Toile La La: Letter from the Editor: Spring 2015

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Letter from the Editor: Spring 2015

toile la la letter from the editor image

toile la la spontaneous now fashion show image

yellow and blue - spring color inspiration

toile la la take a little look mini book/zine image

toile la la letter from the editor image

Features:

Spring ideas, flowers, and fashion popping up right, left, and all around!
Spontaneous Now Fashion Show - Top-Notch Marvelous!
Creative Spaces
Letters To and From
Number One Good Luck Employee Cat candids...

Spring: I love love love it! Spring surpasses my expectations - in its splendour, it inspires me to be more healthy and vibrant... to freshen up and renew, like a garden perennial. This Spring is a very happy one for me - my head is full of art and fashion inspiration, and my mailbox has been blooming with wonderful, artistic, creative letters. These are the Spring things I want to share with you!

from the toile la la tres petit trianon garden...the Spontaneous Now SS2015 fashion show venue

The Spontaneous Now fashion show was top-notch marvelous: stellar spring day, lovely models, the garden - glorious, all - perfect!

toile la la Spontaneous Now S/S 2015 fashion show image

My creativity flourishes best in a variety of creative spaces... including nature walks outdoors, my little studio "perch", the garden, and my own head-space. All sorts of fanciful ideas bloom in my brain during a brisk walk...breathing good fresh air! And, I love my workspace - which is upstairs in an out-of-the-ordinary old house. My husband and I created the space together and I love the atmospheric colors we painted and the archways he built.

From my perch I see spectacular landscapes - birds, trees, mountains, clouds, weather - everything changing and growing, light-shifting...all very beautiful. Sometimes I find it ironic that my surroundings inspire thoughts of fashion, but I believe it is precisely the pristine environment which provides a fertile head-space!

toile la la tres petit trianon garden - post-winter and prior to the show

Gardening...weeding, planting, watering, spreading mulch - was my main inspiration for the S/S 2015 Spring Spontaneous Now collection, show, Jardiner fragrance, and video. A few days before the show, creating some mail art in my workspace perch - I experienced something very exciting and unusual - much like gardener's green thumb...artist's indigo finger! A blue permanent marker exploded on me, but happily produced an effect I found quite pleasing. I love the contrast of blue and yellow - so I hurried outdoors to photograph my indigo finger with a dandelion.

like gardener's green thumb, artist's indigo finger

If you view the photo sideways, imagine you are in a jungle on another planet and see a tree with a blue trunk and plush yellow foliage!

Although my Spontaneous Now collection was predominantly white (accessorized with everything floral), I have been creatively-inspired by this indigo or ocean blue and dandelion yellow combination for quite some time.

One of the first images you saw - of the perfect juicy lemon nesting in a blue bag, I photographed after my mother's friend shared lemons from her very own tree. The look and smell of that lemon was beyond compare!

My mailbox has been as bounteous as a cornucopia this Spring! I've received bundles and boxes of mail art from my friend E and also from my daughter. E sent me a vintage-magazine decorated shoebox full of ephemera, which I recycled to produce some of the mail art you see in this editor's letter. My daughter sent me a package with some pretty buttons, miniature people, and a black stallion which I photographed with my sewing machine as a backdrop.

In the images of E's ephemera shoebox, look at that fantastic vintage 30s or 40s peephole shoe! My feet are fantasizing about that wedge shoe and its reptile window! And, the furry feet you see belong to my Number One employee cat - who can't resist my photo sets and especially tables draped in fabric or paper.

toile la la collage art image

In E's box of vintage ephemera, I found a card with this pop-up blue paper. Originally, this was an umbrella and the card featured two fireflies - and said "You're Electrifyin!". When I opened the card, the umbrella popped open. It required some engineering, but I was able to create a tutu for this amazing ballerina I found in an Italian Vogue magazine. The lightning bugs also featured some yellow cellophane bodies - and from the yellow cellophane, I decorated some sunglasses photos from another fashion magazine. Placing the firefly yellow shades over various models, I could see how they would appear with the eyes of their friends, sometimes producing a dramatic and fetching effect! After using the hole punch to embellish the sunglasses, I made some Easter eggs to decorate a vintage photo booklet, which I will send back to E as a surprise - along with the ballerina.

For my daughter, I made a little zine or book called Take A Little Look, with a vintage television image from E - and images clipped from the Italian Vogue...things I found eye-catching.