Nine years ago today, I met my daughter Samantha. Meeting your daughter in an office building in China is a tiny bit different from giving birth. She was 9.5 months old, and not happy to be there. She had just been driven for four hours in the arms of an orphanage worker to meet her new parents, who probably looked to her like space aliens. Her first few minutes in my arms were spent crying and pushing against my chest. Her clothes were soaked with pee from a bursting diaper, and snot was pouring out of her nose. I cried too. I don’t know what I felt more strongly – love or empathy. Sam cried and cried, with a determined persistence that I would soon learn is a hallmark of her personality. I knew that this was a very healthy reaction, and was grateful to see her tears even as I tried to calm them. When Sam finally stopped crying, she became very quiet and looked around her intently to assess the situation. By the following morning she was laughing. Her transformation was stunning and quick. Here’s a photo of her the day after we met, right after we signed [...]

For about a year, I have been working on a special project. You know how sometimes an idea pops into your head, and you wonder “Could I really do that?” This is one of those. I am frequently asked to donate dresses to charities, mostly for silent auction fundraisers. My customers have causes that they care deeply about, and they ask, so I give. It’s easy. But sometimes we want to do meaningful things that are not so easy, that require thought, investment, time and risk. And sometimes a cause or an organization strikes our heart in a different, more persistent way. The Canada Mathare Education Trust felt like that to me. It’s a secular, volunteer-run, registered Canadian charity that provides high school scholarships for children living in the Mathare Valley slum in Nairobi. Mathare is one of the largest and most impoverished slums in Kenya, and most of its 800,000 residents live on less than a dollar a day. Thanks to the opportunities CMETrust provides, kids who would otherwise not have access to a high school education are thriving, and several graduates are now starting university. The students are seizing these opportunities, working hard, and taking on leadership roles [...]

Something usual happened to me this week, perhaps even cathartic. I live in a rather chaotic environment of my own creation, with three young children and a home-based business. There are times when my house accommodates not only family and friends, but also hundreds of new garments, or dozens of bolts of fabric waiting to be cut, or dozens of boxes waiting to be packed and shipped. Right now I’m busy preparing for the One of a Kind Show, which starts in a few days. But it’s my seventh year, so I know what needs to be done. The complication this year is that I’m selling my house at the same time. The thing about selling a house that is challenging for people like me, is the fact that houses look much better when they are not cluttered with too much stuff. The five of us have accumulated a LOT of stuff. When I was writing my bio for my website, I described myself (humorously but truthfully) as a fabriholic. I don’t love all fabric of course, but when I find a piece I love, my imagination runs wild. Whatever draws me in, whether colour, pattern, or scale, all beautiful [...]

Last night my sister came to me with a mission: she’s taking a quilting class and wanted to select nine harmonious fabrics to use in her first quilt. Because I own a vast amount of printed cotton fabric, she expected this task to be easy. It wasn’t! As she pulled out bolt after bolt and ruminated over multiple possible combinations, I started to think about what makes a colour or a print pleasing to one person and ugly to another. I spend a lot of time making decisions about colour and scale and pattern, but it was interesting to watch somebody else engaged in this process. We all know what we like when we see it – something in our brain just clicks. We live surrounded by visual stimuli and are constantly judging what we like and dislike from a multitude of choices. But I wonder how much of this is subjective, a reflection of our personal or cultural associations and biases, and how much is attributable to science. A recent (2010) study at UC Berkeley by a team of psychologists devoted to the study of colour perception and aesthetics, postulated a new theory of colour preference. “Ecological Valance Theory” [...]

A few weeks ago I did another photo shoot, this time for my Spring/Summer 2012 line. Once again my amazing photographer Lise Varrette worked her magic, this time in her new studio space over a five-hour period with a total of nine children! The children were amazing and the photos are beautiful. As I reflect on these twice-yearly photo shoots I can’t help but feel that in addition to tracking my development as a designer, they’re also tracking the growth of my three daughters, my nieces and nephews, and our beloved friends who have generously acted as my models, some for years. My Caterpillar Dress is a particularly difficult one to photograph well. Because one size fits from about 1-4 years, I like to show it on different ages in the same photo to illustrate its flexibility. But it can be challenging to photograph a 12-month-old, and I don’t know very many right now (all the children in my life are growing too quickly!). Visiting friends with tiny toddler twins fit the bill perfectly. Their older “helper” was the lovely Anika, turning 4 next month, the daughter of other beloved friends. Acting as the senior model with two rowdy toddlers [...]