I AM PROM

I'm not going to prom. I naturally don't need a prom dress.

But I'm going to make one anyways. For the heck of it.

Late last night as my eyelids drooped from the promise of sleep, I kept my eyes wide open while I scoured the far reaches of the World Wide Web's fashion world for dress ideas. Rather than looking through patterns first, I decided to look for inspirations from already existing dress designs. I started off with looking at the typical prom dress stuff. After thirty dresses or so, they all started to look the same--blingy rhinestones, colossal flounces, tiaras, shiny fabric in varied colors of monotone brilliancy resembling shades of highlighter pens... "I AM PROM!" they all seemed to shout (or discharge). I stopped looking at prom dresses, changed to looking at dresses in general, and found more success there.

My Finds!





They're all unconventionally short and, with the exception of the last one, unconventional prom dresses. Just my cup of tea. My excitement grew as I managed to find patterns for all of them. With a few tweaks to the patterns and the right material, successful recreations of my new finds could be created.

Wait. Finds as in singular or plural?

Midnight struck its tolling tones, and I paused the flurry of mental images of well-known fabric stores, beads, baubles, the stray thought tinged with guilt about the cost, and yards and yard of chiffon, charmeuse, and silk dupioni.

I can only choose one dress. Choose? I like them all equally. How do I choose? What a predicament.



I questioned myself, "What would your dream dress be?"

The previous system overload fantasy immediately blackened. The emerald green dress--a single dress--from the movie Atonement immediately swooshed its delicate silk form into my mind from memories of me sitting in awe in the movie theatre.



...so it seems that I'm going to recreate that dress.


So far, I've devoted five minutes to it.




Plus, I've found a possible pattern for it.


More updates to come.

Friday the 13th

The weather is still indecisive. It sometimes chooses to be a crisp cold and other times chooses to be a vibrant warmth, both of which seem to penetrate the skin to the body's core. Considering that winter does not officially transition into spring for another week, the weather seems to have a valid reason to be fickle.

Today, for some reason, I recalled a line from one of my favorite movies from childhood. "Tr-la-la-la-la. Spring is in the air, and I am the flower. With nothing interesting to say." --A Bug's Life

Although I'm taking that line out of context from the actual situation in Pixar's movie, the clinging memory of the computer-animated lush blades of grass and fine veins of leaves compelled me to step outside and examine the more microscopic (yet deceptively simplistic with their abundance) aspects of the outdoors. It had been some time since I had gone out past my normal boundaries of the yard. Since today is Friday the 13th, an oddity that occurs anywhere from one to three times out of the year, I decided to follow suit and take a break from my normal view of interior walls.

...and it seems that signs of spring had popped up over night.








Their fleeting existence is what makes them quite magical. Just like their sudden appearance, one day--poof!--they'll be gone again.

So Far for This Year...

So...I told myself that I would wait a couple of days to do my next post about my recently completed sewing projects.

I don't think my self-restraint is quite honed enough for that.

I wrote a review of my jacket (which, I'm pleased to say, is no longer a work in-progress) earlier in today at Pattern Review. The actual review can be found here.







I used McCall 5670 for my denim jacket, and I'm really pleased with how it turned out. While sewing it together, I was a bit nervous about the ease in the shoulder area. Taking into account that the denim doesn't stretch, I decided to be a bit more skimpy with how much the front closure section overlaps. It seems to have worked well. I found the denim and the buttons at JoAnn's and used one of their coupons...which took off a measly 40 cents or so. :(
Now I just have to wait for the weather to loose its slight chill! It seems that I can only wear medium-weight to thin tops underneath this.

As for my two tops, here are the final products:



This is McCalls 5388, and I plan to use the same pattern to make another top from a yellowish patterned cotton. It's made of cotton gauze and is wonderfully light and floaty—perfect for summer. But...it stretched a little while sewing, so I think I'll have to wear a tank top underneath it to prevent the whole world from seeing my bra. Which would detract from its wonderfully light and floaty feeling against my skin, but oh well...




This one is almost an identical (visually, but maybe not its construction) copy of BWOF 03-2008-110. I saw BWOF 03-2008-109 (the version with sleeves)on several blogs and fell in love with the bias band which cradles the bustline. After searching near and far on eBay for the March 2008 issue of BWOF, I gave up, whipped out the top section from a princess dress pattern, used that for the top, and then draped the rest. It actually wasn't difficult at all, although it took a couple of centimeter-by-centimeter tries to finally get the bias band to fit correctly.

It's made from turquoise silk linen(if I remember correctly, it should be silk linen) from my grandmother. I didn't line it because I didn't want it to be too bulky.

So that's all of my projects from January to now.

First Post!

I have so much free time (well, compared to previously—I'm not exactly acting as the vegetable on the couch)! To prevent myself from going crazy, I've been reading tons of blogs. Initially, most of them were artsy/food/life blogs. My selection then narrowed and escalated into a singular focus of me exclusively reading sewing blogs—TONS of sewing blogs. Which explains why my clothing sewing count now has risen to two completed tops and one coat in-progress. (I'll post those another time.) Additionally, the to-do list consists of one Vogue dress, one military-style dress, one Grecian-style dress, and one coat for the upcoming, much upcoming winter (hmm, I wonder the sudden predilection for a bunch of dresses?). The to-do list is shown below:




All of these accumulated in the past two months. The previous count—or rather, the non-existent count—was zero. Am I crazy? Yes, probably, because it seems that instead of detoxing from the stress of the previous semester, I've been heaping the stress upon myself with all of the seams that I've had to rip out from sewing the wrong sides of pieces together sequentially not once, twice, but thrice times.

While it seems that all I'll be talking about on here is sewing, sewing, and more sewing, I figure that my frantic spurts of sewing will taper off at times to allow and, probably more truthfully, to require other topics and endeavors to take over for that time being. Additionally, this summer promises to be a fairly exciting one; and with going off to college in the fall and knowing that I probably won't have time to update everybody about to my life in between getting to know my classmates, homework, eating, homework, exercising to keep off the threatened “Freshmen 15”, homework, something might give. Just a bit. But since a visual aspect can be factored in (granted, Skype allows one to do show-and-tell quite well...), you slightly seem to get the better end of the deal.