milk and sugar

Sometimes when you have something on the drawing board for years it can end up being really hard to bring to fruition.

The 'milk-and-sugar project' had become one of these millstones. 

Essentially it was about getting every scrap of seersucker in the studio together, patching it into a long length and sending it off to the quilters to have it fabric-to-fabric quilted. F2F is a form of quilting with no wadding in it, in this case the same 1" diamond I use on the summer quilts, holding together a layer of seersucker and a layer of calico.

250+ patches of fabric stitched together last Friday and I thought my brain might burst. I had spent every studio day for two weeks patching for different things and it was just too much.

Anyway it came back from the quilters and I needed to put scissors to fabric and actually make something out of it, otherwise it really would have ended up as a millstone, a blank piece of paper, that length of fabric you are always too scared to cut into.

So the first project was dresses, same pattern as the pink linen ones in store at the moment.

Having been run through the quilting machines the fabric was all flat and even. The dresses looked a little wrong. Home and into the washing machine- seersucker! The texture all back. Sometimes a piece needs a washing, an iron, a steam to make it come alive. This is the part I love when the leap happens, when a garment or object begins to speak to the wearer.

I love seersucker, in Persian 'shir o shekar' means milk and sugar, such poetry for a fabric that is just a tad daggy at the same time. It stands away from the body, like linen, which is why it is perfect for summer cloths. You can have woven seersucker and chemical seersucker, and there is a bit of both in this patchwork. There will be a few dresses, a couple of skirts and jackets and maybe some bags out of this run. I'll have to start collecting again, the shelves are empty.