Vintage-inspired Rue Bee dresses to appear at fashion show

My 2 beautiful girls have been invited to model Annie's Clothesline at the O'Child Spring Tea and Fashion Show on Sunday, March 27th. They will be modeling two new Rue Bee designs. The dresses are vintage-inspired and one (the shirt-waist dress) is modeled after a pattern from the 1950s. The other (princess dress) is modeled after our princess coats. Take a sneak peak at the shirt-waist dress. The fabric has a little girl walking French poodles on it. It's so adorable and we absolutely love it!

 

    

More Items at O'Child

 We finished a new set of Washboard Girls dresses and they are now available at O'Child. I really like the minty cool green of this dress and the pocket on the tee makes it playful.

New Items Available at O'Child

We have worked very hard over the last 3 weeks and completed 14 Rue Bee Princess coats and 6 Washboard Girls dresses for this spring. The items are available at O'Child in Bloomington. The coats look fantastic! They are in a great location in the store; at the front! They can be seen from the sidewalk outside the store on the Square. We love the Windsor blue most but we know many people will love the fuchsia more. The 6 Washboard Girls dresses are rose colored with flowers at the neck line. The flowers are darling and the colors make you anxious for spring.

Rue Bee Princess Coat, fuchsia

Rue Bee Princess Coat, Windsor blue

Washboard Girls, rose flower dress

Next up, more Washboard Girls dresses, Princess dresses (bias cut, button front with sleeves), and shirt-waist dresses. The fabrics are fantastic and the styles are a perfect match! We'll post pictures when they are done. Not to mention, you can view our models and clothing at the O'Child Boutique 2nd Annual Spring Tea and Fashion Show from 2-4 PM on March 27th!

Last project and the next

Side View

Fabric Lining

I may have plenty of work to do, what with 2 stores to fill this spring and 3 young children to raise but I still pushed through a project of my own. I'm totally in love with this bag so I felt the need to share. It was on my to-do list for 8 months and that makes me even more excited that I'm through with it. My love of the bag mostly comes from the love of the fabrics I choose (Moda!) but also for the functionality. It's meant to be a diaper bag for a while and then, if it's not too beat up, just a plain bag to carry. I'm getting pretty good at these and I'm already looking for a reason to make more, alas they don't fit into my business plan at the moment. 

 

So speaking of business I'm not moving on to making flowers for those cute Princess swing coats that sold so well in the fall-winter of 2010. We are making them in fuchsia and what we're calling Wedgwood blue. No doubt they will be showing up at O'Child soon. 

Business Expansion

I have a few unanticipated free minutes and I thought it might give me a chance to post a blog. We'll see how long those "free" minutes last...

Annie's Clothesline is still looking for a few possible new stores that will carry our products. We've investigated several stores in the state of Indiana and one or two out of state. We would like to add a new store or two but can't seem to make the ultimate decision until we know we can handle the increased work load. That means we need to hire one or two people to help us sew. Just a little help is needed for some piece working especially on our coats, since they are one of the most desirable items we make. We welcome any comments or interest.

I would also like to thank O'Child Boutique for the support over the last year. Selling our items in that store was one of the best decisions we made because it has opened a some doors for us. Thank you Nancy!

Spring/Summer 2011 Fabrics Purchased

On New Year's day we made a trip to our favorite fabric store, The Stitching Post in Washington, Indiana. We were able to select many fabrics for a great deal of what we will be making for our spring/summer collection. We love our new fabrics and feel they will represent the upcoming seasons well. You should see our new collections at O'Child Boutique in Bloomington and Ballerinas and Bruisers in Zionsville. We're disappointed that the 3rd store that carried our collections, Ragpickers in Jasper, is closing. It is motivating us to find 2 new stores to carry our products this spring.

Washboard Girls
We plan to make short sleeve t-shirt dresses as well as tank dresses with these fabrics-

 We also plan to introduce a new item to the Washboard Girls collection, skirts.

Kate and Izzy
Featuring the following fabrics paired with vintage barkcloths.

Rue Bee
More Princess Coats for spring out of fuchsia and a powdery-royal blue. We are also going to expand the Princess Coat design and make it into a dress with the following fabrics-

One more new design will be a shirt-waist dress with buttons down the front. We think this fabric below will be perfect for the introduction of the new design.

RJ Clark
Yes, we have a boys collection! We chose this fabric for RJ Clark. We will make boys overalls with shorts for spring and summer. I know we'll add more designs and fabrics for the boys collection, since now we have a few boys in the family to clothe.

Reflections on the Year

2010 was a big year! Annie's Clothesline had our best year ever. We began 2010 by developing our logo and identity with a graphic designer. As a result we have a cool new logo and great colors to go with it. Work with him is leading us toward even more professional looking products by adding logo designs for our collections, new tags and labels.

Next, we tackled the website. We hired a designer from etsy to create a splash page for our site. Then we began implementation of a web redesign to go with it. The redesign is a never ending process for which I have to thank my webmaster, my father, for working so hard. Our site now includes pictures of our products on the left. When you click on the product you can see additional images of that product in the center of your screen. Our obstacle is that the large images take time to load so he is working on that now. Nonetheless you can still see more of what we have to offer in all of our collections.

We're still awaiting final sales from O'Child but we already know that we have increased our sales by over 600%! We have sales in stores to thank for that. O'Child Boutique in Bloomington has been our top seller. We have had a presence in the store for a little over a year now. Second in sales in Ballerinas and Bruisers in Zionsville. The patrons of that store love our coats. Speaking of which. My mother and co-owner made these beautiful coats for my daughters. Every where we go people are noticing them. Someone said, "What are those coats?" I had to say, "They are Annie's Clothesline!" Yes, we're heading for name recognition. The woman continued to say, "You don't see that in Bloomington. They look like they are from Paris." I said, "Well, now you do. And they're on sale at O'Child Boutique on the square."

The third store that sells our clothing, Ragpickers in Jasper has also had success in selling our products. It's the cutest store in downtown Jasper and is a great destination for gift shopping.

A dress at Ragpickers

We also did a decent bit of selling to friends and acquaintances as well as attendance at the Plainfield Tri Kappa Gingerbread Christmas craft show. We enjoyed the show and hope to attend again next year. We learned a lot from attending the show and it will help us in achieving our goal of attending the Country Living Craft Show in Columbus, Ohio in a few years.

Booth at Gingerbread Christmas

Thanks to everyone who supports us. We love our business and we hope you do too. Expect to see more growth and visibility of Annie's Clothesline in the future! Happy New Year!