30.5.09

Prom Dress '09

 

Here's this year's Prom Dress. There were many extra African American Quiz Bowl t-shirts this year, so I was able to get 3.

This was created by measuring for the bodice. It's a really simple shell with bust darts. The skirt is made with 2 shirt bodies with plenty of pleats for fullness. The skirt also has a kangaroo pocket concealed within the pleats. I created the waist panel with a doubled t-shirt hemline.

I dyed the finished piece with a procion dye. This should have produced a completely matched piece, but apparently the thread in the shirts and the thread I was using both contained too much polyester. They remained white. The flowers were sewn on afterward by hand. They each have a vintage shank button as the center.

It's totally customizable. I will definitely be making more of these.
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25.5.09

Glass fusing random fun

   
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These are my three favorite pieces I made at the Etsy Pittsburgh team glass fusing workshop. They declared my fish tank the "winner", despite the fact it wasn't a contest. I also like it very much. I would make more of them. I also learned that if you layer the glass, it can be called tacking. Fusing seems like a more logical term. We should be doing this again soon. I also found a studio really close to my house where I can also do this, among other things.

24.5.09

Fortune Teller Swap

 
This is the fortune teller I made for the fortune teller swap. I tried to create media message fortunes. I used magazine images and words. Our traditional fortune tellers used 4 colors on the outside, which the reader would spell as they opened and closed it. The inside contained 8 numbers which the reader would count off as they opened or closed it. Then on the third selection, the reader would read the fortune under the number you picked. Other versions have you read the fortune without the intermediate counting. As children, we seemed to value suspense.
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23.5.09

the ultimate neglect

Here are the few things I have done since February, which I have already ripped out. Even with my new policy of only pulling out legitimate mistakes I managed to accomplish almost nothing in 3 months.
 
This is the third iteration of this sweater. Still too short and misshapen.
 
Here is the base of an alpaca lace sweater that I already knit up and ripped out 3 times. I was totally winging it, and it took a lot of experimentation to find a suitable lace pattern. This particular version created strange gaps between the lace repeats. Later versions were lacking sufficient positive and negative space.
 
It was also a little too scalloped at the bottom. There was no real focus on scallops in the pattern, so it mostly just resembled a mistake. So I treated it like one and ripped it out. Since sipping out two more versions, I'm almost done with the current usable one.
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