The Sight Of The Stars Makes Me Dream

For me, inspiration comes from many places: stores I visit (I'm the shady looking girl checking out the inside seams of clothes to try and figure out how its made so I can copy), street style pictures and books about art, design, architecture and nature.
Some of the things inspiring me at the moment - pumpkin, deeper tones and exquisite detailing like these little raised flowers. All of this probably points more to autumn but I'm about to come into spring! I'm a little bit sick of all the floral prints after seeing them on all the northern hemisphere lasses, so I don't know how I'm going to make it through!

One resource that I constantly draw inspiration from is a tiny battered book that I bought secondhand called Fashionsmarts. I couldn't find any copies of the book anywhere so I thought it would be okay to share a little bit with you.

'A good friend who is also a fashion designer shares this trick: She loves embroidery and lace and fabrics that are especially beautiful, like scraps of silk and crepe de Chine. As a designer, she found she is often left with bits and pieces of beautiful fabric scraps. Rather than relegate them to the drawer for use for 'someday', she treats them as jewelry. She'll wear twists of silk and crepe de Chine at her wrists as bracelets. Longer lengths of her favourite fabrics she'll wear tied in a bow at the neck and she has also tied them around her waist.'

Honestly, as someone who sews, I though that this was one of the best ideas I had heard of in a long time. Often you do end up with a pile of scrap of lovely fabric in lovely colours which looks so vibrant and interesting when they are all together. This is a simple and effective way of using those pieces. Here's one I prepared earlier -

I've just cut strips of scraps that I had left lying around and attached it to the neck of this dress with large round eighties earrings. You can do knots, twist it around, all sorts of things. In this case, I decided to use all different patterned fabrics with some matching solid colours mixed in. As I had made this dress, I also used some left over material from it to tie all the colours together.

Best to note though that this sort of thing looks better the more pieces of fabric there are (to make it thicker) and the more colours there are. The longer pieces look great over a simple black dress and I've used this type of thing (it was actually a giant cacophony of scarves) to make a work dress look less work-y. I think it would work well with ribbons and lace too if you didn't want to cut up material.