Another New Activity

left to right, Katie, yours truly, Cristal, Ashley, Owen, Tim

It was a gala occasion. Tim and I, along with Cristal and Katie caught the 1 pm ferry to Vancouver. Owen's mom and sister met us on the ferry and we all piled into our vehicle (someone compared it to Mary Poppins' expanding carpetbag). We met Owen and Ashley for dinner. Then....

Off to the fashion show we went. This was a totally new experience for most of us. In February 2013 Ashley was a participant in a design competition in Montreal. To open the fashion show, her design, shown above, along with two others from the school (Vancouver Community College) were shown on the runway.
 

Then the finishing class's garments were shown. Ashley's designs were inspired by the pre-Revolution Russian aristocracy. She used silks, wools and blends. In the look above the silk dupioni skirt is laser cut, using embroidery patterns from the inspiration era as the basis for the design.
 

I really liked this look - narrow skirt with a vertical band over pants, a shirt and vest. 
 

The back of the above look. I have to say that her designs fit the models very well (she did a lot of fitting adjustments in the past couple of weeks) and her outfits had a very polished look.

For this collection, Ashley had to design 20 looks (complete outfits) but only had to sew up 5 of them. She was the only student in her class to include menswear in her collection. She stitched two of them for the show. Above is one of them - her tailoring really impressed me.
 

And here's the designer herself, walking the runway with one of her models. She's now completed her schooling and has a job in the industry as a junior pattern drafter - just what she wanted to do. 

Kudos to the dads of the Little Misses A and S, and Little Mister F who stayed behind while Katie and Cristal attended the event. We had a lot of fun and I hope the moms enjoyed their night of uninterrupted sleep.

So that's my latest new thing, unlikely to be repeated. It was a lot of fun!