City Weekend is now shipping! I promised, months ago, that I would tell you more about this collection, and the time has finally come.
Designers find all sorts of inspiration for their work, from the abstract (an idea or a place, perhaps) to the specific (a painting or photograph). I based City Weekend on a very loose feeling: a relaxed weekend in the city.
I imagined waking up on Saturday morning in my make-believe downtown loft, rolling out of bed, and popping down to the corner bakery for a pastry and a coffee. After breakfast my fictional weekend would include a stroll through the neighborhood park before stopping into a bookstore to browse the titles, and then meeting a friend for lunch, taking a nap on the sofa with the newspaper, or biking along the river.
For this collection I selected clear, vibrant colors like blue, turquoise, red, and yellow-orange with supporting shades of pink and green in smaller quantities. The prints are intentionally relaxed and calm, ranging from the Park Ramble branch pattern with plenty of open space (the kind of space you can only find in a park when you’re in the city); to Corner Florist, a scattered bouquet of blossoms; to the more orderly but still wild Treetop with its pattern of leaves.
I included lots of smaller patterns, too, since it’s much easier to mix patterns when some of them work more like solids. The Roundabout Dots print works beautifully with many of the patterns, as do the simple and tiny Cafe Dots, picking up the colors in the patterns without grabbing too much attention for themselves. The Urban Grid and Street Stripe work equally well for boys and girls and lend a quiet calm to the collection.
You’ll want to touch these fabrics. The quality is light, smooth, and very soft. It feels very luxurious and lends itself to clothing (of course), quilts, and all sorts of projects. I’ll show you a few ideas this week.
As you may know, City Weekend also includes interlock knits. Moda produces a truly amazing quality of knit that is unlike any other currently in the market. It’s substantial and soft. If you’ve felt the hand on knit fabrics before and haven’t been impressed, you owe it to yourself to try this new knit from Moda.It will change your mind about sewing with knits, just like it changed mine.
Once you’ve felt them, you’ll want to find things to make from the knits. We recommend the Hopscotch Dress or Top, the Nature Walk Pants (more about these later), and the Bedtime Story Pajamas, which were actually written for woven fabrics but make up beautifully in knits as well.
We’ve created a new Flickr group for City Weekend and would love to see what you make with this collection. Check in with your favorite local or on-line independent fabric retailer to see the collection as it begins hitting stores later this week.