As Autumn has arrived and the weather has turned wetter and greyer here in Sussex, I’ve been glad to work with this invigorating Spring-like print.
It’s called ‘Brightley’ and although it’s from the Liberty London Autumn/Winter range, its burgeoning, blooming irises and fuschias speak of a sunnier, more flourishing season.
So just as well it is off to Australia, where, I am led to believe, it really is Spring at the moment. It was commissioned by Andrew Bristow, who wants something colourful to wear when he plays bass in The Mighty Surftones.
Liberty say that the print was hand painted on a large scale to give a feeling of growth; they remind us that the Iris that is at the heart of the design is named after the mythical messenger of the Greek gods and that her symbol was the rainbow. I like to think that it also honours my Mum, Iris Aspley, who taught me to sew and will be 90 years old next March. A Spring baby, well named.
Jim Lauderdale on Music City Roots, 8 October 2014
Jim Lauderdale on Music City Roots, 8 October 2014
Jim Lauderdale on Music City Roots, 8 October 2014
The print is new too, from Liberty’s Autumn/Winter 2014 range. It’s called ‘Midnight’.
It’s one of my favourites ever, with its dazzling details and darkly beautiful colouring. I finished the shirt with a fancy stitch and sneaked in a burgundy collar stand – we all need a little warmth next to our face at this time of year!
Liberty say that the design was ‘hand drawn in ink on tracing paper’ then shaded with graphic pens; it was inspired by the night sky over the Isle of Bute in Scotland – hence the twinkling, exploding, shooting stars in amongst the paisleys.
Shirt made for Jim Lauderdale in Liberty ‘Midnight A’
There are four colourways. Liberty printed them on denim as well as on the tana lawn that I used for Jim’s shirt. A few days ago I was in Liberty’s Regent Street store and couldn’t resist buying a metre of denim in that hot orange and pink colourway – I plan to make myself a skirt as soon as I’ve got a couple of hours to spare!
It’s Americana Music Association week in Nashville, and although I haven’t made it over this year, I have sent a few shirts out there to represent Dandy & Rose. And I’ve just seen one of them make its debut live on Music City Roots’ livestream.
Host Jim Lauderdale’s shirt is in ‘Poppyseed Dreams’ from the Liberty Autumn/Winter 2014 fabric collection. It seemed to call his name – the poppies made me think of Jim’s musical hero Gram Parsons’ famous ‘Sin City’ Nudie suit
I love that warm orange in the Liberty print, mixed in with the vibrant purple. Liberty say that the design incorporates the Indian spices ‘pepper, cardamom and vanilla’ along with the poppies and is inspired by Indian textiles and by The British Museum’s recent exhibition ‘The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur’.
Shirt made for Jim Lauderdale in Liberty ‘Poppyseed Dreams A’
Danny George Wilson of the marvellous Danny and The Champions of the World asked me to come up with a shirt for the showcase he has at the Americana Music Association’s Festival in Nashville on 18 August at Third Man Records. Somewhat recklessly, he gave me a completely free rein about fabric choice and design.
I wanted to do something totally different from his previous Dandy & Rose shirts, which are black with contrast yoke and piping.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
The print that immediately came to mind was Liberty’s Kitty Grace. Danny can pull off a really decorative print so well, and this one had been in my sights for a while. With its hearts and flowers, it reminds me of the great western tailor Nathan Turk’s work for The Maddox Family, who were known as ‘the most colorful hillbilly band in America’ during the 1940s. He took the heart motif on these outfits
from this book by Lepage Medvey about costumes from his native Poland. Turk’s own copy is in the Autry Center in Los Angeles and his note to remind himself to place hearts down the leg of the Maddox Brothers’ trousers survives.
Here’s Danny’s Kitty Grace shirt….
Shirt made for Danny George Wilson in Liberty ‘Kitty Grace A’
So I’m chuffed that I got to use this Liberty classic, Willow Rose, in two completely different ways recently.
At the beginning of the summer, the singer/songwriter Jim Lauderdale asked me to keep my eyes peeled for suitable prints in blue, his favourite colour for the festival season. I came up with a few ideas, but a week or so later I was shopping in Shaukat, a Liberty print specialist in West London, and spotted this beauty. I knew it was the one! It’s a giant version of the classic ‘Willow Rose’.
Shirt made for Jim Lauderdale in Liberty ‘Willow Rose’
I love that greeny-yellow flower in amongst the dark blues and bought some pearl snaps to match it. But as the shirt came together, it took on an altogether more subtle identity. I followed Jim’s usual ‘no piping’ instruction, but I sneaked in a little decorative stitch in a dusty aqua thread that perfectly matched one of the greens in the print. I think I got away with it, because he’s been wearing it!
Photograph by Anthony Scarlati
And so then the snaps too chose to be green. I love the shirt and think he looks the cat’s pyjamas in it.
Here’s Jim wearing his ‘Willow Rose’ and doing an acoustic version of Let’s Have A Good Thing Together, from his new album I’m a Song.
I think the couplet in that song, ‘The magistrate of fate has spoken/ Laws of attraction can’t be broken’ are some of my favourite ever Lauderdale lines.
While I was making Jim’s shirt I received an email from Jane De Vekey, who, along with her partner Darren Smith, is in the Bournemouth based band Thin Wire Fence. She knew that Darren loved Dandy & Rose shirts and wanted to surprise him by ordering one for him. It’s always so nice to be a part of these special gifts. Jane had been taking secret notes on which shirts Darren admired the most. She had trawled the Liberty website and, by coincidence, picked out a blue and red colourway of Willow Rose, this time in the more usual smaller scale. We put together a blue shirt with contrast yokes. I was lucky enough to find fabric the exact shade of lilac-y blue in my stash, and used it to make piping. Then I put a red jewel snap right where it could be seen from the stage.
Shirt made for Darren Smith with yokes in Liberty ‘Willow Rose’
Darren looks great in the shirt, as you can see from the photos of him performing with Thin Wire Fence at The Smokin’ Aces in Bournemouth.
I loved the film The Two Faces of January, which I saw a couple of months ago. I so enjoyed its old-fashioned approach to story and character and thought the performances excellent. And the clothes – an inspiration! Especially this yellow shift dress that made Kirsten Dunst look so elegant and cool.
I left the Duke of York’s cinema in Brighton feeling that yellow dress, even though yellow is a colour that I have hardly ever worn. So how lucky that, on the way to the bus stop, I passed Ditto Fabrics in Kensington Gardens. Well, when I say I passed Ditto, that would of course be a wrong course of action: I went in. And lo! I spied yellow fabric. And not just any old yellow fabric – a Wayne Hemingway-designed retro print with touches of charcoal grey and pink in amongst the yellow.
I let the fabric sit in my workroom for several weeks before I settled on this pattern – Vogue 1350.
I wanted something a bit different from my usual fitted bodice/flared skirt, and I got it. Everything about this design is unusual, from the curved side seam to the cap sleeve that’s cut as part of the bodice. It fastens with snaps, so no problem there for my trusty snap press, more used to giving service in the name of western wear.
It’s also really difficult. It was a novel experience, after making so many shirts, to work my way through a pattern without having a clue what was coming next – and I did a fair bit of unpicking. I lined the dress with cotton lawn, and I like its structured but casual feel and the easy fit given by the curved seams. O – and I love the colour!
This is what it looks like after I’ve sat at my desk in it for a whole morning…. bearing up pretty well!
Jim Lauderdale’s short sleeve shirt in Liberty ‘Hera’
Jim Lauderdale’s short sleeve shirt in Liberty ‘Hera’
Sometimes I wonder if pattern matching has become a dangerous obsession with me.
But there’s something about placing and matching patterns that’s strangely reassuring. When that 3 point yoke was all stitched into place onto the back of the shirt and I saw the peacock feathers line up, I knew that all was right with the world.
Even more so when I realised that I had made the pattern run all the way down from the collar to the back of the shirt, completely by accident; I had already done the same thing with the button band.
Pretty soon I’ll be matching patterns in my sleep. Now that’s obsession!
This is Liberty’s ‘Hera’ – I wrote a little bit about the history of the print a few weeks ago.
Sometimes an idea for a shirt just pops into my head – style and fabric together, and I can’t get it out.
This one is like that. I enjoyed working with the peacock feather print ‘Hera’ so much that I wanted to take on the challenge of this other traditional design and for some reason, the shirt just had to have short sleeves.
It’s called ‘Ianthe’ and its inclusion in the Liberty range reflects the company’s art nouveau heritage. According to their website, it is a reworking of a design by the French designer R. Beauclair from 1900. ‘Ianthe’ means purple flower in Greek, so perhaps the original design featured purple flowers; but this strong red and blue is my favourite of the current colourings.
I’ve been a bit under the weather recently, so I’ve been taking it slowly with this commission for my very dear and longstanding friend Teresa Collins.
Teresa is a colour consultant and designer of beautiful bespoke rugs. You can see them on the Little & Collins website:
She’s got the sharpest colour sense of anyone I know (no pressure there then!) We’ve been shopping together for decades and it’s a standing joke that I will always choose the most vibrant colours available, while she goes for understatement.
One day when I was buying a piece of Liberty’s ‘Storm’ – in this colourway, which I used for Danny Champ’s shirt
there was a friendly disagreement about which was the ‘best’ colourway So passionate was Teresa’s attachment to the beautiful dusky black, silver grey and caramel of her choice that she bought a piece and got me to make it up as a shirt.
The jury is still out on which colourway is the ‘best’; but I have to agree with her – this one is striking in its subtlety.
I’ve been meaning for a while to experiment with fancy stitchery.
Fancy stitching around yoke edges is a finish that is often found on vintage western shirts. Steven Weil shows this example in his fantasic book ‘Western Wear: A Classic American Fashion’. My copy, which is special to me because I bought in the museum shop of The Autry Center in Los Angeles when I visited the Nudie’s archive there, is one of my favourite books to leaf through.
1950s – 60s shirt by Ranch-Man
So anyway, I have used one of my favourite Liberty paisleys, the 70s-looking ‘Mark’. I’ve used aqua piping on this in the past, but to make the stitching stand out, I’ve picked out the navy blue this time.
The stitch is a blanket-type stitch from my trusty Janome 3040, which I believe is also – justifiably – known as the ‘Threadbanger’. I tried using a heavier thread – Gutterman top-stitch thread – but if anyone can get that to run smoothly on their machine – well, feel free to give me some tips!
I like the neat effect I’ve got here, from using Coats cotton thread. Tana lawn is very fine, so I stabilised the fabric with Vilene ‘Stitch and Tear’ paper and spent a good while poking out the bits caught between the stitching after I’d stitched and torn, using a seam ripper.
https://dandyandrose.com/2014/03/14/danny-champs-shirts/
Dandy & Rose 