Gibson Girl (A Book Review. Sort Of.)

Liesl, wearing her Portfolio DressEvery holiday season, I host an eggnog party. Last year my invitation announced that dress would be "festive". This was meant to be loosely interpreted, which did not work out so well for my friend Kuan, who took it as a welcome opportunity to wear the authentic liederhosen that he had been conned into buying (you’ll wear it again!) at a bachelor party / Octoberfest weekend. He looked great in it, at least that’s what I hear from his wife, who was caught with him (but not also wearing leiderhosen) in a freak snowstorm on their way to my house. While we were wondering why they hadn’t arrived they were walking thirty three blocks uptown against freezing wind and driving snow, Kuan with his bare legs, trying to claw their way back home after being abandoned by their cabbie who wasn’t willing to go a block further with passengers. Why is it that a part of the world that can claim the most harshest of winters can also claim a national costume that includes short pants? I have to wonder.

Liesl Gibson, however, arrived exactly on time. She glided in out of the storm dressed in what the northeast could probably claim as a national holiday costume of it’s own, were we all so lucky to have the fashion sense, tailoring skills, and dressmakers figure that Ms. Gibson does. She was decked out in a perfectly... perfect bias cut wool plaid floor length (and by that I mean that it constantly hovered a fraction of a fraction of an inch above the floor as though it were in constant collusion dialogue with her shoes and hip bones) and a crisp white shirt with darts that matched her torso so exactly that it made me even more self conscious of my laced up dirndl, which I wear every season but was particularly suffocating this year. I was, in fact, exploding out of it in every direction, having run out of ribbon while lacing it up which meant that it was so tight that my hearing was affected. I could, however, still hear the seams straining when I breathed, so I was trying not to do a lot of that. Liesl was moving gracefully around the room with her enviable posture, always looking the picture of comfort and grace. I tried to make her drink more eggnog to even things out. Her outfit was pure Liesl: beautiful, perfectly proportioned, impeccably tailored, and extremely practical. Did I mention that her skirt concealed a pair of boots that, if necessary, could carry her home through the snow? I'm telling you, this woman put the sense back in "fashion sense".

Here’s the thing about Liesl. She understands, more than anyone I have ever known, how to make things fit properly. Its sort of an obsession, I think. Last summer we were hiking together through a beautiful lush forest in Vermont. I was wearing a sundress that didn’t fit me properly, and for a while she was walking just behind me. While I was lost in greenery and yammering on and on about something she was being silently tormented by the fact that the straps on my dress fell an inch beyond where they should have, landing on the wrong side of my shoulder blades. I could tell by her need to discuss this fact with me that this was very nearly ruining her afternoon. I had to admit, it had been driving me semi-consciously crazy, constantly repositioning those damned straps all day. But fix it? I don’t know. I’m super busy with..... stuff. 

For many of us, sewing and fashion are for fun. For Liesl, they are her profession and her passion. She has more technical training than many working designers today, having studied with some of the best New York City has to offer and worked for some of the biggest labels in town. She also has a head for business and an admirable work ethic and general industriousness that makes one of my “busy afternoons” look like a long lunch followed by a nap. Which sometimes is exactly what my afternoons involve, but still. Oh and in her free time? She actually makes her daughter’s clothing. She walks the talk, this one. 

I’ve had the honor of teaching alongside of Liesl now for several summers, and I can tell you what most of our Weekend Sewing Workshop students already know: if you want to learn to sew, cut, alter, or fit something in the most proper and correct way, ask Liesl to show you how. If you need to somehow fix something that you sewed backwards without being told that the only proper and correct thing to do is to carefully pull out the stitches one by one, ask Heather. She’s right over there, by the cookies.

Oh but I do go on. The point that I had hoped to make is that Liesl’s work is exceptional,  and that this spring has seen some really great new lines and products come out of the Liesl & Co. / Oliver + S studios that if you aren’t already aware of, you should be. Her first book,  Little Things to Sew, is fantastic. Her new line of women’s sewing patterns, released by Simplicity under her women’s brand Lisette along with a gorgeous line of apparel weight fabrics at Joanns, are modern and lovely and expertly drafted. Her new kids patterns are just as well written and well designed as the ones that came before them. 

I’m especially interested in attempting to make the adorable dress in the picture above, which I have actually seen in action and up close and love. Liesl’s lifestyle is a mix of hard work and motherhood and art and commuting around a hectic city via bicycle and scooter, all of which she can do in the clothing she designs. And really, if she can manage all of that in these outfits, I’m willing to try spending a busy afternoon in one of them.

Introducing Far Far Away III

I'm so pleased to announce the impending arrival of the third installment of my line of fairy tale - inspired prints for Kokka of Japan. Kokka's US distributor, Seven Islands, is now taking wholesale orders for the line, you can reach them here.

The line includes two weights of cotton / linen fabrics, Seven islands can fill you in a bit more about that. Expect it to start arriving in quilt stores in June.

I have a related bit of news that I've been trying very hard to keep under wraps until everything has been finalized, which is oh so difficult. I have been working on a wallpaper line for some time now, and hope to be able to show it to you in a week or two. It will be a limited edition and will be available directly through me, via my online pop-up shop. We will begin taking pre-orders before stock arrives, so if you'd like to be kept abreast please join our twitter feed or check back here regularly.

 FFAIII / PINK

FFAIII / GREEN

FFAIII / YELLOW

Heather Ross for Walden Surfboards

These are arriving in stores in the US now, and in Australia in July! You can find them over at Walden's website.

You can also read more about them (and find international dealers and retailers) over at Global Surf Industries

Girls Who Love Horses

"playing horses" heather ross for Kokka, available spring 2011Its hard to reconcile, sometimes, that horses were once a part of my life, and now they are not. I still have my chaps, my helmet, my breeches, my paddock boots, and a pair of very smelly and increasingly stiff riding gloves in the bottom of my closet. I hold onto them the way my husband holds onto the motorcycle helmet and form fitting leather suit that has not been used for over a decade. My cleaning lady (I'm not rich, just a really bad housekeeper) once found these last remnants of a brazen bachelorhood tucked away into a forgotten corner , and asked where the Mr.'s motorcycle was. "There isn't one anymore, he just can't bear to let go of the accessories", I answered, to which she responded with an expression of pure pity. She looked down into the dusty visor in her hands, shook her head and softly murmured "so sad."

He's not the only one who lives in a suspended state of denial. When I was packing a bag for my appearance on The Martha Stewart Show, I seriously considered including my riding gear. "Martha and I are just going to CLICK, I just KNOW it." I explained to a husband who was already exhausted by the general theme of self promotion that came along with the book tour that I had just begun. "and when she finds out that I RIDE, and that I grew up riding Morgans and draught horses, she's GOING to invite me to Bedford and I NEED to be READY. Because I can't possibly go RIDING with MARTHA STEWART in the WRONG CLOTHES. Now it was my turn for a long, pitiful look. "Oh Sweetie," TC said softly. "get over yourself." For the record, I have not YET been invited to Bedford to go riding. Nor, I should point out, have I put my riding things into deep storage.

But the acute awareness that a stage of life has ended, and the nostalgia and the piles of boxes of things that can't possibly be gotten rid of that begins to grow in it's place is really the third stage, isn't it? Before that part of your youth began or ended you must have first been able to imagine yourself loving a horse or a motorcycle or whatever it was that consumed you, probably for hours, in that fleeting stage of life where any perfect situation is possible and can be played out with the help of carefully arranged plastic figurines on one's bedroom floor. So when I saw this beautiful post over at Soule Mama I immediately knew that even though Kokka was requesting more princesses (yawn) for my new fabric collection that I also needed to do some little drawings of little girls and their plastic horses. I also knew that perhaps I had found a new and loving home for the collection of gear in the bottom of my closet. Of course, Amanda's little girl wont be fitting into anything for a while yet, which means that I can cling to my delusional dreams for just a little while longer.

A penny for my tax man's thoughts (which, be warned, are frightening).

I have to assume, based on the size of the bill that my accountant has just sent me, that he intends the good advice he has given me to be shared with about a hundred thousand people. So here goes.

Somebody over at the IRS has finally been introduced to the world wide interweb and noticed that Etsy (and Ebay, of course) is making an awful lot of money off of lots and lots of small, under the radar sellers. Starting January 1st, 2011, Paypal will be calculating income and, by years end, reporting it to the IRS. If you haven't already started reporting your income from Etsy or Ebay on your taxes (I put it in the "other income" category, and print out the years transactions for my own records) Now's the time. It will also be more important than ever to keep track of your expenses and costs of goods sold, because you will need to be able to show what an item cost you to make and what costs went to operating your business so that your actual net (ie, taxable income) can be calculated. Lets say for example that you sell something on Etsy for ten dollars that took five dollars to make. The IRS will see the whole ten dollars, it will be up to you to show them what your actual profit was, and that's the number that gets taxed.

As it stands now, sellers bringing in less than $20,000 don't have much to worry about. But just because Paypal won't be sending your records in to the IRS doesn't mean that they won't be aware of your business presence. Clearly, they are paying attention!

Here's the thing about the IRS, and I'm sorry to get a little scary here. If you make the decision to start a business of any size - making or doing or reselling anything in exchange for money - the responsibility to have a full working knowledge of the laws in your town, your county, your state, and your country falls, in their eyes, completely and unsympathetically on YOU. If you owe them money, they will not forgive that debt in exchange for an explanation, unless they can be proved wrong. They do not care if you are a stay at home mom, a student, or a really nice person who didn't know that they were doing anything wrong. They have the power to take away your house, your car, your credit, and your business.

You can read more about this new law here and here. Paypal has it's own explanation on their blog, but honestly it feels like the article downplays the issue a tad bit. I know, it seems a little overwhelming. You'll be able to figure it, and a system for tracking what you owe, out for yourself without hiring an accountant, I promise. Also, Etsy has a great thread about taxes over here. As much as I wish they would do more to warn their sellers about the pitfalls of unintentional tax evasion (and labor laws that pertain to working at home, and the health risks of knitting fifty scarves a week without workers comp insurance, while they are at it), the truth is that it's not their responsibility as a marketplace to do so. Its up to you to protect yourself, which could be the motto of small business in general, no?