Sempstress

It’s official. I finally got my diploma in the mail today. I know that sounds kinda shadey, right, but I did the online thing and getting a diploma through the mail, though lacking a certain pomp and circumstance, is much more official than getting said degree from a Cracker-Jack(tm) box. It’s a Bachelor of Science (with Honors, conveyed so officially that they must be capitalized), and my area of concentration was fashion and business. It’s a real degree, from a real (read: accredited) college, and I worked really hard for it. But I enjoyed it. In fact, I enjoyed college so much that I managed to stretch it out for 16 years. Alas, all good things must come to an end, and THANKFREAKINGODI’MDONE!

In other news, because I can’t seem to follow directions and do things in order, I’ve finally started the process to petition for my AAS in Fashion Design, and I’ve joined the Society for the Preservation of Run-On Sentences(tm).

The world is full of straw hats. They are almost never the size and shape you’d like them to be. (That’s a known effect of the Law of Universal Irony, along with how the thread already in the needle is never a color that will work for your current purposes.) Fortunately, reblocking a straw hat is pretty gosh darned simple. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes, you need a knicker, or some other relatively non-denominational short, slightly poofy pantlet with a cuff at the bottom, and you don’t have time to make it from scratch. (Perhaps, for example, you have a cast of 37, and 9 or 11 of them are kids in Fagin’s gang and most of them are too short for proper long pants… Hey, it can happen!) Here’s the cheater’s method: Read the rest of this entry »

File this one under “possibly useful to some one, at some time, somehow”: this is a series of pictures of corsets I’ve made over the last several years. Each one shows me standing in profile, next to my dress dummy. This makes the changes in my shape imposed by each corset fairly obvious, and the pictures all together give you a pretty good idea what different types of boning and styles of corset can do for a girl. Read the rest of this entry »

I did fittings for kids in Oliver! last night. I survived, and no one cried (not even me.) Oh, right, there are 17 children in the cast. And they each play at least two parts, which require costume changes. I’m not good with kids, for much the same reason that I have no future in particle physics: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s pretty again! Yay! I like pretty…..

My apologies to anyone who was trying to read anything while I was bouncing through themes. That was probably ugly.

I just upgraded my wordpress install, and reverted to the most standard of standard themes. I’m hoping this will fix the issues people have mentioned about browser problems, etc. Please expect to see a new theme in the next couple of days – I miss my tagcloud and image frames already!

…but only if you really like pink.

Mom and I were in Milwaukee a couple weeks ago, and we stopped in to a fab little yarn shop called Just 4 Ewe. The owner, Jan, enthusiastically shared enough fiber tips and tricks to send my brain into complete and happy overload (while her dog, just as enthusiastically, kept trying to lick my feet). If you’re in the area, I strongly recommend the shop – but think carefully about your choice of shoes. Anyway, one of the things Jan recommended was using Wilton’s Past Food Colors to dye fiber. She showed me roving in a series of joyful pinks.

Now, I have some sort of crafter’s disorder that causes me to believe in absolutely every trick I see, read, or hear. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m costuming Oliver! for Wheaton Drama. Yes, some one is letting me, the girl who believes that leash laws should apply to children, costume a show where half the cast isn’t old enough to drink. That’s remarkable, so I’m remarking upon it. The show has lots of fun arts&crafts projects: some knitting, some dying, some distressing (ideally of the costumes, rather than the costumer). The exciting thing, I think, is that there are a lot of very good-natured folks helping me knit up scads of scarves and maybe some hats and things to be used in the show. After the show, we’ll be donating all of these to Snug Hugs for Kids. I think that’s pretty cool. Anyone out there want to knit a scarf for the show? ;)

In other news, it’s just dawned on me that this is a blog, rather than my old geriatric set of static html pages, and I can write things without actually having a full article in mind. Le sigh….. I feel like a dinosaur sometimes. All this technology has gotten totally out of hand, I tell you!

All of the old Millinery articles are back online. (My super-cool html-to-WordPress script didn’t work as well as I thought, and only a third of the millinery stuff imported properly.) You can find them through the tag cloud, under Millinery or Hat Making. I’m going to try to get Ye Olde Dial-a-Dress up and running next.