Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Not so Mellow Yellow

Yellow is one of my favorite colors.  Not to wear -- yellow makes me look yellow, and not to decorate with (although our bedroom is a deep dijon-mustard gold), but just as a color in general.

It's happy, it's cheerful, it's . . . a difficult color to wear.

And because of that, I'm always on the lookout for yellow garments at the thrift store to incorporate into my work, and I hardly ever find any. You would think that someone out there would have bought a gorgeous, but unflattering, yellow dress in her time - and gotten rid of it.

But no.

Recently, a couple of sewing friends came to town and we went on our annual fabric pilgrimage.  The place is wholesale, but will do retail if you show up and ask nicely.  Since most of their stuff is high end, I tend to stick to the remnant boxes in the front of the store.   (They're appliance boxes, so plenty of room for remnant goodness!)


One of the first things that I saw, which made me do a total happy dance, was a chunk of brilliant, sunny yellow cotton. The next thing was a second chunk of it.

My day was made.  (I'm easy, right?)

All this yellow goodness was going to last me for ages.  It was going to be incorporated into a dozen different projects, accents on dresses and strips in patchwork, a little everywhere, to make it last.

Which, of course, is why the first thing I did was to cut out a dress.

The appliques are made from  some Hawaiian shirt fabric brought back from a co-worker's vacation (I asked her for fabric, and she brought 4 fat quarters of different colors -- pretty, but never large enough to make something from).  The green stems are from a set of lime scrubs from the thrift store.

Red and green ornamental stitching at the hem, red buttons, green buttonholes.  Obnoxiously charming, or charmingly obnoxious?  You tell me.

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