You may ask yourself as you browse this set, "where are the surfboards???" The answer is simple: The Sims Resource. TSR has a monthly theme for Feature Artists. One of the themes was Summer Beach Party. Windkeeper did a series of surf boards for it. Since hers are awesome and I have them in my game already I'm not going to make any. If you visit the Related Finds section (above) there is a link to her items and the other beach themed stuff.

The spark of inspiration for this set came from someone who purchased Bella's Secret (it is now free). She mentioned that she was building a beach shop and was going to use Bella's as bathing suits. She was only missing a countertop sunglasses display. I figured I could extract Maxis' display and alter it easily enough. 24 hours (of actual work) later and I have a whole set including some new bathing suit type recolors of the Bella's Set.

I really wanted to have some sandals in the shop. I have downloaded several shoes from other sites but they didn't have what I was looking for. Aside from that, I wasn't sure what to put in a beach shop (I've never been to the beach and it was 20 degrees outside when I created this) so I went over to TurboSquid. I like going there to get ideas - mostly to challenge myself to see if I can create something that I see there. In this case I ended up spending $6 on 3 shoe meshes and the sand dollar mesh. Will you ever see any more shoes at Retail Sims? Not unless I can get them cheap from Turbo Squid or decide to spend a few days reading up on 3D Studio Max.

The name of the shop and the basic sign design comes from a real life shop. I found a pic of the sign while using Yahoo's Image Search for ideas. That's how I ended up using the DOA girls for bikini models. I was doing a search for "beach" when they popped up. I couldn't ask for better models so I grabbed the pics. I added recolors of the fabric store bolts because I found a site which carries nothing but Hawaiian print fabrics -hawaiianfabricshop.com. When I find a whole site with tons of perfectly sized textures (in this case fabric sample pics), I couldn't just pass that up. I also used their fabrics on the Bikini Top & Skirt Displays.