Most fun thing to ever happen to embroidery: that rat’s nest of tangly-tangly threads on the back of your work that manage to ensnare your…
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So I’ve been doing a little embroidery lately (which is an odd statement from She Who Doth Not Embroider, but it’s true). And then…. loopies.…
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Someday, I would like to costume an insanely popular movie so that I can pull out all my dirty tricks to make fanciness – and…
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I love covered buttons. They just make a design look so pulled-together. The problem is that that directions on the back of the covered button kits are a little bit less than useful. They’re actually kinda bad. So for anyone who has ever wondered, here’s the sitch….
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It’s a sad commentary about my life that I am sitting here in mid-December still trying to finish writing all the demos I did photo work for during 1776 last spring. Life’s been a little crazy lately. Great/fantastic/amazing (grantasticazing?), but crazy. Anyhoo… One of life’s great mysteries seems to be “How do you alter a hat?” I’ve talked about straws, which are basically a “just add water” operation. Reblocking felts is slightly more dangerous exciting, because you get to play with steam. Ready?
Sometimes, in theater, you need a specific period shoe and you don’t have the time to order it from the internet, the money to order it from the internet, or an actor who wears a size you can order from the internet. (In this case, it was an “all of the above” scenario – I had a Benjamin Franklin who wore something like a 13EEE. This is hard enough to find in a modern shoe at community theater prices. As for replicas, you can forget it!) This is not a demo that will show you how to make an exact replica. It’s more of an act of desperation, which might possibly inspire others to do a better job than I did. ;) I just needed something good enough for stage at the “this ain’t broadway, sweetheart” level.
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So there’s always that scene in midieval movies where the heroine is seen romping around a field with a wreath of real live flowers on her head, and maybe there’s someone shown doing some totally random bit of jiggery-pokery that effortlessly causes flowers to form into a neat little chain. These scenes annoy me. I’ve tried everything I can think of to make flowers turn into neato little wreaths and chains — braiding, twisting, weird-pokey-stem-through-stem things, everything. And it never works. So I end up buying a dried flower wreath at faire. Well, no more…
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I needed 25 Colonial-looking vests for 1776. Because I wasn’t sure that I’d get round to making a coat for everyone, I wanted vests that weren’t faked out in the back, and I needed them to have structure and to be long enough to cover the obviously modern fly fronts on the britches I was making them. Now, you can’t just trot off to the Goodwill and buy a real live Colonial vest. But you can pull off something passable, if you believe that that there are, in fact, user-serviceable parts inside of a jacket….
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So, I took a few hours break from my current bout of insane workaholism the other day and did a little beading. This is what programming does to me: my mind goes from being a marvelous realm of creative joy to being a twisted up little thing that can only think in terms of methodology and function. Hurts my soul a little, not gonna lie, but it’s quite useful to those who employ me. Also, it makes me say hopelessly silly things like “How about a small scale mockup of Eleventh century German multi-needle beadwork on 1/4th inch wide organdy ribbon?” I’m fairly convinced I would not be doing this if I were in my right mind. Darn you, temporary left-brain dominance! Here’s the method I used…
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I’m a huge fan of shoe roses (aka, “shoe hoo-ha-s”, “shoe hooters”, “shoe dec”, etc). Whatever you want to call the silly little things, I love them. Seriously, little hats for shoes? Tee! Put me in, coach! They just make me giggle… If you need to period-up a shoe with a strap across the foot (like a mary jane or t-strap style dance shoe), here’s a quick and dirty way to build a shoe rose that is relatively actor-proof…
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