The Tyler Challenge

"Day and Night"

The idea of an over scale print seems easy enough until you go out shopping for it. Nothing in my fabric stash is over scale because I work hard at keeping my dolls in prints representative of their size. So off I went on a hunting trip to “Hancocks” for inspiration but alas a disappointing adventure. At one point I did have in my hands a wonderful large scale cotton Plaid, wonderful colors... but my thoughts were, “Wow everyone will use plaid”.... ~NOT~.... No one in this challenge used plaid. That really surprised me. I should have bought it because I returned home with nothing.

(consept drawing)

I had to rethink, I pondered on doing an Asian theme and adding an over scale dragon appliqué that encircled the dress. (opps done that already) But in the end I came up with another idea...”Day and Night”...... the “Sun and the Moon”. Yes this in my mind is a brilliant idea. One side of the dress day the other night
High contrast fabrics in graphic colors were going to be needed to make this work, but I did not want black and white so yellow and blue were a perfect choice. When I returned to fabric shop I stumbled on to the idea of stripes, which in theory, I could collage together and make sun rays radiating out from my sun face. I found a wonderful yellow and yellow orange stripe. I wanted a blue that was vibrant and a live that did not fall into the gray/blue area. To add texture to that blue I found a modeled print that had a leaf design over lay, thinking that might appear as “stars”.

From the beginning I knew it was doubtful that I would find a sun and moon fabric so I did a search on Google images assuming if I found something I liked I could print on fabric to make an appliqué. I did find a lot of inspiration and even selected an image. But my printer did not cooperate and the print did not come out vibrant enough for me ....soooo what next....? Well I know myself and I figured to get exactly what I wanted I would just have to paint the design on white fabric and then appliqué that onto the dress.

I played around with the radiating strip effect and trashed it, feeling it would create a very bulky effect. But I did make the choice to junction my 2 fabrics on the skirt using a wave line. I added the appliqué but before the skirt was attached to the bodice I did a lot of freeform stitching on the fabric. I did radiating yellow an orange stitching out from the sun and all around the moon I stitched swirling curls in white thread. I LOVE this!!! So much fun...
My original drawings were extreme fantasy and “OUT” there with lots of projecting attachments. My tendency to create fantasy is strong and I had to REALLY edit myself to stay as real as possible, knowing all along that real women would never wear this anyway.

In the area of an oversized element my first thoughts were to do a necklace with very large bobbles (moon stones were my choice; again they have a little star effect when light shines on them.) I did assemble the bobbles into a 4 row necklace but the effect was wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy...over the top. Then I made a really small necklace of delica beads and wrapped it around and round the neck ... in the end I dropped the whole necklace idea all together. I found some blue and yellow stars and arranged them in the dolls hair. I think I may have dropped the ball on this one but it looked good to me. And I am going with it. I finished out the ensemble with 2 more of the stars and made an evening bag to compliment the outfit. Lucky for me some where along the line I had a pair of bright yellow shoes.. yea!