Marine layers, geological layers, layers of clothing -- textural contrasts within: tight and heavy with airy and bulky over are the kinds of layers we see in fashion.
How many layers can there be??
Kimonos, layer after layer after layer.
The layers of the onion.
Jawbreakers have layers, and inside a pepper or anise seed. I can't be trusted with jawbreakers: I chew away at everything. Went to bed last night with severe pain in a crowned tooth: thought I had broken the tooth inside the crown, broken the crown, or worn through it (as I had done to another gold crown I'd had since my early 20s). I had gobbled away at (an undisclosed amount of) Good & Plenty: great cigarette substitutes and something to do to keep myself in one spot working. . . .
Yes, so I have a couple of dolman-sleeve sweaters, one a nice dusty rose angora sweater I bought on the street in Hong Kong years ago, earmarked for reuse for dolls due to some actual moth holes in the back; wouldn't it have been simple enough to do with it what I already had in mind, use it for doll clothes? Take a picture of it in its original shape and then duplicate it at 1/3 the size. But nooooo, why take the easy route? I figured that when I finished another more elaborate dolman project, a jacket-dress, I could make the sweater to wear under it.
"When I finished another more elaborate dolman . . . . project . . . ????" It has kicked my ass. Eighteen hours straight, finishing what I spent I don't know how many hours straight just making the embellished cloth, the altered fabric, and . . . . O.K. the inspiration was one from many many years ago, the design for the fabric, which I've been collecting labels for for forty years. The labels on this are not those I collected; those are set aside, probably in my old brocade sewing box.
A stronger inspiration, or a more recent one, is Bill Griffith saying through Zippy when Zippy visits Japan and finds his non-sequiturs to be most appropriate. At one point, he exclaims, "What's yours is mine and what's mine is labeled."
Last, then, another part of the label theme is, "O.K., so ask me who I'm wearing [just try it, I tell you, just try it]."
My leftover turkey gravy is about to boil over -- got to get something in my stomach and get back to finishing up this "elaborate dolman project."
added later more notes and I forgot to add "Idiocracy" to the inspirations:
More of these labels had been cut out of garments than I had anticipated, which added to work time considerably. Ideally, they would all be stitched together, one by one, to make a more fluid garment. Washing this garment will serve to do that somewhat. As it is, in the try-on, I see a lot of the iron on tape not completely melted to the fabrics.
I could have used glue and didn't, because I didn't want it to thicken or stiffen the garment too much. At the moment it looks like one of those Japanese men's butterfly vests from the Warlord era in Japan. Hmmmm . . . that may well have been a part of the inspiration, come to think of it. The other part of the inspiration has to be Harajuka (Harajuki??) Girl, which is Evelyn herself. What a gorgeous client she is.
Then there is also my love for patches on my HHH Jacket -- more like Girl Scout Badges than advertising as on race car drivers' jackets (which this has an odd resemblance to too, in spite of all the time I spent arranging and rearranging those labels by value and color). In reference to it looking like the race car drivers' sponsors logos on their clothing, there is also, just for a bit of "The Future is Now," the fabric worn by everyone in "Idiocracy." Hopefully we are emerging from that future period just this year . . . .
I remember when it started, that branding, in the late 1970s, early 80s. I spent most of the 1980s in Taiwan, so I was able to maintain a certain purity of spirit in regard to labels. Many of them were made there anyway and more recent arrivals on the island would exclaim, "Oh, that's a Liz Claiborne" or such to my mumbled, "Oh, yes, it is. Is that a brand that people know?"
Now people speak of branding themselves, making themselves marketable by being a brand, a type, more or less: I first noticed it on "I Know My Kid's a Star!" when one episode of the show was devoted to the children's seeking to work out their "branding."
I don't know. The Sepulveda Girls and I just call ourselves Rancho de Doble (also Rancho D Doble) for our clothing brand: special clothes for the fit and big breasted woman that won't make you look dumpy: built like that, you have two choices, button it up to the neck and look dumpy so that women won't glare at you and men won't talk to your breasts, or tighten up the top and lower the neckline to compensate for Big Girls' Blouse Syndrome and just let men talk to your breasts and women sneer with their eyes, in sidelong glances.
That's different too: a whole generation of females, several generations it seems, go out and buy two focal points for men to talk to -- and they don't seem to get tired of it.
I saw an article some time this year that correlated high IQ with big breasts: maybe that's the difference in the attitude toward men talking to your chest. If you have something to say, you'd like someone to focus on your eyes and mouth for a little bit.
branding . . .
let's get back to that as it applies to clothing labels. When it first started, I laughed long and loud on reading an article about a man going to play tennis and getting all the stuff he was supposed to have, each with a label on them. To paraphrase from a thirty year old memory, he said he put on his tennis whites, his Adidas shoes, his white branded Nike tennis shirt, his (op?) white shorts and his (brand name) Titanium tennis racket and by the time he arrived on the court he was a walking identity crisis.
aw gee, where's my saved draft?? this one disappeared too -- in highlighting to change the font -- and then saved again just as I was to post this, so the original text ha desaparecido.
If it ain't one thing . . . it's anotha.
Also, bummah, we have been requested not to show any of our pieces until after the whole project -- all of the challenges -- is done.
Ay yi yi -- very unstable intenet explorer. It is indeed time to reinstall windows (aka "Vista") -- once again.
Everything I just typed about the new session of Project Dollway disappeared when I went to change the size and color of the font. I'm safer with html on my own with i.e. and/or Vista in this condition.
Don't know if reinstalling fixes registry errors. Tired of buying this program, that program, and the other for fixes, and damnably tired of wasting so much time because of errors that need fixes. It seems that every time I sit down at the computer, it is a fix-me session with Vista.
Mike Gallagher asked this morning, "Where did John McCain go?"
"Puppets of the vast conservative conspiracy" is the only explanation for inexplicable behavior, answer for those unanswerable questions.
Sarah Palin feels she had been "set up by the Bush people." "These aren't my clothes. They're going back. I'll go back to wearing clothes from my favorite consignment store in Anchorage, Alaska."
Puppets. One must never allow others that amount of control over oneself.
". . . set up by the Bush people ?? They are the vast conservative conspiracy.
. . . so in mulling over why it was that the McCain-Palin statements seemed so oddly garbled and at others together and why it was that McCain looked like he wasn't "really" there in introducing his running mate, and why it was that she showed up out of the land of the two-day night, it came to me, the simplest answer of oll: these are "puppets of the vast right wing conspiracy." How else could they be so disengaged, so articulate on scripted speeches, and so garbled on unscripted responses in which they have talking points? Why else would a dresser go shopping at Nieman-Marcus and Saks for a VP candidate arriving out of the blue?
Puppets.
Somewhere along the campaign trail someone got to McCain where the Vietnamese never could-- using patriotism as a lure to go along with it all?
30 October: . . . and you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and . . . . what was that other sow proverb that came to me last night . . . ? you don't want to buy a pig in a poke? No, something with sow.
31 October: No, it wasn't a sow, it was the Biblical and Aesop Fable phrase "Pearls before Swine." I think the Aesop Fable referred to a jewel in a chicken yard.
and Two:
This has got to be the weirdest run-up to an election I have ever seen, weird being a much lighter form of the run - up to the 1968 election, with the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by a person "who blew a hole in history," and the Democratic National Convention. All that was "unreal:" so mind- and soul-shattering that a denial of the reality of it all was a necessity.
This is all pretty unreal, surreal, as well, as if the wheels of change in the abstract realms of the macrocosm were turning and somehow hit an oil slick or a patch of ice or a defect in the road and, when they came out of their skid, their spin, regained control of the wheel, they skipped a patch in time and came out out of sync. Barak Obama is the right person at the wrong time; Sara Palin is absolutely adorable and absolutely the wrong person in the wrong place, and could it be the right time? -- for the Democratic Candidates perhaps. Then we have Joe Biden, in a practical manner of speaking, predicting an attack on the U.S. when/because Obama was elected, "to test him." If I read that in the spirit it was meant, it makes sense. If I just look at it and listen to it in the ponderous tone it was spoken, I am horrified. On the other side, we have McCain and Palin working at cross purposes and McCain doing a pretty good George Bush impersonation in Pennsylvania -- "The Democrats said some pretty mean things about you guys. . . and I couldn't agree with you more . . . ," followed by some garbled recovery similar in sense and delivery to "One time shame on you and you can't fool me two times," or whatever that infamous line was, and Sara Palin herself supplies the comedy material for Saturday Night Live: her lines write themselves. The comedy sketches are taken word-for-word from her actual public statements. It's like a huge cosmic cloudburst descended on all of them, affecting them with magic Tourette's dust.
Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are getting their ducks in a row for contesting the election, results each on different grounds. McCain's desultory performance while campaigning, and somehow coasting on in to the nomination, and then proceeding to carry on in the same way, as if . . . dare I say it . . . ??? I do dare, yet I don't know how to frame it -- carrying on a non-campaign. If I add the look on his face when his running mate was announced, perhaps I will be able to frame it -- he looked as if she had been foisted on him by higher-ups: uncomfortable with something of the deer in the headlights look behind what looked to me to be obvious embarrassment. Then carrying on a campaign of pot-shots . . . . Is he certain that the powers that be will see to it that he is elected no matter what he does or doesn't do?? There, I said it.
All I know is that I am so tired of the two-party system and much of my voting life spent voting for the one I dislike least that I am ready to break with it. Actually, when reading polls earlier on, after Sara Palin joined the Republican ticket, both candidates were sliding in the polls and the area unaccounted for, the subtext, was growing in size. I think I'm not alone in my thorough disappointment with a two-party system.
I said to my husband, "When you order a beer here, you have an infinite number of choices, a dizzying and confusing number of choices, but when you go to vote, you only have two choices. When you order a beer in Taiwan, you just order a beer: there's only one kind*: Taiwan Beer, but when you go to vote, a huge number of people from all quarters, are running,"
Well, it's tv time and time for me to go ponder the huge array of Satellite Channels available to me . . . .
*[which is not wholly true; however, if you order 'a beer' you will get a Taiwan Beer; others you would specify if you know them to be on the recent import list. There's probably a bunch of Budweiser there now, maybe Marlboros too, to accompany the fighter jet sales.]
oh, and p.s. it does have to do with dolls; I'm just not ready to show
I posted a long response to a blog post about abusive treatment of child in the NY AG Place, which is a blog entry from March 2007, Fake, Out! by One of Those Moms blogging here, the horrifying story of taking a six-year-old child into the AG Place in New York where the child was subjected to a lesson in marketing through intimidation dosed out by not only the shopgirl but another parent waiting in line, wanting to get something, other than opportunities to spend more money, for all the money she'd spent on the doll, so she took it out in self esteem, which she gleefully sucked from the child.
I have pasted my response below, as I have more formatting choices here, on my own blog page, and because the response is very long, pulling in a lot of doll issues
(note: Big Red reminds you again and once again: the word issues generally refers to topics of discussion; it otherwise refers to bodily fluids or solids coming out of your body; they can also be, formally, children, as in "God has not granted the king male issue." The word issue has become devolved into a prissy euphemism for problems; if a person is said to have issues, he/she has problems indeed! I've seen children with issues: leaking from every possible orifice at once, eyes, nose, mouth, and no need to look further), it became a culmination of a lot of thoughts about those particular dolls, marketing, and "branding," another oh-so millenial word -- it was even applied to child actors on "I Know My Kid's a Star" as one of the challenges to the parent and child teams . . . .
The blog post to which I am responding, here instead of there, is a truly outrageous story about those merchandising geniuses behind the American Girl doll (what a neanderthal: see photos here of comparison of Battat Our Generation to AG body). The post has got a bunch of us hot under the collar, "us" being people who see the whole AG thing as a very nice idea at one time that has run way out of control in terms of people falling all over themselves to spend more than their neighbors on those tubby little things.
I think I feel about the same way toward the AG line as I initially did about Barbies: my only interest in having one would have been to do rude things with her.
My response:
Recent American Girl Dolls have been made for people with more money than imagination, and your little girl Etta should be proud that her doll is indeed a real doll (as opposed to a "real" doll), as her doll was bought and paid for honestly, the hard way and invested with the imagination of a little girl who chose her own doll to create an identity and backstory for on her own.
She has just been introduced to the capitalistic bullying that is a component of artificial exclusivity, which is based on marketing rather than on true value. If one has to be made to think something is exclusive, it isn't; exclusivity comes from the innate value of something recognized by someone with a mind of his/her own, which definition, Etta's doll is the exclusive one, not the clone dolls whose features and hairstyles and clothes are all picked out from catalogs ". . . and they all look just the same." Many people find great comfort in uniformity; "exclusive" neighborhoods exist, and in those one must have a garage door the same color as all the neighbors' and may not leave that garage door open except for certain hours during the day . . . . The list goes on.
Check out this little 18" beauty, slimmer and more elegant than the portly AGs Madame Alexander: Real Dolls for Real Girls: this is an eBay listing for one of the best 18" play dolls available, made by the oldest continuously-operating doll company in the United States (we might even say in the Americas). Not many people know that tradtionally, all well-brought up little girls had a Madame Alexander Doll; the others were considered newcomers, imitations, and for the blue collar masses.
Please pardon me for saying these things -- I am not sniffing at "the blue collar masses," just those people who make snide comments like, "Hmmpf, probably couldn't afford one of these." Nouveau-riche Biedermeiers who "know the price of everything and the value of nothing" and don't think their blue collars are sticking out all over the place.
Nothing wrong with blue collar people: I love them. I just have a problem with people who go about thinking that a financial windfall turns their blue collars to blue blood and who then turn on the good people from whence they came, as did the phony woman who directed her disdain at a six-year-old for practice.
This post affords me the opportunity to point out that "traditionally, all well-brought up little girls have a Madame Alexander," as it is something one does not say in public, for fear of making someone who doesn't know that feel bad. It is, however, something that should be made public to counter the insidious "Hmmpf, probably can't afford one of these [monstrosities]" mentality."
The Alexander Dolls were always expensive and were also not heavily marketed. One was not paying for the marketing but for the quality of the doll.
Today, Madame Alexander has produced some lovely little playdolls, and the 18" girl doll is one of those; again, retail, they are not inexpensive, although you can get them reasonably on eBay: they've been discontinued. Too few people today trust their own taste and judgement in the face of what marketers tell them, and marketers tell them that the American Girl is the doll to have. Gak.
I bought a couple of Our Generation Dolls by Battat (what your daughter has?) to have one the same size as the AG. I would not think of spending that amount of money on a mass-produced piece of marketing genius. I would not have bought a doll that size at all, however, were it not for the people standing in line with fistfulls of money for the AG. I needed a fitting model so that I could test out clothes to make sure they fit the AG. I sell on eBay.
Since that time, however, I have also come to realize that many of the AG buyers can't make a move unless it is an official AG one, as in purchasing clothing. Grandmothers, however, are another story. The best thing to come out of the run on the AG dolls is that, because the clothing is so expensive, moms, aunts, and grandmothers are sewing doll clothes again, as we did in the past.
I hope that your little girl's doll will find herself outfitted with the nicest, most beautiful, hand made clothes -- Doll Couture, my dear, not OTR (gasp!)!
(one more note, another lovely 18" doll are the Magic Attic Club dolls, who also have books with their stories in them and have a much nicer face and body than the AG type: they are slimmer and their head is more in proportion to a fifth-grader's body. The AG, at at 4-1/2' or 54" tall, about the size of a 5th-grader, would be a 1:3 scale doll, which means her waist would be a whopping . . . well, a picture is worth a thousand words. On this page here, scroll down to see photos of body comparisons between the West Coast Kids (more expensive than the American Girl, so "Hmmmph" to the snide motha in line, feeling so foolish wondering why she was there and why she had spent all that money when a nicer-looking doll that wasn't a "real" doll was within range of a child's savings that she just had to snipe), Magic Attic Dolls, and what can be plainly seen to be rather Neanderthalish – not even that more like a sack-butt ape -- an American Girl doll.
Plus, the older Magic Attic Dolls have click-n-bend knees, so much more fun for posing.
I'd love a West Coast Kid, but for now, I am happy with Mattel's 16" jointed Teen Trends Dolls.
As to my most expensive doll, it is a Dollfie Dream -- I couldn't afford a Super Dollfie, the same size, so I got the DD for an eighth the cost and painted and wigged her myself; her body was what got me in the first place -- not a doll for children. The 22" Super Dollfies go for $1200 and up (so "Hmmmpfh" once again) and there is an exclusivity to those: they have adoption ceremonies in Japan and special parties for SD owners, much more exclusive than the AG "do"s in malls at the customer's expense. Sorry, I just had to put exclusivity into perspective here, back to that exclulslive club of blue collar nouveau-riche price of everything and value of nothing lot.
Too bad your little girl didn't have at the tip of her tongue for the sniper, "Yes, a fool and his money are soon parted.," with a sweet smile. Hey anybody, how about an anti-merchandising movie in which the cool kids all have things that are unique and the plastic fantastics all have the same thing and try to bully the other kids into wanting it too . . . . (The American Girl Movie is coming out soon).
This is so long that I'm going to have to move it on over to my blogspot here, which I opened while participating in Project Dollway online last Fall and Winter.
I really must stop here; I went to find out what kind of doll hair AG uses and stumbled across this looking to see what kind of synthetic hair American Girl Dolls have, and so far all I have found is "There hair is made out of really good fake hair (it's suposed to be made out of the best kind of fake hair that there is. Or so I've heard)." Ahhh the power of marketing.
It seems to be just plain old nylon, which is used on most dolls. Saran, which I love, has a weight to it like real hair and is smooth and shiny, like a waterfall of hair. My Fleur Delacourt doll (customized Susie from RanD or R&D doll makers) has beautiful white saran hair that flows like a waterfall down her back, just as it was described in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Last, there is Kanekalon hair, a "wrinkly" and a smooth, which I use for rooting dolls' hair.
Actually I get hair from all sorts of places, as long as it looks and feels good, I trust my own judgement (and some background research before I try it).
Now, that all said, I suggest that you, mom, hold a nice Dolly Tea Party at your home. Spend some time collecting small dishes for the dolls and the girls, and they don't have to match and really shouldn't be Spiderman Paper Party Plates or any such brand mass-production nonsense -- nice little ceramic and porcelain items. If you have silver or silver plate, use that too. Prepare some fun finger sandwiches, fancy frilly cookies, hit the bakery for some special nice cookies -- more adult than child cookies. Aim for grown up girls' sophistication.
Embroidered or appliqued napkins, white linen or cotton w, embroidery or applique (shabby chic stuff). Flowers on the table, and a bunch of books that star dolls, like Dare Wright's Books, Edith The Lonely Doll and others; maybe a Magic Attic Book. Maybe a photo album of your daughter's doll visiting different places . . . go one-up on all the bs.
Have the girls do a little sewing project for their dolls.
Think old-fashioned, real, personal, natural, sunlight and girly.
Be sure to invite your daughter's friend with the AG doll -- the beauty behind thio ugly experience is that the brand of doll made no difference to the girls; it was simply the shared love between them and for their dolls.
See if you can round up four to six girls for (weak) tea with milk.
Last, the reason I was researching exactly what kind of hair the AG dolls have is that I put together a booklet on Doll Hair care plus some clean up tips as I saw a lot of people looking to give old Barbies new life. Then I saw the outrageous exclusivity "It can only be done here" nonsense of the American Girl Dolls, who seem to actually have rather weak heads, heads that damage easily: I have seen numerous people needing replacement heads for them and trying to find a less costly fix for the repair process which entails shipping to the hospital and back, at least a six-week stay, and the purchase of a whole new whatever -- head in this case -- rather than a repair. Add to that an outrageous price tag for repair of something that shouldn't damage easily. For the "Hmmpfh she probably couldn't afford it" types with more money than taste or tact, so what. A sucker is born every minute.
Hoever, little girls see other little girls who become infected with that virus and then begin to desire the dolls too -- for no reason other than "so and so has one and [boasts] about it." Parents then pony up for one and then grandma wants to buy some outfits and sees the price and decides to sew some and then is desperately looking for a "cheap used" one . . . and on and on.
Seeing those nice people looking for help led me into checking out the AG dolls to see if all I knew about restoring vinyl and/or resin dolls and their hair would be applicable; if it were, I could help a lot of people save money and gain knowledge and power and at the same time get a small amount of the money swirling around these dolls in return for expertise.
My doll spa instructions have been going well on eBay, and they come with free technical support (from me) as well as updates, and today I was double checking the AG hair. I've experimented on two Battat dolls and their hair is gorgeous.
The first doll I ever restored hair on was a Barbie I found across the alley from a nursery school, trashed with about six other dolls who had all been lying there in the rain and wind and sun for a while. If I can restore that, I can restore anything, I figured.
So "one of those horrible moms," send me an email, contact me through my blog here on blogger.com
I might be able to come up with something nice for your girl and her doll, would love to, actually, to welcome her to the larger community of real doll people, a community that is so exclusive that no one even knows it is.
Well, I've been MIA for a while here, holed up with Inuyasha, Kagome, Naruto, Jiraiya, Tsunade and what's the name of her pig?, Fuu, Jin, rolling around on the bed working on this and that, interspersed with long hours at the computer trying to get Vista and Java to work together to run the program where I do online work, every day (I do not exaggerate) from 1 April through this last weekend. Most of the time -- or was that when I started working with Microsoft Tech Support? yes I think so. I'm certifying myself now after all the paces the guys put me through -- and I am thankful for those paces: I learned A LOT. I also have only the highest praise for the gentlemen who helped me through a huge problem, never losing patience and helping me to keep my own patience through a long process that resulted in a fix. A fix I promptly messed up trying to get rid of this phantom user "Ronnnie" who keeps sharing my name. I guess he's the guy at acer who programmed the computer in the factory.
I am well on my way to getting rid of him, although in the process of taking ownership of all his files I did some security resets, one of which i realized would cause a disaster if completed, and backed out of it. I am now going file by file to fix all the files that got closed as read-only, causing some glitches. At least I know what I did.
I learned so much from those two Chinese guys in tech support that I can't even say how much I appreciate it: they were so generous with their information and intelligent with figuring out what it was I was trying to say. Tech support here often can't see the forest for the trees and I get help telling me to do something that was a long ago been-there-done-that for me, or giving me help on something I mentioned was working fine. These guys were doing this in a second language and managed to get the relevant points our of my, uh, you know, long-winded explanations, in which I include every detail in case any one of them is important and then get sidetracked onto a humorous word association . . . .
I was skeptical when about 25 years ago a friend in Taiwan passed on some of the conventional wisdom there: that the 19th Century belonged to the British, the 20th belonged to the Americans, and the 21st would belong to China/Asia.
Take a look around folks. Any lingering doubts I may have had vanished when I saw China's president boots on the ground (running shoes, actually) in Szechuan days after the earthquake, meeting with people even in, gasp, the Arena! It was such a painful contrast to our president's delayed and distant response to Hurricane Katrina that once again, I wept.
Sheesh, now I have some nice silk to work with; somehow that "traditional fabric" bit escaped me, when I finally settled on an Erté-inspired design, which was quite a nice udate of Erté's design (though straight-up Erté would be something I would myself wear).
One comment on the dress was that it would be uncomfortable to sit on the knot. Indeed, it would be; the dress is designed so that, to sit -- again, I was thinking "Hollywood Bowl," "Academy Awards," "Theatrical Performance" -- the knot can easily be brought up to the waist and slipped back down below the hip when standing or walking, or even be tied at the waist -- front or back.
It was the tying and convertability aspect of Erté's design that had stayed with me in this one, the simplicity of construction combined with alternative ways to wear a garment, depending on the wearer's own taste. This was the way I designed it, the way I had in mind for it to be worn -- diagonally crossing and knotted in back.
For best effect in this 1:4 scale, the garment really should have been made of a lighter fabric, a well-washed silk. All through Project Dollway I worked only in fabrics I had at hand (since I have a lot of them at hand, though I can't always locate what I have in mind in time for a competition*).
The project was to design for a 16" Robert Tonner doll, and who but Roxy Hart should step forward to be the model for this design?
Unfortunately, even with this great Deco-inspired model, in the end, besides having made the synthetic fabric faux pas, I had thought the project suggested moving away from Erté to 21st Century Erté-inspired designs that didn't necessarily need to derive from one specific design of his, and the one I submitted was not considered especially relevant or referential to his work, though I had researched, researched, researched, drawn, wrapped, draped, and internalized the designs to the point that this one emerged on its own, growing out of looking at a sketch sideways, at eye level -- my sketchbook lying open to the last page I'd been working on when I laid my head down to sleep -- as I went through the process of emerging from sleep and joining the waking world the nest morning.
Inspired it was, indeed, but derivative enough it wasn't.
*I'm still hunting for my gold lamé. I did make a trip to JoAnne's Fabrics for lamé for this competition and was aghast to find that all they had was a stiff, lightweight metallic organza of some sort, not the liquid gold I had had in mind and know I have around somewhere. Getting ready to dump the mother lode of fabrics out on the bed to see where it has slipped away to, as I have exhausted all other possible places it could be after having pawed through the Mother Lode on numerous occasions in my search).
I liked Laraine's and Dot's of the At-Home Designers' work
Alexandra's comments on mine:
DESIGN TEN: Delightful little 20s inspired mini dress. It is elegant with touches of razzle-dazzle. This dress would be perfect for Marilyn Monroe in SOME LIKE IT HOT. The stole simply does not work and is unnecessary and distracting. A delightful solution but probably needs more to be a centerpiece outfit in the Fashion Royalty line.
DESIGN THIRTEEN: A charming little dress that could easily be made from a moonbeam. Lovely silhouette and the cut and detail of the skirt are lovely. All in all, a very flattering dress. Again, probably needs more to be a centerpiece dress in the Fashion Royalty line.
All I ever wanted to be was an Artist and a teacher. I'm lucky: that's what I am. I am a watercolor painter with a Master of Arts Degree in Fine Art, a B.A. in Art Education with a minor in English, and I have exhibited internationally in competitions, group exhibits, and one-man shows (and I still prefer "he" to "they" as the general first-person pronoun). I taught ESL to adults for over 20 years and have had one-man shows in Taipei, Los Angeles, and New York. Early on, I was thrilled to do an Album Cover for Warner Brothers (a or the Fugs Album).
I sell on eBay, under the same ID: books, dolls, art and art dolls.
