Austin School of Fashion Design Fashion Show!

May 18, 2008

First things first!

The Austin School of Fashion Design Annual Fashion Show will be held June 7th at the beautiful Mexican American Cultural Center at 600 River Street. It is on Town Lake and is just a wonderful building, with plenty of room for our event. The exhibit of the illustrations and draping will start at 7pm and the fashion show starts at 8pm. We will be showing the students work. Please come!

Back to the blog......

Since we are now officially into summer, I thought I would use a summery text color just to brighten up the page a little. I have to stop myself from going any farther, for fear I will start decorating the borders and adding all sorts of "pretty things"! Stop me.

My best friends, Beth, Judy, and Laura have made it an annual thing to get together during the easter celebrations and decorate something....eggs, shoes, etc. They are not your normal easter eggs...I will try to download a few to show. Mainly, we just laugh ourselves into oblivion, getting together and pushing our "artsy fartsy" talent far as it will go! A few years ago, we decided to decorate shoes...we all went to walmart and bought a pair of open heel sling back shoes ($8.00)...did I mention the heels? $8.00 heels...ouch!

We all brought every box of craft stuff from our homes that we could carry, threw it all on the table, got out our favorite glue guns, and poured the wine. On your mark, get set, go!

Now, I want you to know that all of us are pretty good artists, all of us make our living at art, so you can imagine the potential here. But put four good friends together, and a box of glue guns, some fake flowers and plastic beads, and stand back, Ellie!

After a couple of hours of trying to outdo one another, we had our finished masterpieces....but the best part was actually putting them on our feet and walking out the door to go to dinner!!!!We all decided to wear our shoes out that night, and take a walk down Congress Avenue after our dinner. Man, oh, man....those were the most painful shoes that any of us had ever worn, but we hobbled along, laughing and crying at the same! But what a fun day!

My point in telling this story.....how did everything get so busy in all of our lives that we just don't have time for these get togethers? I hardly have time to look up, much less find my glue gun! But our friendships are so treasured...there is just so much love and laughter!

In the last two years, the school has take all of my free time...I'm not complaining, I would rather be there than almost anywhere else. I love watching the students learn and coming up with new ideas in fashion. Everyone is so driven to learn. But I forget that I have not seen my friends in ages and I miss playing with them. Judy, Beth, Laura, Jan, Virginia,Barbara, Connie, Carol.....my friends who have supported me every step have all taken a back seat to my school.

Hopefully they will all be there on June 7th, and some of you can enjoy them as much as I do.

Now that summer is here, the kids are out of school and we start all of the summer programs for the kids.....beginner sewing, intermediate sewing, illustration, hat design, purse design. The kids have a great time, and I am so impressed at how focused they all are. The classes last five days each, one week, for two hours a day. So the kids have an opportunity to take several classes if they wish. Kim Allbright and Ashley Raines have done a wonderful job in creating great classes for the kids...and the kids seem to really appreciate the creativity of the courses.

The adult classes stay the same, however, we don't teach the morning sewing classes, because there is not enough room with the children's classes. So, for just the summer the morning sewing classes change. We do still teach flat pattern in the morning.

I hope to see many of you at our fashion show, wearing your designs, or showing your illustrations, or just being in the audience supporting the students and admiring their creations.

Regards, Mary Margaret

Mary Margaret's Fashion Post for August 29, 2007

As I said, I am not too good on adding to my blog on a regular basis. Those of you who have been by the school lately understand why there is so little time.

We added a downstairs for the additional children's programs, and it was great to have the extra space, even though the re-building of downstairs took a while to complete, and is still being changed. It is bright, and everyone loves working down stairs. Music, air conditioning, big tables, sewing machines, what more could you need?
The summer program was so much fun.....the children's classes were better than I thought possible...I just cannot believe the work that the kids did! They learn so fast, and are so focused and determined!

We added all sorts of classes for the kids.....skirt design, shoe design, purse design, fashion illustration, advanced fashion illustration, draping. They were amazing! Can't wait until next summer. For the fall, we decided to add children's sewing classes to our saturday schedule, lasting five weeks. We had immediate enrollments, so the kids are really wanting to learn to sew.....liberated and sewing all at the same time!
For the adults, we have added six week sloper development, advanced fashion illustration/portfolio, and learning to use industrial machines to our curriculum. Check the new schedule, and register as quickly as possible.

On another note, somewhat sad for me and my family, my Father, Ted Quadlander, passed away on August 14. Although he was 86, it was very unexpected. He just fell to the floor that morning, and I hope died instantly. For a man who lived his whole life being curious and ready to take on any new adventure, his death has been hard to accept. While I am so thankful that it was immediate, it is still hard to say goodbye to someone like him. It is like watching a huge oak tree go down.

I am the oldest of six children..me, Greg, Cheryl, Pat, Mike, and Gary. My dad taught us all to ride a bike, to swim, to play baseball, golf, basketball, softball, to compete in track, volleyball, badmitton, target shooting, ping pong, tennis, anything and everything that had to do with competition and athletics. In 1951, he coached his Austin little league team to the play offs in Williamport, Pennsylvania for the Little League World Series. They came in second, and when they returned to Austin, the whole town showed up for a parade on Congress Avenue! It was the talk of Austin for years. Some of his players from that year showed up for dad's funderal...they had so much respect for him!

I went to catholic school and there were always sports for the girls, but once I transferred to public school, there were no sports for girls.....I guess we were just supposed to stand around look pretty for the football players....pass the hairspray, please! I rounded up some friends to start a girls basketball team, and asked my father if he would be the coach. None of us could play worth a dang, but we would head over to east austin once a week and challenge the girls over there at the rec center to a game. They slaughtered us everytime...but my dad hung in there with us until we couldn't find any other teams willing to play us....we weren't a big enough challenge, I am sure.

I learned to play golf when I was a teenager, along with my brother. Dad would take us out to practice range, and help us with our swings. I beat Sandra Hainey when I was 16 years old! She later joined the PGA. I think he mourned the fact that I didn't pursue golf more earnestly. But I had a boyfriend at the time who was terrible at golf, so I quit playing so that I would not embarrass him by beating him.

In high shcool, my dad coached our girls powder puff football team at Sidney Lanier. It was supposed to be flag football...no rough stuff. HA! There was plenty of rough stuff, I am telling you! We played our hearts out, tackling, pushing, shoving, whatever it took. I was a senior, and my dad always coached the junior class...so he was the enemy! I tried to steal his plays one day...I knew he kept them hidden in his sock drawer, but dang, he had moved them. His team won, as they always did. My best friend and I were lying on the field after the last whistle, having just missed a throw that would have tied the game. We were crying our eyes out. I didn't speak to my dad for a week!

He taught me how to drive when I was 12....we lived out in the country. The first time I ever heard my dad cuss was that day...I was trying to learn to drive our manual transmission Corvair, and I let the car stall, and then I kept stalling it, not quite able to master the clutch and the gas. Oh...I forgot to say...we were stalled on the railroad track with a train coming! My dad kept saying, "easy, easy, let out the clutch, push down on the gas at the same time, easy easy", and then "Holy ----! Move over!" I don't know what startled me more, my dad popping the clutch so fast we were airborne, the train whizzing by behind us, or my dad cussing. I think it was the cussing.

He contracted paralytic polio when I was six. My brother was four, my sister, two, and my brother Pat had just been born. Dad was in the iron lung, paralyzed from the waist up. There was very little hope. I think that the doctors fully expected my father to die. It was 1953...polio was thought to be incredibly contagious. I was taken out of school, and our family was pretty much exiled from the neighborhood.

My dad survived...through the well of determination and perserverance that we would come to see for the rest of his life.

I mention only a few of the many many memories that I have of my father, because it is in this foundation that I realized how important it is to be perservering and how important it is for girls to have male mentors.

My father was not the most pleasant person to be around, in spite of all his assets that I just mentioned. The physical effects of polio limited his use of his hand and arm, and I know that it was angered him endlessly to have to accept his limitations. But he would strap a golf club, or baseball bat to his hand and off he went....never ever crying over spilt milk!! There were eventually six children...I am not sure that my father even wanted one! He liked to schedule his life on his own terms, and not have to answer to anyone else. But inspite of all of that anger and emotional un-availability, he still managed to in-still in us a spirt of perserverance and determination, curiousity and dogged stubborness. He was incredible survivor, working for 52 years as a stock broker for Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Smith. He retired when he was 83, and even then, he missed his job desperately. His eyes had started giving him trouble, and he was having difficulty seeing to drive his car.

We all thought that he would never quit working.

I kow that I owe my father for the gift of determination. There is not much that I am afraid of trying...unless it is jumping out of an airplane! Dad never seemed to be too suprised or even notice our accomplishments...he really expected us to do well, and rise above. He never saw my school. His favorite saying was "wipe the blood off and keep playing!" and we all heard it often growing up.

It is so important for children to believe that they can accomplish anything! I try very hard to get this across to my students...set high goals for yourself. Don't expect to have a perfect childhood in order to accompish your goals. Don't expect your parents to be perfect. Don't let fear stop you. Cut yourself loose from people who bring you down, who make you doubt your ability. Just gently cut them loose. Take care of your mind, your body, your wit, your spirit....if any one of those gets weak, everything weakens.

Like most men of his generation, my father was an enigma, tough, hard to please, hard to reach, rough exterior. But his actions spoke so much louder than his gruffness. He taught all of us to be perservering, determined, funny, curious, competitive, and to never quit. What more could a kid ask for?