Chain, Chain, Chain

When Cherie first asked me to design these pieces, one of my first ideas was to handstitch rows of chain onto my Road Warrior silhouette, to bring it up to the next level. I knew that handstitched chain was something I just wouldn't be able to offer in my regular shop, stitching on the chain is just too time consuming to create multiples of, I'd never be able to keep up! So I thought this was the perfect time to try out this idea.


At first I thought I would use a small sized chain, but then I decided to throw caution to the wind and use the biggest chain I had. Thankfully I had the foresight to use gold toned aluminum chain which is much lighter weight than regular brass chain. The lightness of the aluminum chain keeps the shoulder pads from weighing a ton and starting to droop, but even still, this piece is quite weighty!

I had also recently picked up some vintage milliners woven raffia in black, and I thought this was the perfect bit of 3-D emellishment to compliment the chain. I then added black fringe to make the shoulders even MORE strong, I really wanted this piece to be really tough and really geometric. Basically what Mad Max would wear to his wedding, or something like that.

I had originally planned to use the gold embellishment (the section with the "x"s below) right against the skin with the elastic looped through each end, but then I thought about it a bit more and realized that no one in their right mind would want metal rubbing against the side of their bust, so I decided to handstitch it to the elastic. The tricky part here though is that the elastic stretches, but metal obviously does not, so I had to attach the metal in a way that would still allow the elastic to stretch a bit below it. Tricky work, but the end result is exactly what I was looking for.


Originally I was going to use gold buckles, but I found they made the look too busy, so I switched to the black ones for a more subtle look. Finally I tried it on and found it was missing something, it was too top-heavy. I mulled it over for a couple days, and saw that the solution was right in front of me....a fringe peplum at the waist! I love how this detail came out and how the entire piece swishes and swings as you wear it. Swishing is fun, no one can argue with that...

xo
Angie

Storm of Feathers

Hi guys, Angie here, back again to share with you the first of my necklace designs, made just for Shrimpton Couture. Many of you may have seen the plethora of fringe necklaces and earrings in my Etsy shop, but for this special edition necklace I wanted to make something TRULY one of a kind, something that I could really only make one of, so I knew I had to start with some sort of vintage piece from my stash of goodies.


I sorted through my many boxes and drawers of trims, ribbons, buttons, clasps and chains, and found this great strip of metal mesh, which has always seemed kind of futuristic/post-apocalyptic to me, but yet also very 70s disco. Soooooo futuristic post-apocalyptic disco.

Of course.


So this was my starting point, and from there I came up with the metallic/purply/slightly gothic colour palette of black/silver/lilac and knew that these lilac feathers I had would be perfect. In order to attach the feathers to the chain I made little bundles of three feathers, with the curves of each feather pointing outwards and connected them with small silver fasteners. I love these little bundles, I think they look sweet enough to eat.


I've been wanting to do some sort of bib shaped necklace for awhile, so I pulled out my leather bin (yes, a whole bin...the hoarding problem is deep) looked through my leathers and found a great black leather with a subtle swirling zebra-esque pattern embossed on it. Perfect.


From there I began playing around with the metal mesh, silver chain and some jump rings (the rings used to connect chain) and discovered that some of my rings were the perfect size to fit right through the mesh, and the design was born from that. So from there I just played around, adding chain, taking off chain, playing with the shape of the leather bib, moving feathers around, until I was completely happy with the design. In the end this piece reminds me a bit of a storm: the cloud of feathers, the metallic strips reminiscent of the electricity/lightning, and the fringe the heavy flow of dark rain. Whoa man, that's totally deep.

xo
Angie