Ugh.

I’ve hit a wall. I hate everything I’m making. I have no energy or love for what it is I am creating and I feel like I’ve stepped down a path I’m not sure I am in love with.

I hope that this is a perpetual feeling all designers feel. My fingers are crossed.

As I face unchangeable choices, decisive distinctions in the aesthetics of this new collection, I doubt my talent. I doubt the color pallette, the concept, the conceived silhouettes.

I’m frightened and the truth is, designers do not like to express such fear, the dark side of a glamorous world meant only to entice, not to share our insecurities with you. The truth is, I’m an artist and I am frightened. So much anticipation and interest in what I do next is making me totally freak out!

I have been given very little time to pull it together and I push to create work that inspires, yet pays homage to the work I’ve done in the last year, to give the garments people seem to have connected to a chance. Yet, from a creative point of view, it’s like painting with colors you mixed from a series past. I am not inspired to be re-hashing old concepts, I’m just not, but I feel drawn to giving them the chance to be loved and worn in a way I think they deserve. Double ugh.

The company I keep right now is solely the pattern paper on my floor (still cutting on hard wood floors as I was pre-Project Runway win) and it is begging me for more time. I am faced with the focus on refinement. On doing the best version of ideas I’ve already had. Once again the reality of design, rather than art hits me. I am creating for you, not me – or at least to some extent. Many of the pieces I am designing are in some sort of way retrospective, re-worked garments that you connected to but that I have just fallen out of love with. A “lovers quarrel” so to speak, but one within myself. I think for better or worse, that’s a sign of a good designer. Moving on the second they grow.

Perhaps it’s time for me to stop working on the elements within this collection that reflect on past works, and move onto the pieces that will challenge me, challenge you to think outside the box of what you think of as “Gretchen Jones.” It’s time to think architectural elements, not “Lady Of The Canyon,” or better yet, how I can meld the two.

I can do it, I am doing it – its just hard to do it alone. We artists [we designers], need our cheering sections. Especially coming off of a year/experience that so harshly critiqued not only my every stitch, but character. If I am to fail, I say fail hard. Blow it all at the craps table – I may just win big.

What a blessing it is to be troubled with issues such as these. Fifteen days and counting til the finish of a collection I hope to die for. Sleep and restful thoughts are just a glimmer on the horizon.

This is the third piece in a new series at EcoSalon with Project Runway winner and sustainable fashion designer Gretchen Jones. For Jones, her daily apprenticeship with the “school of life” has been her guiding teacher and we look forward to bearing witness to her weekly inspiration collages, featuring ideas and scenes from the streets and parties of New York City, where she recently located. As well as her innate sense of style she’ll be pulling from a world of patterns, textures and all the designers who have preceded her.

The post Week 3: My Designer Life by Gretchen Jones of Project Runway appeared first on EcoSalon.

Time stand still, please, could you?

That damn designer dilemma is here again with the always impending deadlines. And now with a trip to Costa Rica, I must learn how to accept it, how to use it and more importantly, how to embrace a break without letting go of momentum.

In Costa Rica, I wake to rose petal waves gently unfolding on the velvet shores and at the same time think how I could have left my life in this state of ground break? Construction just starting on a collection I can barely break from my breast yet had to. I needed to not only walk away from the studio in order to stop coddling it, but to these moments of sheer bliss before my entire life changes with the new collection.

I also needed to take off my rose colored glasses and settle into a new pair, ones that are the dark shade of inspiration.
My Costa Rican “quickie” couldn’t have come any sooner.

While there noticing the dark, heavy, glittering sand layered with lighter (in weight and color) tan powder, like two universal matters filtering through a flour sifter – yet somehow perpetually linked hand in hand. Coral matter flecked along the shore line like burnt umber freckles dancing atop the tan bosom of the sea. Sunsets so vivid and rich that the equator seemingly swallowed them whole, I let go of some worry while watching them be consumed. I left some of myself down there.

Walking off the plane back into the brisk east coast air, I feel baptized by the book of travel. I resolve to do it again soon. The creative spirit needs that. It needs new lenses and appreciation for other ways of life, as that is how we translate our character into the concept. Ethnic interpretations and texture from far away ground you, ground your designs, give you perspective, and a new way of speaking your own truth.

My bible is made of silks and wools this season which will envelop those restful nights like the warm winter blanket of work ethic. Back to the drawing board and sewing machine for me.

This is the second piece in a new series at EcoSalon with Project Runway winner and sustainable fashion designer Gretchen Jones. For Jones, her daily apprenticeship with the “school of life” has been her guiding teacher and we look forward to bearing witness to her weekly inspiration collages, featuring ideas and scenes from the streets and parties of New York City, where she recently located. As well as her innate sense of style she’ll be pulling from a world of patterns, textures and all the designers who have preceded her.

The post Week 2: My Designer Life by Gretchen Jones of Project Runway appeared first on EcoSalon.

Craft. Tradition. Skill. Sustained aesthetics.

As I find myself forever linked to native influences, I tend to think about the skill it takes to make things, well, well-made.

Time, action, finesse and a little bit of human mistake, too. It’s what makes a piece feel special – it’s the soul that is inevitably left by the maker. In some Native American crafts, mistakes are made intentionally, as it is believed the only one(s) who can be a perfectionist is the divine. I like that. I like being able to sense a person’s hand in what I am purchasing. It’s what makes it special, and in turn, worth the investment.

And as I find myself ever more connected to my trade skill and hands-on learning approach – I’m self-educated and apprenticed in many areas of handcraft – I am reminded of the wonderful quote:

“And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others.”
– Wole Soyinka

I like the school of life, rather than the classroom.

This week’s imagery is pulled from areas within my own studio and soon-to-be launched new collection, but also many images that have formed my “signature” as a designer. I hope as you look at it, you can see past the label – and into the soul that feeds it.

This is the first in a new series at EcoSalon with Project Runway winner and sustainable fashion designer Gretchen Jones. For Jones, her daily apprenticeship with the “school of life” has been her guiding teacher and we look forward to bearing witness to her weekly inspiration collages, featuring ideas and scenes from the streets and parties of New York City, where she recently located. As well as her innate sense of style she’ll be pulling from a world of patterns, textures and all the designers who have preceded her.

The post My Designer Life by Gretchen Jones of Project Runway appeared first on EcoSalon.

Imagine your village’s water supply was about to be contaminated by nuclear waste from a nearby dump and the federal government simply offered to put a fence around it. If you were the Hopi Nation, you’d sue.

In the 1950s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs created an unlined, unrestricted dump a few miles from a uranium mill on Navajo and Hopi land. Everything from uranium tailings to medical waste has been dumped there over the decades. The dump was closed – covered over with sand and dirt – in 1997 and the Hopi and Navajo people have been fighting for a cleanup ever since.

Studies have confirmed that groundwater near the dump contains levels of uranium, arsenic, chromium and more that far exceed what is considered safe. What’s the “safe” level of uranium, anyway? And after years of watching government agencies hem and haw over the issues (yes, even offering to simply build a fence around the dump), the Hopi Nation is fed up. They plan to take serious legal action.

And they’re not just suing as a matter of principle, but because a uranium-contaminated water plume is headed directly for the Hopi water supply. Drinking water is a precious commodity, especially in the Arizonan high desert, and it was governmental mismanagement that led to the problem in the first place.

It’s hard to believe that anyone could sue the government itself and succeed, but with President Obama’s more sensitive leadership, maybe this major law suit (which includes the Department of Energy, Department of Defense and the Environmental Protection Agency) will make the United States government pay better attention to the real and ongoing saga of Native American affairs.

The post Hopi Nation to Sue the U.S. Government Over Environmental Charges appeared first on EcoSalon.