Monday, December 29, 2008

This is the new year...




(bottom photo: vintage dress from Oh Leoluca on Etsy.com, middle and top photos: gleaned from my ever lovely sixties/seventies dressmaking/craft book collection)

And these are my inspirations...(sing it like Death Cab) I often hesitate to make my inspirations public because they are many and sometimes even I am surprised by what my end product turns out to be. So I don't want to mislead anyone else in the process. This means that my process is rather intuitive, and that I change my mind often. Well, let's put it this way: I often have a very specific impulse or desire about what I want to sew, it just takes me a while to nail it down and find it's proper manifestation in the physical world. This is just a little shout out to the current warm infatuation I feel regarding yellow and child-like cozy things.

That being said, there is a special (large) place in my heart for the handmade styles of decades gone by. Among the many things that draw me to the fifties and early sixties style of dress is greater emphasis on formality. People dressed up then. Women still wore dresses when they went out, with gloves and hats. Men wore button up shirts and ties with shiny shoes while they got sweaty on the dance floor. Regarding the seventies, something about elephant bells, long hair and earthy patterns in warm colors makes me feel great. About all three of these decades, there was still a significant amount of handmade clothing out there. To buy or to sew was a legitimate question, because the majority of mothers and grandmothers still had this skill set. It was like cooking. Everyone could do it to some extent and being able to sew one's own clothing or clothing for the family was not the novelty it has become today.

Of course the irony here is the disappearance of the ability to sew a wardrobe has given way to a newfound general appreciation of this once ubiquitous skill, thus allowing me to turn my primary artistic love into a business! So cheers to the fifties, sixties, seventies and 2009.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Greetings from the xmas zombie!


Welp, now that I have three weeks free of teaching child dance, I've successfully reverted to my 4pm to 4am winter hibernation schedule. I mean, if I'm going to be sewing in the dark creepy basement for hours anyway, why not do it when it's already nighttime, right?

Other exciting news: ETSY! I now have a teeny tiny online shop where you can purchase among other things, some of the dresses I post on the blog. I try to put something new in there every few days, so check back often! Plus, friends, if you've ever had a fantasy about something you'd like to me to make for you, please do not hesitate to put in a "private request" in the shop. I love custom projects :) If you're visiting my blog after seeing the Etsy shop, welcome! For me it's downstairs to dinner and then off to my sewing cave...

riotsiren.etsy.com or just click on any of the photos on the right and they will take you to the store :)

Happy Shopping!

Thursday, December 11, 2008

For the ladies


My favorite German wearing his birthday present (yes I made it, and it has earflaps, but he's tied them behind his head) and his new medieval teutonic beard. Keep looking at this picture. It just gets better the longer you contemplate it.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

December 9th 2008, Just Another Day


So I've been sickety sick sick sick this weekend. Good old lying in bed fever/ache and other less favorable symptom sick. And I have to be honest, xmas kind of gets me down. Plus, we are cleaning out the entire dusty basement this week for a party and my roommates had successfully NOT done their dishes until every single bowl and silverware element was molding on the counter, interspersed with nasty lunch tupperwares and gooey plastic bags that we are apparently going to wash and save. I then found out I had two LESS days to cough up some cash to pad my bank account for the next student loan withdrawl. Shortly following, I discovered that my German bank card is too scratched for me to tap my Euros and I forgot my pin number for the card that works.

There is a scene in My Own Private Idaho when after a whole series of trials and tribulations, River Phoenix is being asked by an Italian man to rip his jacket and shirt off in a hotel room. As he starts to do it, he becomes so overwhelmingly fed up with everything he begins flailing about, stomping, squealing, jumping, and eventually does a sort of backwards swan dive onto the hotel bed, falling immediately into a fit of epileptic narcolepsy. All day I have been doing this scene in my brain; watching him but pretending it's me. For about 50 percent aforementioned reasons and the rest indecipherable harbingers of doom and frustration.

Also: I did not make this dress, it was my grandma's. I just hemmed it.
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