Design History 101: Georgia

 I love textiles. Especially vintage.

Fortunately, I have a ‘valid’ reason to collect antique clothing as well as vintage fabric swatches and the upstairs loft at Double D Ranch™ archives all of these references for me. We have a collection of antique cotton quilts, crazy quilts, and scrap quilts. We have antique swatches of 19th-century prints, early India paisleys, French damasks and a very fine collection of western bandanas. I have a fabulous gathering of Mexican and South American serapes and ponchos, the latest coming from Jack’s and my mission trip to Peru. We also have a mix of folk embroidery samples ranging from Eastern Europe to Mexico. I could continue on, but I’ll save the loft for a later post.

What I want to show you is the inspiration for Double D Ranch’s™ fall ‘Georgia Duster’. This is a great example of what I love most about designing. It’s not really designing at all…I’m just taking the lead from a vintage piece and in this case recreating it almost verbatim.

‘Georgia’ is inspired by this child’s shirt from Bolivia. The date is unknown, but one can still appreciate the fine embroidery and rich sapphire coloring of the velvet.   I originally designed ‘Georgia’ in velvet much like the original, but once the samples came in I wasn’t pleased and realized the need for a quick fabrication change. Instead of velvet, I switched to fine wale corduroy that (thank you LORD) was setting in overage in the warehouse. This time I was so pleased with the outcome I put in the third request for ‘Georgia’ to be done in cotton gauze with tonal embroidery. They both turned out great and accomplished the look I was going for…very Romanian gypsy folkish despite hailing from Bolivia.