Ixchel, Inc. - Handmade Apparel and Accessories Inspired By Music - Ixchel Blog

Our 2016 collection is almost here!

2016-03-17T20:38:00-04:00

It has been a long winter, and a lot of work has gone into this, but we are just about ready to showcase our 2016 collection!

New shorts, new embroideries and appliques, new Joggers style pants, new hoodies in new fabrics, new hi-tech backpacks, a few retro-classic style bags, and a lot more!

We are proud of this collection, we hope you like it, and we'll tell you more about it all whe we showcase it on or around April 15th!

Our Summer Festival Schedule (Factory Team)

2015-07-02T21:37:00-04:00

It's about time we got around to publishing our event schedule, summer is here already.

This is the official Factory Team schedule; a number of the best festival craft vending teams will always carry our products, so they will be at a number of shows where we won't.

So we will be at Camp Bisco, July 16-19, at Montage Mountain in the Scranton, PA area. If Electronic Dance Music is your thing, this is a must-see, and Montage Mountain is a great venue. We will be in the Waterpark, where a 24/7 hippie pool party will be in full swing. Bring your bathing suit!

We'll go next to the (can you believe it?) 20th Annual Gathering of the Vibes, in Beautiful Seaside Park, July 30- August 2, in our home State of Connecticut. Since it's our home show, we'll do an extra special booth, and shoot video for our up-and-coming YouTube channel.

In August we'll do a back to back run, 1st the Peach Festival back at Montage Mountain, we'll be in the Waterpark again for one more hippie pool party (it really is a special way to enjoy a jam-festival) August 13-16, and then run right up to the finger lakes for Magnaball, Phish's big summer camp-out for 2015, at Watkins Glen Race Track, Aug 20-23. We will be in the Campground for that event, so you might have to walk to come out and see us. We'll be open 24/7 at that event

In September, we'll go back to Lock'n, in lovely Arrington VA, Sept 10 to 13, and then come back to New England for Wormtown Music Festival in Greenfield MA Sept 18 to 20, and probably our colleague Saint Phinnegan will take a crew to Catskill Chill out in Hancock NY that same week-end, we hear it is the last year for the Chill at that Camp Minglewood.

We'll finish up the years events at Hulaween, down in FL at the legendary Suwanee Music Park, and that is going to be enough. I am sure I will announce "never again" at least 6 times this summer, which I think I have been saying every summer since around 1994. Then I remember all the fun we have and I say... well,.....one more summer!

Christopher

A little bit about our new collection for 2015

2015-06-19T18:28:00-04:00

Well, summer is here and we're finally getting around to telling you what we've got that's new around here. No excuse for the delay, except maybe the weather, as spring didn't make it to Connecticut until late April.

Nevertheless, or sin embargo, as we say in Español, we did in fact toil away in the salt mines of our magical workshop all winter, so we could bring everyone new and beautiful hippie fashion art. (Excuse the mixed metaphor; the salt mines part is an exaggeration anyway, our facilities in the Mayan Highlands are lovely, and the weather, while quite cool owing to the altitude, is a marked improvement from any New England Winter)

So, you're asking what did we do there? Quite a lot actually. First, due to the success of our garment dyed shorts and pants in 2014, we expanded the garment dyed apparel collection. We got very lucky in sourcing a new basic summer cloth; it's about 4.7 oz., has just a bit of slub (irregular thickness) in the yarn to give it texture and an artesanal look, it dyes richly and softens beautifully, giving it the just the hand you would want from casual summer clothing. The garment dyeing process also shrinks the seams, giving a nice pucker to the cargo pockets and patches (we did patchwork shorts and over-dyed them) and well, we love it and we hope you do. We were so happy with the results we expanded the color selection, and we have gone to unique variant images for our 2015 hand woven apparel; when you see an image of a short or hoodie you like, that's the exact one we'll send you. It's working out great.

We also (I told you we got lucky) sourced a basket weave cotton, it is quite heavy; 8 oz or so, it also dyes and softens just like you'd want it for casual wear with an artesanal look. We are making outerwear; Hoodies and patchwork jackets with it, a heavyweight version of a new kimono that we love, and using it in bags too. When we bolt-dye it, it combines in patchwork with the native textiles that we use with a striking result. You'll see it in a few places in the collection, and we are bringing out more outerwear designs in basket weave for fall.

We are doing our traditional patchwork apparel with embroidered appliques, the Terrapin cargo shorts are a must-see, and we took our "4 Seasons" Tree of Life design and upgraded it. Originally, we wanted to hand-embroider the tree design, it was simply too hard to get right consistently, so we went back to the drawing board and labored to get our 9 color computerized embroidery machines to give us a rustic, hand made looking result, something modern computer software doesn't want to do, but we figured it out. The result was so good, we went overboard and put it on 8 different handbags and backpacks, in different fabrics, and they all look fine.

We are making so many new artesanal styled apparel items, many of which are quite costly to produce, that we left them out of our wholesale collection for 2015, so many products offered on the site this year will not be available in the boutiques that carry our collection. That section is now called the "Ixchel Custom Shop"; it's not open as I write this, we will showcase the new stuff any day now.

We are doing the big jam-band and EDM festivals here in the North East; check our Facebook page for the summer schedule. We won't be at Soldier Field, but our hearts will be, and vendors will have our products. We will reward our steady customers with a BIG discount coupon shorty, also check our Facebook page for news, and that's all of mine for now. Play nice, it's going to be a long summer

Christopher

On the launching of our new Theme.

2014-10-13T10:34:00-04:00

To all our friends, our patrons, consumers and retailers, colleagues, suppliers, competitors and first-time lookers, we hope you like the new look of our site!

We have put a lot of effort into it; and we have had some great help. We wanted to have our site re-done before Holiday Season 2014, and we just made it. We have a lot more work to do; we will be updating the images and editing the info on our current collection, and we are excited to be showcasing some new products, mostly fall/winter outerwear, in the coming weeks. We know the site navigation still needs improvement, and we will be working on it steadily, to try to bring you the best shopping experience, and to better compliment the aesthetics of our collection. If you are familiar with our fashions, you know we draw our inspiration from the sights and sounds of the jam music scene, and from the world of textile art possibilities that we enjoy from making our collection in the heart of the Mayan Highlands of Guatemala. To us, those two cultural expressions, the art of the American jam music scene, and the Mayan textile arts, make a perfect match, and that is what we try to express with the Ixchel brand.

You can now link to our Facebook page and our Twitter feed from the site, so stay in touch and let us know how we're doing!