I looked over the two pages that K stuck a sticky note to in my
Dover Press paisly book, wondering how to make her dress a reality. It felt like too big a design challenge.
As I drove over the Olive Street Bridge to the Seabra Grocery Market (we were out of milk) I saw how to make her dress work. Its a good thing I saw the solution with my inner eye, because the road was snowy and there was oncoming traffic. The Olive Street Bridge if MUCH improved since it’s re-engineering, but a snowy bridge in New England is not the best place to get inspired, no matter how stumped I was on the design process.
If I make many long paisleys, and connect them so the rounded bottom is the hem of the skirt, and the narrow curly part makes the waist, I’ll have an a-line skirt. In fact, I’ll have a one motif a-line skirt that wouldn’t take a whole lot of page space to describe. I might get a salable pattern out of this digression after all – if the paisleys are made a bit thicker, there’s my size gradient. The sketch looks really sketchy – When I make the real dress, I’ll fill in the spaces between the narrow bits of the paisleys – I’ll probably connect the bottoms of the hem, then pin the tops to a waistband on K to get the fit custom. Then I’ll fill in the background. Or, I’ll already have a background waistband/hip band to pin it to, and sew the paisleys on top.
Now the question: is a little girl’s paisley flower fairy skirt pattern something people would pay enough money for for me to break even on photography and tech editing? Or should I just make charts for myself and share the photos?
Comment away, please!