By Hali Estrada.
When I tell people that I make everything from scratch not many people actually believe me until they see it. Its a long process that starts just with a thought always inspired and heavily influenced by my life as a Skateboarder, and then turning that thought into reality first by drawing by hand (or in Illustrator) the basic idea for graphics or by making a prototype in any fabric I can grab from my studio when it comes to clothing, sometimes I dont even make a pattern and I just start cutting and sewing, after I like what I see and choose a Fabric then I make the pattern and work on the fit. The picture from below is from one of the 5-panel hats, it took me a long time to get a nice fit and I redid the pattern more than 20 times and I sew like 40 hats before the fit was perfect. The hats are a good example of doing something from scratch, I even had to learn how to sew a hat since I never done that before the day I saw that yellow fabric and pictured it as a hat, I bought one yard and took it home, the hardest part was to learn how to attach the visor, but after lots of practice and lots of hours I finally could post them at the store.
I wanted to make a blog entry about the process because I got 2 persons asking me about it today and I wanted to explain a bit about what I do, Im gonna have to make a video one of this days :). Right now Im in the middle of packing tables, machines, screens, inks, patterns, printers, fabrics etc etc to move to a bigger better space, from there it will be a lot of new stuff coming soon, I will keep you guys updated. #CFL.
