Another season has finally come in and Fall 2014 is upon us. The new collection has arrived, it looks fabulous and boy do we have some fabulous prints to share with you!

Last summer we at Mata Traders took a good look at the Fall 14 forecast and fell in love with this idea of crafts. We already have embroidery in every season and sometimes we add a bit of ikat into the mix, but for this season, we decided to focus on a pattern fully dedicated to cross stitch. As you know, I have personally become fascinated with cross stitching (thanks to my good friend Haley), but here was a chance to play with the image of the craft rather than actually cross stitching a dress. Now that we had our concept, we needed a subject. The forecast was full of vintage florals. We decided to merge the two ideas; vintage florals and an illusion of cross stitch.

Cross Stitch Roses. Textile Design by Shifra Whiteman. Garments by Mata Traders.

Creating this particular pattern was really fascinating to create. From the beginning, we wanted colorful flowers with a dark background so that the colors, no matter what we chose, pop! We started with a grid made up of the letter "x" and used illustrations of 3 different flowers. Then, we used 3 different shades of the same color to show the shading between each petal and 2 shades of green for the leaves. After playing with 3 different types of flowers, we decided to use only roses. The next step was playing with scale. We had one word on our minds…BIG! We wanted everyone to see each "x" printed on the fabric.

Left: Oberlin Dress    Middle: Hello Dolly   Right: Loyal Love Dress — Left: Oberlin Dress Middle: Hello Dolly Right: Loyal Love Dress

We held our breadths waiting for a sample to come back and see if this pattern would even look good. Thankfully it did! The whole design team fell in love with it and the vintage look with a modern twist looks awesome. We love it so much that Mata Traders decided to make 3 dresses with the fabric! Check out the Oberlin Dress, a wonderful cut perfect for any lady (especially ladies with curves), or the Hello Dolly Dress which could be paired perfectly with a cozy sweater! But my favorite dress is the Loyal Love Dress. It is such an elegant garment that could be dressed down for work just as easily as it could be dressed up for a wedding.

Florals are one of the most popular patterns on fabric. Walk into a clothing store and a floral print is guaranteed to cover a few garments. I myself have designed or refined a bunch of florals for Mata Traders like the Roses print and the Falling Florals print. You might be asking what makes this floral print different?

One of many images from StyleSite Trend Forecast for Spring 2014.

We always start by looking at the trend forecasts to see if there is something we can adapt for the clothing we make. The image above hooked us in. Check out how intricate the designs are and how the colors are so vibrant that they pop off the screen! I immediately started researching tropical and local flowers of Brazil and started drawing. I had pages of sketches but ended up using 2 main flowers as my focal images to then construct the grand repeat. For weeks I worked on using 4 or 5 vibrant colors weaving them in-between each flower in a vision of a dress bursting with an energetic floral. Towards the end of the design period, reality set in and the entire design team realized that we needed to change our perspective on this specific print.

Yes, having a super crazy colorful dress would be awesome but how many of these colors can we really get with the natural dyes from our cooperatives? Would 5 colors be too much to produce? What if it doesn't translate to a dress? With a new vision, we scaled the colors back from 5 to 2, we produced the print on a large scale and made one color variation in similar blues and one in red and purple.

From right: Parisian Book Shop Dress  &  Isle of the Sky Dress — From right: Parisian Book Shop Dress & Isle of the Sky Dress

The dresses came back wonderfully! The scaling back of color makes these dresses seem so much more sophisticated. The Isle of the Sky Dress in the blue fabric is calming and almost has a floating feel to it, while the Parisian Bookshop Dress in the red and purple color combo is vibrant and gives of a dramatic vibe.

This is a perfect example of evolution in a print. We started with a wild vision of different Brazilian flowers cascading in many colors across dresses and ended up with a simpler and calmer version. The design team had to figure out how this fun and crazy trend could work for us and our abilities and facilities and in the end created a wonderful print.