San Francisco is famous for its sourdough!

Hearty, tart, flavorful, and crusty...

To make a successful sourdough bread, you have to begin with the batch of bread that came before. By using a little bit of the previous batch in the dough, the yeast and flavor of the bakery is maintained through generations of bread baking. Some San Francisco bakeries have been baking sourdough using this method (and maintaining their original yeast) since the Gold Rush!

In the same way, Sourdough uses vintage fabrics to create new fashion items.

So what is barkcloth?

The fabric is called "barkcloth" an American textile that was created between the 1930s and the 1950s, although some from the early 1960s may be found here and there. The name "barkcloth" comes from the thick, hearty, bark-like texture of the fabric, which was woven on special looms from cotton or rayon threads. The resulting textile was then vat-printed (a type of synthetic dye process that ensures color-fastness) with thousands of colorful prints.

Some of the most famous barkcloth patterns are the tropicals, featuring palm fronds, tobacco leaves, and giant hibiscus flowers. There are also beautiful florals full of roses, ribbons, and nosegays. At the opposite end of the spectrum were the "atomic" prints inspired by modern designers like Charles and Ray Eames. These featured amoebas, boomerangs, mobiles, and any other type of space-age modern motif. A final group included the novelty patterns which included cowboys, the circus, plantation scenes, toile prints, hunting motifs, cocktails, bowling, sports, kitchen utensils, or any other theme of American life at Mid-Century.

At Sourdough, we spend a lot of time carefully considering our barkcloth. We don't like too many florals, nor do we like prints that are too large, too loud, too novelty, or too retro. We choose fabric that is unmistakably vintage, but still wearable and relevant today. We work hard to buy only cotton barkcloth, but if a particularly fabulous print is available, we will choose some rayon prints as well.

Some history...

Annie started sewing when she was 10. It was only natural. She'd already conquered crayons, paints, collage, and every other form of artistic mischief, so why not graduate into sewing? On a free day from school, her Aunt Nini took her downtown to the gigantic Woolworth's that used to be in the Flood Building at Market & Powell; she picked out a circle-skirt pattern and a stiff peach floral cotton, and Nini began instruction on straight grains, ironing, pinning, and sewing. From then on, Annie monopolized her Mother's green Kenmore 1431.

Of course, sewing happened only occasionally over the years, in between building dollhouses, re-decorating rooms, high school sports, reading every issue of Vogue ever printed, playing piano, writing stories, painting, sculpting, gardening, reading the classics, watching films, living in a Co-Op, attending fashion school, and working in everything from software to high fashion to home design. But, it's always been the sewing that Annie's come back to time and again.

For the love of barkcloth...

Did Annie find the barkcloth, or did the barkcloth find her? As with all great love affairs, the origins are fateful and mysterious. In 2000, an uncut eight-yard bolt of barkcloth was won in an online auction. Soft and nubby but with a hearty texture you couldn't let go of, and printed with the most fantastic atomic-style tinker toys.

A jacket was made... and promptly put away in the back of the closet.

In the spring of 2008 the jacket reappeared during a closet-cleaning. What to do? Send or keep? Is it really fair for this adorable fabric to spend its days inside a dark closet?

Some slight alterations and design changes were made to the jacket and it emerged from the closet freshly adorable and downright loveable. Almost immediately, perfect strangers began to ask about it, wanting to know who made it and where they could get one too.

Annie found this sort of funny - only a kook could love this kind of vintage fabric the way that she did, right? Well, it seems there are a lot of kooks in this kooky world.

After much discussion, planning, advice, and soul-searching, Sourdough was born in early 2009...