With its delicate old fashioned blooms, this shirt lives up to the Dandy & Rose name.
This is a deceptively simple print – there are several shades of orange and peach blending in those roses and the stems and leaves are a gentle olive green. I have loved working with it and giving it those orange accents.
Bill DeMain is a very talented man. He is a journalist who has interviewed all your musical heroes; an accomplished musician and songwriter based in Nashville; the entertaining and astoundingly knowledgeable tour leader of Walkin’ Nashville;Â and a recently converted Francophile.
Bill visited Paris last year and fell in love with the city. During March, he returned for one of those total immersion language courses and kept his instagram followers entranced with photographs of the things he saw (and ate) while in The City of Light.
When Bill asked me for suggestions for his third Dandy & Rose shirt, this wonderful Arts and Crafts style print by Liberty leapt right into my mind. It seemed like such a fun way to acknowledge Bill’s love of France. And just look at that frog, with his little toes!
It can get hot out there, walkin’ Nashville, so Bill likes short sleeves. I like short sleeves too, and leap at the opportunity to make them.
I have been waiting for an opportunity to use this print ever since it came out last year. I’m so glad that one has has hopped along.
OK. That’s enough corny frog jokes. Unless you know any.
What a great fabric choice my new Californian customer, Joe, has made! This print is from the current Liberty of London range. It completely removes the need to make a decision that many of my customers struggle with: floral or paisley? It has them both!
Joe opted for lots of piping and ‘smile’ pockets.
I have placed one of my signature contrast pearl snaps in line with the yoke….
… and added an extra yellow snap to each sleeve placket. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
In my last blogpost, I showed a smile pocket on this shirt coming together. Here’s the end result.
I have mixed this favourite guitar themed western print (look closely to spot the cowboy hats and horses) from Moda with a tiny star print.
These are the steps that bring together a ‘smile pocket’. Don’t try this at home folks… unless you’ve got time on your hands 🙂
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I was born and brought up in the county of Shakespeare and have loved his work since I was old enough to know who he was. So when Lorna Simes chose this print for her fourth Dandy & Rose shirt, I was delighted. A Shakespearean western shirt? Why not?
The first Shakespeare play I ever saw was Romeo and Juliet. I think I was about twelve or thirteen and the production starred John Hurt and Lisa Harrow. I asked my Dad to take me to see it at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry. He worked at the Massey Ferguson tractor factory in Coventry, but at the end of a long week, he put on his suit and headed back into the city, because I had asked him to, and he wanted me to have the education he hadn’t been offered. The play made a deep impression on me – as it would on anyone who saw John Hurt play Romeo, I imagine – and decades later I mentioned to my Dad how wonderful it had been. He told me he had had no idea what was going on onstage, because he didn’t understand Shakespeare, however much he wished he could. He just wanted me to have that experience. Thank you, Dad.
I don’t mind, then, that Liberty, having created a print showing stormy seas, starry constellations and fleets of ships, and called it ‘Tempest’ to boot, have covered it with bits of text from Romeo and Juliet. Apparently, the designer’s concept was to depict someone stranded on an island, who records their observations on the weather and movements of the Heavens on the only paper to hand – a copy of Shakespeare’s Works. I think I would have torn out the pages of a lesser play, myself.
Lorna’s shirt will be joining her when she sails on the Cayamo cruise in a couple of weeks’ time. If any of her fellow cruisers are alarmed by the stormy seas on her shirt, she can perhaps soothe them with the beautiful verse also printed on there. And reflect that she has taken the advice of Polonius to Laertes in Hamlet:
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
I can’t think of anything Shakespeare can have meant more by ‘rich’ than a cowgirl shirt with his own words printed on it!
This is the third shirt this customer has ordered. He found me through my online shop about a year and a half ago and by the time he got in touch, he had already chosen the print he wanted from Liberty‘s online offering. He likes to keep his prints simple, so he chooses the quiet designs. I love that, because I would otherwise overlook them, and they turn out to be brilliant. His first choice was this Jackson Pollock style spatter print:
On the day he received this shirt, he ordered the next. Now that’s what I call customer satisfaction! Although it was a bold and sunny yellow, it had fewer colours than most of the prints I work with.
This new one is intriguing. It’s called ‘Mantaray’ – you will see that the design takes the graceful shape of the fish of the same name.
I have been dying to post photos of this shirt! But I’ve been waiting for the all clear, as it was a Christmas gift from a brother to his sister – so I am not sure whether his choice of a fabric called ‘Queen Bee’ was a comment on their respective roles in the family! 🙂
At any rate, she was reportedly very pleased to receive it – and it is a very special Liberty print, one of those where you spot more and more detail as you look. I love the crown that the bee seems to be placing on her own head!
I did a lot of thinking before I cut into this fabric!
‘Agandca’ is one of the most intriguing Liberty prints I have worked with. It is based on a 1910 design from the Liberty archive and the complicated pattern looks a bit like embroidery. It’s arranged in wide stripes – but unlike your average stripe, they are asymmetrical.
Cue shirtmaker headache.
I decided to use the stripe by cutting the yokes and pocket flaps ‘on the bias’ – I explained what that means last time I used the technique here
The three strokes in that cross motif in the design inspired me to finish the shirt with a triple line of topstitching.
Thor Platter has a new album coming out in October, which I can’t wait to hear. He asked me to source a Liberty print with a retro look, in dusky browns, greens and oranges, to chime in with the artwork for the record sleeve.
It took about a week, but finally I remembered filing this one away at the back of my brain.
So retro!
Dandy & Rose 