And We Shall March

"Stars and Superheroes Sparkle at Museum Gala"

Be sure to watch the video, but what jumps out for me at first is the red web dress on the right side behind Spider-Man, seen in the second photo. It's very close to how I ultimately decided to run the webs on the Anansi Dress. A couple of the other dresses in the video take the same approach. I figured out that having the web start at the hip/side and radiate out across the body has more impact, and I don't even have a degree in this shit! Heh.

Oh, hey. So you can embed multiple links in one graph.... Good to know.
 

The Bug Block

This is the block I designed all by Moiself for this project. It's called Bug. It's a modified version of another block I designed called Grass (which is for a different project I might talk a little bit about a few months from now).

The center square is one inch, um, square. The legs are 1/4-inch wide, 2- and 2.5-inch in length.

Here is a shot of prototypes in single- and double-leg form. (Protos are raw tests thrown together just to get a general sense of how the end product might look. For example, first thing I figured out was the legs have to be a teeny bit wider. Ignore the interior topstitch on the one on the left, as protos are also for Experimenting. )

Since these Bugs would contain words at the center, I adjusted to make the square a little bigger but left the leg width & length the same. Here's a couple of Bugs all formal with seams pressed and everything. (There are nine total, each is different.)

The font is H.P. Lovecraft's handwriting. I wanted to use his cursive but it turned out to be too difficult to read at the size I wanted. Also I ended up not embroidering each word as originally planned because I forgot that the transfer paper leaves a waxy surface unfriendly to embroidery. (One day I'll be set up to print directly to fabric. Until then, no word embroidery.)

What turned out to be the most difficult thing with the Bugs was figuring out where to place them on the shell.  It took about two weeks of pinning, changing my mind, pinning, changing my mind, soliciting opinions, pinning, changing my mind before I came up with a layout I liked. When I tacked them down I left about 1/8-inch of the end of each leg loose in hope that they will unravel a little bit down the road. We'll see what happens with that over the years. If it works, I think it will look cool.

If you like this block and want to use it, my only rule is you have to call it Bug.

Illustrated instructions on how to make one will have to wait until after Geek Vegas, as my other lovely assistant's camera is still on the fritz.

The spider would have been blocked had this been a quilt as originally planned. For the dress I left it free-form. Sort of. Here it is sewn into the shoulder. It's okay. I'd like the front legs and antennae to be more spindly, but I couldn't make any of the protos work.

Another surprise, it turned out I liked the raw sleeve ends so much that I couldn't put trim on them. This is unfortunate because when I did the zig to seal the fabric I used black thread, not expecting the sleeve ends to be visible. Had I known this 70s-era linen would drape so well, I'd have done the zigs in the storm thread. With hope, the very ends will unravel a bit down the road, giving the sleeves a slightly ragged look.

Surprise the third, I put the trim on the inside of the wedges instead of the outside. I like it.

Though I realize The Dead would most likely describe it as overly done, what with this thing having a lot of stuff going on at once, it makes me happy.

Ghost Web

You know how there you are walking through the woods minding your own business, when all of a sudden you run face-first into a spiderweb you didn't see and you freak? Wanted that on this dress, a web that you could only see if the light hits it just right.

Going back to the proto, I doodled potential layouts in three colors (so that I would remember which was which). The red layout won. The black layout didn't get very far..something about putting a web right over the breast felt cliche.

And with that, off to the real cloth! Used a white pencil to draw the lines, then traced over that using a tight chain stitch in the Storm thread. I knew it would turn out great when, while stitching, I had trouble seeing the thread. In these two picts, My Lovely Assistant*** puts up with helping me try to capture the light for a direct and indirect shot.

Then off to the 24-hour drug dealer laundry for a third run through the washer, which erased all the guides, leaving only the near-invisible web loveliness.

*** All last week here's how My Lovely Assistant and I greeted each other daily:
Me: HOW MANY MORE DAYS?
Assistant: FIVE MORE DAYS!!!
Together: WOOOOOO!!
Guess what we were talking about?

Next time, Old Wives Tales!

Basic Tools & Prototype

This is the basic toolset for just about everything around here.

The square thing is a recent addition, snagged at the Ives rumble sale, instantly replacing those damned embroidery hoops I hated with a huge stompy hate. Have no idea what that thing is called, but it's incredibly handy.

Because patterns confuse and irritate me, not to mention patterns tend to be what designers think you should wear as opposed to what you want to wear, I don't use them. I approach an outfit the same way as a quilt - shapes! This is full-sized prototypes are essential around here. Yay for .59-a-yard poplin and scrap cloth...by working out all the potential problems in the proto, you reduce the chance of making A Horrible Mistake with the real cloth. Once the proto is set, that I turn into a template for future use. One day I will have time and moolah resources to take a drafting class or two at one of the trade techs around here. Until then, this approach, though a bit labor intensive, works for me when I'm making items to wear.

There were six protos for the Anansi Dress. Only now do I realize I only took pics of a couple of them, which is just as well because who cares about the failed ones? Based on the too-low neckline, in this pic I'm building either the second or third one. Mostly this shot is to show off the fabulous bendy ruler used by architects. I use it for the more complicated blocks, and if I ever lose it I have no idea where to get another one as it just showed up in the mail one day. The round thing I got down in the garment district. It builds in seam allowances for you! I have it in 1/4- and 1/2-inch.

Here are views of the sixth proto, which became the final template:

And here is Cuddle Kitty in the way. As usual.

Next time, ghost web!

Anansi Dress Raw Materials & Background

• 4.5 yards of Vintage Mom Cloth. Specifically, gorgeous linen dating back to the mid-1970s. I have been holding onto it for years waiting for just the right project. It's kind of grey, kind of silver, depending on the light.
• 2 yards of Kona cotton, just this side of off-white.
• 2 yards of wax cloth from Ghana. That's the purple stuff. I wanted to use kente because the Ashanti is where Anansi came from, but even in this city real kente is getting harder to come by. When you do come across it, it's so expensive it may as well be sitting in a museum. Kente has never been cheap, but for some reason the last couple of years the price point has gone through the roof. Why this is I do not know. Anywho, figured Ghana wax cloth was a respectful compromise. I've worked with this type of cloth before, so first thing was to strip out as much of the wax as possible.
• 1/2 yard of shiny blue cotton (not pictured because it was added late in the game)
• One silver dress of great emotional import, sadly no longer wearable due to an unfortunate bleach incident.
• Six yards of pretty trim I call Storm.
• One spool of grey thread. One spool of invisible thread. One spool of gradient thread I also call Storm. Two batches of ultra-thin black floss (not pictured because at the time of this picture lord knows where I had put the floss. Eventually it was found in the kitchen.)
• Seed beads in light slate and blue slate.
• Transfer paper (not pictured)
• Font from the HP Lovecraft Historical Society (not pictured. I'm obsessed with the man's handwriting.)
• Book
• Cat hair (he's just out of the shot on the left)

This dress exists for four reasons.

1. Love that book.
2. The art by Dagmara Matuszak is STUNNING. It has been a very long time since I've seen a piece of graphic design so perfectly integrated into what it's promoting. And until I saw the pictures on the Hill House site I had never been emotionally moved by a piece of decorative design.
3. James up and died.
4. In teaching me how to make garb for faire, author & costumer Mary Wine has given me the basic tools needed to see past I Can't Sew More Than Straight Lines.

More than once over the years, The Dead had pointed out that I make elaborate stuff for other people but I have never made an elaborate thing for myself.  I would ignore him because whenever he got into his Hippie New Age Crap Mode it just irritated me. I didn't Get It until after he was gone. That's one of the things that's Unfair about the entire situation. (It's been six months and I'm still in the stage where his death is all about Me. I don't know if that's pathetic or not. I've never had someone at this level die on me before.)

The concept for this piece has been in the hopper since fall '06. It was originally going to be something else and it was not going to be for me. It was also going to be much larger and would have taken about a year to do.  I held onto the idea for a month or so after he died, then scrapped it.  I wasn't sure it could be done mainly because I didn't have a high res of the image, and I seriously doubted I would have the time to finish it even if I did. But the idea never really went away, probably because I am in love with Matuszak images.

Then someone told me how you can pull a jpeg image from a pdf. That got me thinking that I could alter the original plan into something workable that could be done in a couple of months. Recently, someone else told me how you can pull a high res image from a pdf. Glory be!  Followed the instructions and it worked! That meant I had to redo the blocks, but that's okay. I was not entirely happy with the jpeg version, and redoing the blocks, though tedious, is not that big of a deal because they are stitched on the shell. (If I had stitched them into the shell, which I considered doing at one point, forget it.) All I had to do was take them off,  redo them, put them back on.

When I get to the part with the block I will show pictures and describe how to make it as best I can. Think it will help me feel less selfish to just hand it over to whomever wants to try it, plus I think sharing it is part of the flow. When you think about it, we don't know who created Jacob's Ladder, Shoo Fly, Log Cabin or any of the many blocks that are now considered traditional. Somebody came up with those, shared them and the universe took it from there. It doesn't make sense to be all grabby about a quilt block, especially when you consider how many modern-age blocks can be directly traced to a traditional source.

The shell (the actual dress) I designed from the ground-up. That actually took the longest. I went through six prototypes before getting it right. Am pretty pleased with how it turned out, even though when I look at it I see glaring flaws I'm not sure others would. Got shots of a couple of the failed prototypes, and will share those, too.

So, that's the background to this piece. There will be this one and no other. It will be for Me. Permission was obtained from no one (in case that needs to be said).

At first it felt weird to be doing something like this for myself, but I am getting over it. Yet it is painful that I can't show it off to the one person who would be happiest to see the end result of this act of selfishness.

Move Along...Just Setting Up A New Category

Since I'm almost done with this one, time for its category. Here's a pic from a couple of months ago, when work on this dress began, of Cuddle Kitty being Unhelpful. This is why the materials list of just about everything around here includes and cat hair. He's sitting on top of either the second or third prototype. I forget.