Design Inspirations from all over

Warning: if you’re not into crafts or designing stuff, feel free to stop reading now. You will be bored. ;-)

Every city I've gone to recently has inspired me in some way to create. Sometimes I buy a really awesome piece of fabric, which leads to a new project. Other times, the museums inspire me with their art, which moves ideas around in my head.

It does take a while to put these projects into motion. I know now I need time to formulate the idea and think through my plan of attack before I feel like I can get started. That's not to say my mind is organized and the project all laid out when I start a new project, but I have a fairly good idea of my end goal. I don't always get to the end result I imagined, but usually I get pretty close. Here's a recap of my projects that sprouted from recent trips:



dress inspired by NYC

I saw a beautiful dress in a shop in New York. I drew a quick sketch at a café and that became my guide for this dress. I’m hoping for more summery days this year because I’ve barely gotten to wear it. Munich had a horrible summer last year.

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My cousin in Israel has a belt like this and it inspired me to try to make my own. I basically measured her belt in terms of how long the different parts were compared to my arm and went off of that when creating it. I also created the shirt from a lilac sheet. Quite comfy!

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This project wasn’t really inspired by Berlin. When we were there though, I woke up one morning and knew what I wanted to do with an old skirt of mine. I guess I had been thinking about subconsciously for a few days. The skirt was made of fantastic fabric, but didn’t fit right anymore. So I decided I would turn it into a sweater vest top. My favorite detail is the buttons in the back.

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The details on the buildings in Croatia made up a lot of our photos on this trip so this project was a natural fit. They didn’t turn out great, but we will definitely be trying them again. We took our favorite photos from Croatia, gave them a sepia tone, printed them and attached them to newspaper-covered pieces of foam (although wood would have been much better!).

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I had been thinking about tunic dresses a lot and found this fun grey polka-dotted fabric and black velvet ribbon while in a London fabric store. It was meant to be! This was my first project sewing a zipper (and I did it without a zipper foot on my machine – pretty daring!)

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I created this doll for a friend’s baby based on a doll I saw in a very cute shop in Grand Central Station. This was the first time I had created a doll (or any baby stuff in general) so it was great fun.

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I fell in love with this blue-flowered fabric in London and have great memories of hunting down a trimmings shop with a newfound friend to get this lace. So this holds special meaning for me. It started out as a scarf, but eventually became a gorgeous table runner.
 

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The Victoria and Albert museum in London was so huge and wonderful. It took me a whole day to see everything I wanted to. I was especially attracted to the ironworks section of the museum and took a ton of pictures there. I came home thinking about experimenting with a fabric pen and silk scarf my mother-in-law, Priscilla, gave to me this summer. This is what resulted, although it’s hard to see because it’s basically a white scarf on white wall. You get the gist, I’m sure.

Ok, this post is already very long so I hope you enjoyed it. If you’re on Facebook, you can check out my crafts album for more projects I’ve completed while in Munich.