The Third Line

Flora is finished and will be coming out at Spring Market this May!

The turnaround period for this line has been ridiculously quick… and I feel like I’ve been running on fumes since our final strikeoffs arrived. Usually, a line will be finalized a couple of months before Market, but this one had some issues with the screenprinting and it didn’t make it our way until a couple of weeks ago. So we’ve been running around like crazy people trying to get everything finished up in time for Salt Lake City!

The final group is made up of 30 total fabrics (9 patterns in 4 different colorways).

I’m not really sure how we wound up going in this particular direction, stylistically… but the process of creating it felt very un-forced… almost organic.

Which is nice, because I generally find that with larger projects, such as this… I require a lot of coaxing and cajoling… to get my brain geared up for something so big. But with this line, ideas and inspiration just flowed freely.

Moda said that we should shoot for a more generic theme this time (unlike our last line that revolved around cuckoo clocks… a theme that is super specific), so we went with flowers… which is pretty much the go-to theme when it comes to fabric. Because, well heck… flowers are pretty… so that’s what we did.

But just doing straight-up flowers seemed a little boring and cliché… so we beefed this idea up a little by going with more of a secret-garden theme… that has fun little surprises hidden throughout.

And as the drawings began to come alive… we noticed that a number of them… began to give off this sort of English Tea Room / Victorian Wallpaper sort of vibe… with a somewhat retro flair (though very subtle).

Which felt right to me. Our first line was wild and organic in terms of its subject matter, so we opted for an Art Nouveau inspired style of illustration… The second line contained Cuckoo Clock/Swiss Alps features… so we went with a Swiss/folky/Hex-Sign style of drawing.

So for a secret garden theme… Victorian wallpaper felt like a pretty natural jumping-off point. And from there, we expanded that system to create our final line… which in my opinion, rounded itself out rather nicely. It’s structured yet organic… it’s complex and intricate, and it has a very decorative sort of whimsy, that begins to show through after a bit. And with this line… I feel like the colors are spot on… they’re rich and vibrant, and each of the fabrics dance together quite well when combined.

And that’s about it… I’m pretty pumped to say the least, and I can’t wait to see everything at Market…