I am all totally done with the pin. Finito! es concluido! готов! And I have to say, I knew I was all in love with random beaded objects before, but now? Now I’m ready to buy up beads by the pound in no fewer than eleven silver-lined colors of the known spectrum.

I can’t look at anything comprised of more than two colors without visualizing it in a majestic BEADED iteration: motel signs, paperclips, my sewing machine, the cats, whatever. I want a glittering royal blue bowl of neon orange beaded cheez puffs as a Thanksgiving Centerpiece; I want a  beaded multi-color portrait of the sign for the Towne Manor Motel in Akron, Ohio; I want beaded arm cuffs of all my tattoos to wear instead of a long-sleeved jacket when it gets chilly. I’m going a little nuts with it–but going nuts is one of my favorite things to do, anyway.

On the other hand, I miss sewing. I cut out the yellow gingham and some white cotton underlining for the Anna Sui knockoff yesterday, and while it didn’t whip up into total perfection or anything? It did feel familiar and good to be in front of the sewing machine again. It’s still going to take some fudging, because I’m not sure what I’m doing and all, but progress is being made at least. I’m a pretty dedicated clothes horse these days, so I can’t spend all my time beading snack foods and neon signs.

And fyi, this ‘pin and many others will be auctioned off Friday, May 29 at the Pinhook in downtown Durham as part of Troika’s annual fundraiser.

So I’m doing the Pin Projekt again this year, and now more than ever, I am aware of how much I like stuff. Bright colors, shiny textures, quirky shapes, hidden treasures, infinite detail, sunshine and buttercups, raspberry filled and sugar coated, more, More, MORE! I am so in love with stuff that it’s a wonder I can find the time to wash my hair once a week. It is no wonder, then, that I have confirmed my love for Liza Lou by mimicking her meditative beaded style: that’s what I’m doing to the pin this year. It’s turned out to be a remarkably satisfying medium, because while heaven knows I love the knick-knacks and baubles and shiny details, I can also appreciate the minimalist touch.

Like this totally lovely Kline Necklace from Persimmon Jewelry. This is the kind of thing that can call out to me as sonorously as a lime green bakelite ice-block necklace, but it’s a little more subtle. The tone is there and the pitch exact, but the equalizer’s set to a more nuanced ear, if you will. I think I’ve been working under the “more is more” guise for a while now, and it’s just sort of occurred to me that subtlety could be afforded in a multiplicitous* way, like how Liza Lou does with her millions of blades of beaded grass. So I can have my millions of facets and be subtle all at the same time! I love it! And thanks for the good word, Grosgrain!

*dude, I know this is not a word, even according to the damn encyclopedic OED, but it sounds better in my Word Pony of a brain than (the admittedly rare, if not obsolete) multiplicious. I WANT IT.

The pin is coming together much better than I had hoped, and while my lower back is not happy with me having crouched over a desktop for many hours this weekend, it’s making me want to pursue this method of ornamentation in a major way. I’ve been really focused on sewing the last couple years, and while I’m getting better and I have been missing it a lot these last few weeks, there’s some aspect of my Mondo Craftiness that isn’t been satiated quite satisfactorily with the needle and thread. I think I’ve always wanted to be able to draw, and sewing just doesn’t really approach that method–which is why I’m such a nerd for rubber stamps and embroidery floss and, thanks to jumping into something completely new for me, beads. Although I stand by the goodness in my original of sewing the beads onto a fitted shell for the pin, that method was SO not working; which is okay, because I really just jumped into doing it totally blind and had no real method figured out for making beady progress or gauging the appropriateness of my method-of-sorts till I’d already invested a healthy number of hours into it. Having started off with that, though, I feel pretty good about getting into other projects of sewing bugles onto fabric. Kind of how I feel comfortable playing around with the excess in a sleeve cap, turning it into darts or tucks or pleats or whatever, because of that time I just flew by the seat of my crafty-pants and half made it up as I went along.

I tell Beck all the time that she’s got these great instincts, but I think I overlook that I have some pretty good instincts too. I just need to be more open and nurturing of them.

I know! You’re here for me to talk about shoes today! Well let’s get up on it, then.

So it’s hardly breaking news that I’m all crazy for the shoes. I scour the interwebs for ridiculous amounts of time in search of deals, images, nostalgic waxings and general opinions of typically snootier and/or funkier brands ‘n’ styles. So in honor of myself, basically, I’m going to start talk, talk, talking about some of my own experiences. Which brands are crazy expensive but actually worth it; what I’m currently stalking for real v. for pretend; whether or not you can wear four-inch sandals with tights in the winter; brand generalizations based on my having actually tried out more than one style; that sort of thing. I do write reviews of shoes I own on places like shoes-dot-com, endless/amazon, zappos, et cetera, but sometimes, in reading reviews of shoes that I don’t have and am curious about, I am less than satisfied with what other folks have had to say. It’s like I really just want myself to have written all about it already, so I’m basically just doing that. And instead of blathering on about what “that” is GOING to be, let me start blathering on WITH IT.

Have you ever seen something so perfectly embodying a modern-day Wilma Flintstone? This is a decadent pair of Marsells, an über fancy Italian brand that no doubt appeals to the upper upper crust of trust fund kids that like Fluevogs, but don’t think them expensive enough for their lifestyle. They’re hard to come by and even rarer seen out in the wild, although in that latter respect my co-workers are obliviously lucky. I picked these up at yoox, which is probably the most reliable place I can count on (and recommend) to find a pair. They were very much marked down, although still close to c-note, and while I hadn’t exactly been stalking this pair and I wasn’t sure about that beige-tinted grey color *or* the ankle-ties? I figured I could always return ‘em. Chances to score this kind of fantasmagoria aren’t too common so I went for the gusto. And good gravy, am I ever glad. These pups are stellar: they’re funky, they’re chunky, they’re pretty comfortable as far as fancy shoes go, they’re made within an inch of staying here on the planet and not ascending into Valhalla, and they’re MINE. MMMMMINE! I say they fit pretty true-to-size: a euro 40 is a good 9-9.5 ‘Merican and the width is a pretty good medium. They’re not padded, and my front ball-of-foot takes a bit more pressure than she likes if I wear them out all day, and the heel counter is pretty average (which, actually, is just a hair big for me). These are a great neutral color that doesn’t match my skintone (why I just can’t dig on that taupe-beige-nude phenom) and they’re light without being white (which … no, I just can’t wear white shoes without significant presence of other colors, like black and yellow). Plus I’m all about mixing grey into my funky color combos, and it works with pretty much every neutral shade you can throw at it. Black? it’s like a snack! Brown? let’s go to town! Taupe? it sure can cope! Uh, Navy? you know it, baby! So: yes. Grey is A-OK.

The Rehash:

Brand: Marsell
Style name: ???
Season/year: who knows. they’re ‘current’ again at yoox, but they’re at least a couple years old.
Availability: yoox, luisaviaroma, ebay
Fit: tts, avg. width
Overall pros: excellent personality & styling, good heel height, made immaculately
Overall cons: super expensive, hard to find, no real padding
My score, 1 (low) to 10 (high): solid 8.

That, in essence, is what I want to provide for random google searchers who really wanna know, if they can, how a certain style of shoe fits and whether or not you can find it online anywhere. It’s limited of course by my terribly fickle tastes and also my extraordinary cheap tendencies, however much it might be enabled because of my amazing sense of style coupled with galavanting around on my Word Pony. Minor caveats, particularly if you’re like a representative of net-a-porter or zappos couture or something, is that I will totally write up a review of whatever you want if you send me a pair. Hell, if you just lend me some Barbara Buis or Max Kibardins I’ll even cater to stupidly arbitrary word counts and find rhyming schemes that work with specific words, up to and including “interuterine.” (Which I mention only because of that time Rose and Dorothy wrote a song about Miami.)

Till next time, y’all! Wear shoes that’d make me proud.

So this is good. It’s still just mid-January, and I’m sticking to some blogness and still thinking with soft, kind thoughts about my New Year’s Resolutions. I had a nice spate of days off from work immediately following the New Year’s holiday, and I rather would have liked to get some hardcore headway made on…uhm, something. Honestly, there’s a lot of time-heavy projects that could use some attention from me: cleaning up the sewing room; weeding out fabrics and patterns (plus clothes and shoes) that I’ve moved beyond; better organizing my paper ephemera stuff; inventorying all my rubber stamps; and probably about two dozen other umbrella-level tasks. But noooo! I had a weiner sore throat that was actually a grody bacterial thing and I had to go to the doctor and cough a lot instead of sew, or clean, or sit on the floor with piles of stuff completely surrounding me, like I’d built a fort to retire in. While I didn’t get anything productive done that week, I did tweet a haiku that pretty much summed it up.

And it was right on, 100%. I’ve been thinking on overstimulatedness for two solid weeks now, how that pummels me into feeling too barraged to move much less cut out fabric and sew it up. I’ve got so much stuff that is great stuff, I mean just terrific, but there is a LOT of it, and I too easily feel like I’m carrying it all around with me and then it has ABBA-heavy dance parties when I’m trying to fall asleep at night. And I think that, with a more atmospheric-point-of-view, that’s what I really wanted to address (if not chip away at) with my new year’s resolutions. But in a sense, I’ve always got some kind of sore throat, so to speak. I watch television or bake cupcakes or drink beers and prowl ebay for marc jacobs heels under $70, and the end result is that my desire to Do Stuff gets overhauled by, perhaps, my more latent desire/s to not Do Stuff. Or at the very least it’s surpassed by my Doing other Stuff that has far less tangible results. Although … I do have like half a dozen pairs of MJs.

Which is to say, that the “sew more” thing I barely touched upon in the Offical Resolutions post? can be further broken down a little somethin’ like this.

1. Finish things. I have got to start doing a better job of this. There are some projects that I start out real excited and happy, but something unforeseen sneaks into the works and then I stuff it onto a shelf and completely forget about it. Now, I don’t only do this, I mean I have actually finished things, but too often I worry that I’ve picked out an unsuitable fabric or cut out the wrong (or unadjusted) size and instead of working on it, I scrap it. And instead of actually scrapping it, I just accumulate it in a defunct zone. So for ought-nine? I wanna get some stuff Done.
2. Sew with my other machines. So I have two whole sewing machines, a Babylock serger and an older Bernina, that I have not even touched except to move them out of my way. I’m still cranking out some time with Bettes, my plastic-fantastic singer purchase from mal-wart, but if I’m going to be doing hardcore awesome projects with kickass fabrics? Maybe I need to upgrade to a machine that’s worthy. Or at least more worthy–I mean, they’re sitting right in front of me.
3. Try new things. Yes yes, you hear this one all the time, and I do try new things even without positing it in a banter of making new year’s resolutions. But really: bound buttonholes are, like, so my style. I just need to crank some out to make sure. Also I wanna: make some non-pajama pants, sew with silk, sew up a vintage pattern, use some of my excellent button stash, finish up tweaks on a muslin and then actually SEW it, and sew a coat or a jacket. And, though I may change my mind on that last thing, I don’t think the cape will count.
4. Buy less cheap stuff. Sometimes there are prints, be they floral or abstract or vintage-y or wacked out or what have you, that I simply cannot pass up. I will accept that in myself, more or less, but for real: I have a lot of solid color, totally boring cheap stuff–and that’s no good. If it’s cheap? there has to be merit otherwise. And if it’s a solid color kind of thing? go for the good stuff, because it’ll make me happier in the long run. It sucks to have a finished garment start looking shoddy after a couple months because you cheaped out on the fabric. (Now, with this example in particular, I’m fine with owning up to having used a cheap-o fabric; the only reason I got something wearable out of that project was because I’m so stubborn ’cause the pattern was not for me, and that was my first time sewing a knit, and so on.)
5. Blog more about it. It’s nice to keep track of stuff I’ve done, especially if I don’t have to sit down staring at a blank piece of paper trying to rack my brain for things I have accomplished in, well, for example the last year. I totally did things in 2008, but you wouldn’t know the half of it if you only looked at VP. So for oh-nine, I want to be better at keeping track of things: including regularity and pictures. I will attempt to lure myself into accountability to myself, but not by being such a hardass (though that’s going to be a super challenge). Uhm, we’ll see how it goes.

I also want to get this site looking the way I want it to, so if you’re not reading this in a feed reader? Bear with my fickle sense/s of likes and half-organizedness.

Ought nine y’all! Hoe-lee! In light of it still being January, then, I want to talk for a sec about New Year’s Resolutions. See, I’m not real big on making them: I tend to be of the opinion that I don’t need some new page on a calendar to interest myself in doing better. I don’t hold at all tightly to vaguely romantic notions that a new year will mean the turning over of new leaves, that something as arbitrary as a chronological numeric assignation to the position of the earth and the sun and the greater cosmos will result in me, all of a sudden, saving enough money and getting in physical shape stellar enough to become an astronaut, or something. Nuts to that; let me do my own thing ’cause it’s working for me so far.

Ahem: that said, get ready for my “but.” BUT I think I’ve done a good job the last two years with sticking to my repeated resolution of wanting to sew more. In 2007 and again in 2008, I did just that. I increased my repertoire of abilities and finished projects, I devoted more time to getting better and sitting behind the machine, I became more comfortable in feeling capable at this hobby. So for 2009? Same goes: I want to sew more. Also this list of eighteen additional resolutiony things:

1. Stop buying so many damn pairs of shoes.

Now this is not to say that I will hop on the rehabilitation wagon for shoe addicts–I just need to stop buying so much stuff that’s cheap and may or may not fit me. I have superior and discerning tastes: I need to start spending that way (uhm, # of times not amount per se).

2. Start sewing with the good stuff.

For real. What is all this awesome fabric doing languishing? who am I saving it for? why do I not have a mustard yellow wool skirt or a polka-dot trench coat or a damn goldfish dress yet?! and so on.

3. Make more art.

Mail art, fabric art, photo art, cupcake art, guerilla art, wardrobe art, acrylic paint on cereal boxes art, yard art. Art art art! I’ll even try to post more to VP in terms of how this will be actualized; I want to do some collaboratory stuff with my best buddy Brian, in Chicago, and my best lady Beck. Speaking of the latter, I may cop her experimonth style and come up with a couple projects where I do some stuff every day for a calendar month. I’m toying with the following ideas: getting up at 5:00 a.m. every day; do some art every day; watch a new movie every day (though that’s an awful lot of movies).

4. Eat better.

Which is to say, more regularly. Lunch is good. Not eating for 20 hours every day, four or five days a week is a lame habit.

5. Relax, dammit.

Allison: remember this? remember sitting on your butt and having a nice beer and just vegging in front of the telly for a bit? Grab hold of that frame of mind a little more often–it’s good for you. Unclench the stress and antsy mood in favor of giving yourself a break sometimes. Like, a lot of times.

So there it is. My official list of 2009 New Year’s Resolutions. Whether or not I’ll actually stick to them remains to be seen, as well as whether or not I’ll actually post anything on the ‘Pants about it all, but, you know. One day at a time.

(Update: jesus effing christmas. I should’ve guessed that BIG BUT in a blog post’s title would unleash the spamly floodgates, but SHIT man. No more comments, for real. Sorry for the two-point-four people out there who care.)

But the season is Fall. Lovely Autumn, with your changing leaf colors and crisp sunlit days! The change in the air is always so inspiring for the sewin’ room, wouldn’t you agree? Here are some things that I think would be nice to have, and probably even nice to sew. Will I make with the sleepless nights and fruitful sewing activity this Autumn? Hard to say: “a smidgen bit” most likely; all the way up to “some” would be nice; “all” is, like, totally not my procrastinating (and telly-watching) style. Still, come windowshop with me!

I’m all about a structured shirtdress, and this tweed is awesome. It’s very coat-like in this more substantial fabric, with lots of buttons, a double-breasted front closure, button-closeable-flapped patch pockets, self-fabric belt and shoulder epaulettes really copping the ingredients of a traditional trench coat. And it is described as a “coat dress,” so even the manufacturer says you can wear it as either, but … whatever. In that respect I can look at wrapdresses as bathrobes, right? It’s way cooler as a 100% dress than as a coat, says me. If you look at the biggest possible view, you can see the multiple gores of the skirt, the waistline seam, and the armscye princess bodice seams which will all make fitting this thing way easier. I mean, you won’t be wearing a pair of pants and a blouse underneath this thing, so you definitely don’t want traditional trench coat ease in this thing. Pattern possibilities: New Look 6815 if you give it a seam at the waist and fudge the skirt into a multiple-gored one and add a bit to the center-front pieces to get the overlap down pat. (Of course, the back has a shaped upper yoke and a center pleat running the length of the bodice which is chopped up into four pieces itself, but … I just don’t feel like playing around in photoshop that much just now. Maybe (read: probably) later.)

So here’s a sewing conundrum: the sweater dress. Not only is it a conundrum in the difficulty of caring for, finding a good pattern and fabric for, and then aren’t sweater knits sort of a pain to sew anyway? I’ve also got to decide between BCBG’s shawl collar-midriff band combo and the inimitable DvF’s three-quarter-length sleeved keyhole mandarin collar wrap option. My brain is facing a meltdown, I tell ya.

Teeny blog-snack, just to remind myself I’m not a complete slug. And also that I should probably stop by the store sometime soon to replenish my stash of baseball-watchin’ junk foods.
What I got done over the weekend: fabric prep (preshrinking) for the cape and lining, including a head-scratching hour or so trying to fit all the pattern pieces onto a little over two yards of 30″ wide fabric for the latter. I tapered the flare at the hem (104″ is a lot, so I trimmed off about 10″ total) and cut off about 2.5″ in length, ’cause I didn’t want it to cover my whole butt, anyway. The length of the finished cape per the pattern envelope was right under 30″, the width of my lining fabric, so I knew I’d be able to shave a bit so that I could squeeze the pattern pieces on lined up with the cross grain instead of the selvage. I’m not sure how exactly I want to sew the lining to the cape, but I don’t think I wanna stitch ‘em together and then turn it out, which is what the pattern directions tell me to do. I want a longer turned-under cape hem, not for the wool & lining to be all even-steven. So…it’ll still take me a bit to work out the details, though I’m happy with cutting out a medium after tissue fitting and, I mean, it’s a cape so there’s not a lot of fitting finesse I’ll have to tinker with.The shoulder seams look pretty good already, I think.
Plus there’s a high of eighty degrees today with lots of sun, and Chicago isn’t supposed to be all that cold so I don’t feel obligated to finish it before we leave later this week. Bonus! I do, however, have to think about what I wanna have for Chicago and whether or not any work toward its construction is required of me. Shoes? Nah, I got enough of them. That silver twill skirt? I have one more gore of lining to sew on, and then I’ll tack down the high waistline facing and hem the sucker and then I’m all done. Chunky red coral necklace? Well, I’d have to get a design figured out and then do it all up, so … maybe, maybe not.

Next time: prepare for more fabric! because I need to get my witchy skirt done up by Hallowe’en, and also ’cause I just bought some teal/kelly green wool jersey and some ice-blue velvet. UHM. Yeah. They would look great together, though.

September? ‘Sridiculous! I’m such a wank-off. So I’ve been thinking about candy a lot lately, perhaps because the autumnal equinox and its incurrent chill in the air has me daydreaming about hallowe’en and—what else?—bucketfuls of bite-sized, chocolate-covered goodness. It’s much more appealing than huge slabs of chocolate-covered goodness because, hey, it’s only just one little bitsy bite. Mmm! tasty! and now you’re done! I need to think about sewing, and blogging (and cleaning, saving money, spending time with loved ones, planting flowers, and life in general) in much the same way. Just a little bit here! mmm! lookit how lovely such a petite incarnation can be! Because eventually, you eat pounds and pounds of candy; sew up entire garments; blog yourself into some kind of analytic significance; save enough money to buy bitchin’ pairs of Marséll shoes and all that other stuff. So: watch for my random thoughts which may not be so lucky as to be piled into Casseroles of Verbosity. (Which are awesome besides! who doesn’t love potatoes?!)

Today’s bitty thought: I’ve got to preshrink my navy melton so as to really get thinking about making my cape. Subtext to today’s bitty thought: I’m totally going to make a cape! I’ve got two yards of a nice navy wool melton, ditto for some fancy silk-blend brocade for to line it, and a pattern and everything. I think I may just dunk a bedsheet in the bathtub and do a london shrink, or I might toss it in the washer and then let it air dry? What I do know, however, is that it’s cool and cloudy and windy enough today to make me wish I had a toasty wool cape to wear right this instant.

When I was in the sixth grade, one of our projects for language arts class was to teach our classmates how to do something. It didn’t matter what it was, it just needed to be something written out in steps in the most clear (and preferably concise) manner so as to convey what it was that was to be accomplished and how you were supposed to manage it. And I had the hardest damn time trying to decide what I could teach people; the only idea I ever managed to even scribble on a scrap of paper was how to be good at math. (Granted, this was way before I met up with calculus, and I was partially convinced that I should be an accountant or something similarly mathly when I grew up. The joys of the tapering off of adolescence! After my first semester of college-level maths I abandoned that mess but quick.) I was too embarrassed to even list out steps for Achieving Math Prowess, or whatever I would’ve called it in my painfully precocious way, and I never actually turned that project in. Not sure how I avoided it, but at this point I’ve got my bachelor’s degree plus I could teach people how to sew a flat felled seam if Mrs. Lindsay ever reads this and cajoles me into doing a make-up report now that I’m almost damn thirty.

But part of being thirty, for me at least, is being able to fake some maturity and play Stuart Smalley with yourself: to be able to re-hash things that made you feel bad when you were a kid, and give yourself a break. To say it wasn’t stupid to try to teach people how to be good at math, but more than that, to really believe it wouldn’t have been stupid. I’m still sort of tripping over that, and maybe I always will because I, you know, never did that project, but this same theme revisits me all the time. I see it at work, with my friends, with my hobbies: this crazy, eyeball-popping perfectionism that I have to HAVE in order to feel OKAY about doing anything at all. I’m especially conscious of how much I do this with sewing-related activities, both actually sewing and procuring stuff with which to actually sew (fabric and notions and patterns, good grief).

And now, for the *ahem* MEAT of the situation.

I’m going a little crazy lately with … well, I guess a lot of stuff, but let’s focus on sewing business. I keep buying fabric, and patterns, and buttons, and books, and magazines, and notions, and tools, and all kinds of STUFF. I even hired out a Cedar Specialist to create a shelving solution for the fabric that has taken over the top of the hope chest, because it’s been too full to fit any more fabric for over a year now. It’s not for having a lack of inspiration, in the form of any possible variable, it’s just that I’m suffocating under the weight of Possible Perfection. I’ve got all these vague, washed-out pictures in my head of what the perfect dress in that one fabric could look like on me, and there are Two Main Things totally, utterly, completely, balls-to-the-wall wrong with that scenario. First, they are vague, fuzzy, underexposed and off-center pictures that I only have a kinda sorta glimpse of because I’m trying to be all natural and organic in my VISION. Just let it come naturally! don’t force it! let it be, man! and et cetera. And you know what? It’s deceptively and crazy-ass difficult to draw fantastically intricate and clean detail from the sweeping thoughts that surround a first impression. That mess is hard. Monks and shamans and hippies work their whole lives to get good at that, and even when they’re a hundred years old they’re still not perfect. Which leads me to the Second Main Thing wrong with trying to get work done based on intangibles: it works, for a split second in your head, because of its intangible nature. That dress looks perfect on my frame and those colors are stellar with my complexion because I’m taking the most sweeping glance at it imaginable. I’m not breaking down any of the hundred parts into how it might work in reality, so that all the details I could possibly want are already present, I just have to squint to make them out. Unfortunately, this kind of defeats the purpose of leaving the house in the morning; if I want otherworldly perfection, I’m going to have to start taking a lot more hallucinogenic drugs and, for my more materially pressing concerns, regularly happen upon brown paper bags full of twenty-dollar bills at the bus stop. In the meantime? I have just got to get some FBA techniques down pat and start sewing up some dresses.

Guess what y’all! I’m the lamest blogger ever! Wooo! The good news, however, is that I’ve been doing some stuff in its place. We’ve got some garden action brewing in the front yard, veggies and flowers both; I’ve been buying fabric like a champ, and even sewing some of it; I have encroached on totally new territory for daydream fodder, because how awesome would it be to have a fabric store stocked with all my favorite things?; and I did actually complete a project in here, somewhere: a fancy sort of gown for a bowling pin for Troika Music Festival’s annual Pin Projekt. And I also watched fourteen episodes of Futurama, twenty-three of The Simpsons, pet Ollie approximately 2,145 times, ate two pizzas, scored a ridiculous deal on tons of polyester horsehair braid, and baked a birthday cake. See? Busy busy busy!

The provenance lies in my lazy searching technique.

So guess what again, y’all! I just sewed the first ever prom dress for a bowling pin! Now that’s probably not at all true, but in looking around for some pin-art inspiration, I found exactly zero occurrences of sewing apparel for the pin. Lots of painting and decoupage with 2-D and 3-D objects, mosaic-style and sculpture style, and I even saw a drum set sprinkled in the results—but no polka dotted prom dresses anywhere. Granted, I looked neither long nor hard for truly representative examples of bowling pin art for auctioning purposes, but I did perform a google search (images too) and checked out flickr. (Although at the Pin Projekt there were two, count ‘em two, other entries with little custom-made clothes for the bowling pin—multiple outfits, in fact. Guess I need something bigger and better to shoot for next time.)

I originally thought it’d be neat to make matching outfits for me and the ‘pin, so that was my initial modus operandi. It more or less came out that way, only in reverse: I used some fabric left over from a blouse I recently finished for dressing the pin. I wore the blouse to the auction and matched the pin (kinda sorta) after all, and it was painfully cute as long as you noticed how nonchalant I was being. Mission Accomplished! And I managed to learn some stuff along the way, which is my REAL modus operandi. Modus operandi modus operandi! I feel all college educated.

I knew I wanted a circle skirt for Ms Pin, probably because I want one for me, too. And I suspected I’d go a little nuts in terms of the details, and let me tell you it’s way easier to draft and sew a prom dress for a bowling pin than it would be for myself. Now that I’ve got my first set of fancy dress training wheels, maybe I’ll feel a little more comfortable jumping in the deep end and sewing up something crazy for myself next time. So I started with the circle skirt; and I made it *way* too long; the pin was on top of an upside-down cup in this picture, which gave it about five inches in height. I not only overestimated how much length* would be required to keep it floor-length while still counting for how far away from the body I wanted it to stand, I underestimated how long the hem’s perimeter** was.
*about half an inch; I made it like three inches too long.
**seven feet! really! it was amazing.

I first thought I might be able to use up some of that length by making the hem do twisty, crazy filigree style loops and curls, which I was going to use a medium-light gauge craft wire to sculpt. I narrow hemmed the skirt and drew the wire through the length of it, so that it was enclosed by the fabric but still very much able to be bent up and twisted. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures because the initial result was not at all what I had in mind, and I wasn’t thinking that it would be nice to document not only what worked (here I was forcing myself to be optimistic) but what didn’t work, too. I accepted my self-imposed necessity to hold off being all doom ‘n’ gloom, but I didn’t really want to photograph my ineptitudes just yet. If only I’d known how nicely it was going to turn out! Live and learn. The wire was too heavy for the lightweight poly chiffon, and it was much more difficult to bend evenly than I’d imagined. I ended up playing around for only an hour or so before I said Forget This; every ripple I bent into the wired hem caused the whole skirt to become unbalanced, and it was markedly challenging (read: totally damn impossible) to perfectly bend the wire to match the perfect draping of a circle skirt. So I took it out and lopped off the three inches that it was too long, and a smidge begrudgingly did a new narrow hem on the length of it. The new, shorter skirt had a hem that was almost a foot shorter: down from 84 inches to a mere 73. Piece of cake! To make it stand out a bit, I made some 1/4″ tape from some polyester crinoline and sewed that along the edge with two lines of stitching.

and then .
Next was the waistband, since I knew I was going to need a waistband. I wanted a tightly gathered look, so I cut out a rectangular piece of fabric about 6.5″ long (narrowest circumference of the bowling pin was 5.75″, plus seam allowances/room for trimming) and about 5″ wide (gathered into a ~1″ band).

I gathered it at the ends, finished with a continuous strip to which I sewed a couple of little snaps, and added two lines of ruching/gathering/uhm, thread so that the waistband itself was divided into three equal chunks of scrunched up goodness.

and .

And then, there were yoyos.

I have already forgotten how many, but it was in the area of twenty. Or maybe 21, since I did use the bottom of a beer bottle as the template. I brought them in to work with me unfinished, and spent an afternoon going back and forth between serial checkin and journal claiming and yoyo stitching. It was awesome. I’ve already decided that the next project I undertake involving yoyos will most certainly find me doing at least some of them in the workplace—I got a much greater sense of accomplishment from having left for home that day with a little baggie full off puffy, polka-dotted fabric treats. It was as good as eating donuts with dinner.

I ended up constructing the “bodice” part of the dress completely out of these yoyos; I stitched it all together, one yoyo at a time, first to the upper edge of the waistband, and eventually to each other. It worked out to be just about right in how it looked, and I even had a few left over that I used to modestly adorn the full skirt. Though I must note: I wanted a cluster of four yoyos and a cluster of two, not three and two. One, ahem, went missing during the early stages of construction.