Slacker

I'm a little horrified that it's been almost a month since my last post. While I've been slacking on the blogging front it's because I've been anything but in the rest-of-life front. I just wrapped a redonkulously busy sixish weeks and damn, am I happy to have a little down time. And by a little down time I mean I have a couple of free hours one night this week because I friend I was going to help with some stuff didn't return my call, relegating him to the doghouse but freeing me up to fingerbabble.

So what's been keeping me so busy?

1) More school. This time a class called Painting: Creating a Surface. It was perfect for me because I am still a little scared of / very much suck at painting, but there was high-level collage-type business, which I'm all over.

2) A friend who works at the Art Gallery asked me to gussy up as the Queen of Hearts for their Mad Hatters Tea Party. We looked at borrowing costumes from a local theatre company, but damn, costumes meant to be viewed from a stage are not so good up close. And by not so good I mean bad puffy waisted gathering, and dammit, I wanted to be a purty queen. So I decided to make it. And I say goddamn, it looked good. I look dorky, but it looks good.

Tragically I don't have any detail shots, hopefully some will roll in. The only thing I didn't make was the hoop skirt giving it the width at the bottom. That was borrowed from the theatre. The skirt is the same embroidered taffeta as the top, which is lace trimmed at the neck and arms and has mad cute heart buttons. The bustle and apron are taffeta with little gold ribbon knots, and the apron is trimmed with black beading. It's sort of scootched up in the photos, should be pulled down more in front. The corset is a rather lovely silk brocade. It's three layers thick for added stability, and, because I wasn't sure if I'd be able to get steel boning at Dressew, is boned with wide cable ties. That's right, I went hardware store Gigyver all over that shit! It worked really well, and saved a chunk of change.

The headpiece doesn't really show in those. The veil part shows a bit here, it's come of my face a bit though. Probably trying to escape. Unfortunately the photo makes me want to get a facelift.

The gloves and choker were total last minute additions, which I think lean a little towards Deadwood era madam, which, let's face it, is probably what this is going to morph into. Hallowe'en is so taken care of.

Hey, check it, Griffy agreed to model the hat! Totally adds to his Puss n' Boots appeal.

Anywhoo, that little sucker sat just over the top of the veil, which Griffy didn't model as veil + claw = sure disaster. It started it's life as a dollar store cookie cutter. See.... Gigyver!

So, that's a good deal of what's been tying me up. There's also that whole annoying job thing that both cuts in to and funds my ability to creatively dork out. Le sigh.

Oh, and yes I did use patterns, though they were modified pretty drastically. The bustle, apron and skirt are from Simplicity 2851, the corset and top are from Simplicty 9769, which for some reason isn't on the Simplicity website. The top is a chopped and de-volumed version of the nightgown thingy, and the corset has been modified to remove the busk and make a flat front.

So (or sew ... get it?), I haven't really been slacking. And I've been multitasking in GarageBand while writing this post, so the Podcast that should have been up weeks ago is almost ready.

Oh yeah, Mama's back.