It always starts with an idea, a hint of inspiration turned to flowing rivers of material, of something truly beautiful captured first on a page and then on a mannequin to get its final home on someone and often in a closet or a dresser. It's often times a relatively slow process; a designer like any artist has to know that the first stroke of a line on the page is not the end of it. It's not instantaneous, and it takes longer than five minutes to do.
Even when she's exhausted and tired and wondering whether there is a soft and fluffy bed to collapse into or when she feels like homework killed all her brain cells or when she feels like that Akuma really didn't know when to quit avoiding defeat; her muscles could ache and ache and ache. Even when all of this is her reality or some of this, she still is drawn to picking up a pencil whether it's early in the morning or late at night or somewhere in the middle. She'll start a design or work on an old one, and sometimes she just craves the feeling of fabric in her hands, so she'll reach for her recently polished designs and try her hand out at turning one into something that almost feels like a dream created before her eyes.
The hardest and longest projects take months, though they used to take years and were often abandoned to be incomplete years ago, when she was new and wasn't quite as aware of the flow of design or the burst of steady creativity. She had many designs left in various stages of complete from years ago: a T-Shirt missing the rest of its unsewed companions that are still down in a notebook somewhere, a half-sewed pair of jeans that she'll likely never go back to, but keeps because just maybe one day inspiration and motivation will join, and she'll complete it, old sketches abandoned, some finished and waiting to be transformed from material to finished clothing, some only half sketched, almost forever abandoned to the passage of time. Creativity wasn't without its casualties, the rudimentary designs and starts that helped you figure out what you liked and what you didn't like, though that always changed and developed over time, as you grew in creativity, in your chosen field(s). She doesn't doubt that there are many almost treasures waiting in notebooks or scrap fabric in her closet or half-finished designs that many would think were clothes just hanging by a thread.
It took years to finally create a full outfit and longer than that to create better ones. Evenings after class were often spent sketching or sewing or fully creating a project that had been testing her for months or weeks or days, and even now her best and favorite days included designing. She dreaded the days that she walked around sluggishly, less fell of that burst of cheer that kept her going, as designing always eased some sort of weight off her shoulders and left her happy.
Marinette paused as she tried to run her fingers through the fabric of the store, eyeing pretty designs and testing how they felt and what they were. She sighed as she shook off random daydreams still perusing the aisle, knowing that all she had was a little money from a contest that she won two months ago, most of it spent, and the money that she'd be saving up from working at the bakery. She felt torn as a pensive frown appeared over her face.
These decisions impacted the designs that she could fully realize that would go from sketches in her notebooks to fully finished outfits. She could not afford to guess wrong and be set back by a few more months with just lukewarm designs in the boiling pot of creativity. "Is there anything that you see?" She looked up at the question with a half dazed smile, still mostly lost in the inward debate over fabric.
"Not yet, thank you." She tells the worker, feeling every urge in her to leave this spot, try elsewhere. This store always got quality fabric at a price that she could afford with what meager money she had. She left for a different aisle, half-fighting off muttering underneath her breath. There was so much to consider, and yet she knew that if she picked wrong, it would be another two months plus before she finally got different fabric. She sighed. It was hard to pick when you felt that bit of shaking pot pressure beneath her chest that raced within every beat of her heart.
Nothing stuck out to her, like it had two months ago, and she found herself tracing idle trails through the store, examining interesting fabric, and half tempted to buy plain fabric, because she could always work something out with it. It just didn't feel right either, and so she sat down, pulling out her notebook, flipping through to analyze what she'd written by each design and going back over the memory of how it appeared in her mind. Immediately, two completely different types of fabric raced into her mind, but she could barely afford either and definitely not both.
Marinette flipped slowly, waiting for a series of designs to jump out at her, waiting for something to leave her inspired and in awe, finally after easily fifteen minutes of sitting on the floor, flipping through sketch after sketch, slowly, she found a particular type of fabric much more popular in her designs. Exhausted, she gets up, confident in her choice, and even more thrilled when she realizes that this week, it is on sale.
She'd gotten through another trip to the fabric store in one piece, and positive that this could very well be the type of fabric that she needed. She doublechecked the feel of it, moving it every which way in the light to doublecheck the shade and hue of it. FInally, with a bright smile, Marinette set off for the counter, confident in her step.