Style forecast brought to you by excitement-induced insomnia

Every so often, I try to do myself a little style forecast based solely on Pantone colors, ModCloth, and wedding dresses chosen by my customers.

My conclusion for the night: There's this interesting little thing going on in the fashion world where there's two personas, if you will. Vintage-inspired seems to be the thing, which means florals, highly visible jewelry, and a lot of interesting different flare silhouettes -- but there's a faintly goth, faintly femme-fatale thing which is operating alongside this sweet, upbeat, innocent ingenue thing. How many times, in one sentence, can Chelsea use the word thing? Patterns are preferred either representative or monochrome (i.e., colorful when it's flowers or feathers, subtle and muted when it's more abstract). Lots of flared skirts and defined waistlines, elegant detailing that's overstated but not over-the-top, and the 70s are starting to edge back into visibility, but mostly in the sweet prairie-girl ingenue looks.

This seems to me to be part of the reason gold is finally coming back so strong. It works for both personae.

Ideally, you're supposed to think six months ahead of the now for design and two months ahead for marketing; being me, I generally make fall stuff in the fall, snap it and store it for a year -- my computer is set (by means of ReminderFox) to remind me two months before the autumn equinox, two months before Valentine's, two months before Christmas, et cetera so I don't forget to start listing things on Etsy. However, I'm making a conscious effort to pull in the Pantone colors in a timely fashion -- spring and summer for this year are supposed to be a lot of primaries and fruit shades, lightening up and shading toward desert dusties next fall. So this is me making a mental note to include shades like "Taxi Cab," "Macaw" and "Satsuma" in my next few pieces (full list here).

I've done a bunch of polymer clay pieces lately, partly because I really haven't touched the beads, apart from my custom order (ooh, I need to post the final version ...) since M left ... and partly because the polymer clay mushroom charms I've made lately don't fit well in my bead boxes for packing but fit just fine in my jewelry stash trays once made into earrings!

We did Christmas with M's parents today, and ate prime rib with wasabi and banoffee pie; I got 62 vintage buttons in shades of black and brown from M's mum which I am currently sorting. I need to do a couple of new-materials photo posts over the next few days (iiif I can find my camera); apart from the buttons, I've gotten some great deals on Moroccan imports lately and a big bag of old women's wristwatches to dismantle. This may be delayed. We've been so busy trying to pack the last twelve years of my life into a PT Cruiser that I've completely burned through my post buffer.

So anyway. Merry Christmas, Internets, and a happy Yule, and may the longest night have left you with a bright morning.