ICON series

One of my favorite places to find inspiration is from old photos of my favorite models, actors, musicians, and artists. I challenged myself recently to use some of these photos to create a line of 100% upcycled shirts I'm calling the ICON series. I'll share a little about how they are made.

Twiggy!! 

First, I decide what shirt I'm using and look through my saved pictures, and match up a photo that the style will go with the shirt. The next step is to make the head and hair. I iron fusible interfacing to the back of the fabric I'm going to use, this stiffens it and keeps it from fraying. Then I trace out the basic shapes with pencil, and cut out the shapes I need for the head/neck and hair. Then I fuse these pieces to the shirt using a fusible webbing called Stitch Witchery. This keeps the fabric pieces from shifting while I sew them to the shirt. This process is called applique. 

Johnny Depp as Crybaby- be still my heart. Cheekbones from heaven. BTW if you haven't seen it, go, go now! Find it, watch it, fall in love with its weirdness. I used two vintage floral fabrics for Johnny that give his greaser look a new, softer twist, perfect for this pretty coral and gray striped tank top. 

After the head and hair are appliqued to the top, I give it a good press and then onto the next step, painting. This is all done freehand, there is no tracing or erasing, it's all final. I pull up the photo on my phone to look at while I work, and start with a little black fabric paint, sketching out the facial features. Then I go back over them with darker lines where needed. I dry brush the shading. Then I add a few more little details to each one, block printing or buttons or fabric flowers, to make each one really special. 

Here's my first batch of inspiration photos:

ICONS

And my first series of ICON tops (and one jacket):

L to R, top- Johnny Depp in Crybaby, Frida Kahlo, Kate Moss,
middle- Frida Kahlo, Twiggy, Grace Jones
bottom- Frida Kahlo, Iman, Isabella Rosselini

Details- buttons, flowers, sparkly eyes

Detail of Iman shirt

I have had a really hard time lately getting people to go to my Etsy shop lately. I'm not sure why, to me it doesn't seem different than Amazon or any other online shopping. There are items, you click the description to read about it, you add it to your cart, click "checkout", and pay with a credit card. Pretty standard I think? But for some reason my sales are down. I've been working my social media hard, trying to send people to my shop, but I feel like I should be getting more sales from the Etsy network, and just in general. Because what I'm finding is that when people actually SEE my work, they like it and buy it. I have been quietly internalizing my perceived "failures" (not selling enough) for a while now. And feeling really bad about it. But I'm finding from talking to people that they just haven't been seeing my things. They aren't visiting the Etsy shop and all the social media sites are constricting my posts so much, people only see them if I pay for advertising (which I do sometimes). I've read the best way to sell things online right now is through Instagram. I have a business account on IG and I have been working lately on setting up direct sales links to my items. It is taking a long time because I have like 200 individual items. 

Ok, so that was a really long paragraph to lead up to me saying, I am not sure the best way to sell these new tops! Should I put them on Etsy (will anyone buy them if I do?) I did a facebook auction recently which went pretty well so I might do that instead. Thoughts? Ideas? 

Also if you are dying to buy one of these, just write me a message! Or if you have a special request I'd be happy to do it.

What people/characters should I do next? 

Thanks for reading!! :)

Frida jacket + Iman tee + jeans= yessss queens