One of the perkiest perks of doing what we do (other than getting to design the clothes that we want, the wonderful women we've met along the way, and forging a career from what we love to do, that is), is that sometimes, on the rare and delightful occasion, we get sent a couple of metres of some delicious fabric to play around with... I'm sure you can all feel how we squealed when Susan of sewbox.co.uk got in touch to offer us some of her Liberty Tana Lawn - of which her selection is epic - to become the lining for one of our Victoria Blazers.

For a make like this, you can really have fun with the lining. Just visible enough to show off a bit of colour and personality, but not so much so that you risk getting into Timmy Mallett territory (those of you who didn't grow up in 1980's England, click here to see what we're on about!). We'd already found a beautiful blue and white striped linen on Goldhawk Road which we'd earmarked for a Victoria, but worried about it looking a little too plain, and if we're honest, booooring, we held off making it up until we could find the perfectly complementary lining. Enter sewbox.co.uk and Liberty! Wanting to keep to the pastel blue colour scheme, we chose Betsey Blue. There's just something so charming in the way that stripes and florals go together, and this is no exception:

To give our blazer a softer, more muted feel, we actually used the wrong side of both the linen and the Liberty Tana Lawn as the right side. The stripes on the linen were just a bit too crisp and intensely BLUE and WHITE from the right side for our liking... Turning the floral Liberty lawn to the 'wrong side' was just muted enough to balance out the paler 'wrong side' of the linen, without losing any of the beauty of the print.

Susan, thank you SO much for gifting us this beautiful fabric! We love how this summery blazer turned out. Got us thinking about a matchy matchy Liberty Anna Dress...