Princely shoes and golden hopes

There was a cast and crew photoshoot and I took my dozen "glass" embroidered slipper brooches mounted on hand painted cards of the bridge with glow in the dark moon and stuff.  Bridge wasn't breathtakingly well painted.  I suck at watercolor. Not my preferred medium.

Well anyway, the idea of using embroidery was to catch the eye of wardrobe and indeed I have.  Tonight I sewed up a couple of quick ribbons for the prince's shoes and I am tickled with them. They make me very happy.  I can imagine the wardrobe mistress saying they're too bright but I'm dead sure this is the esthetic of the current play in all things.  Over the top and extravagant.  My fave. I heard some references to how the prince's ribbons get a few quips because they're so insanely fancy.  I was given some of the fabric from his costume to match it up and while it was not impossible to turn that into ribbon, it certainly wouldn't have been fun or especially princely.  Instead I dove into my treasure boxes dragged out shiny things and folded and stitched into a golden cockade backed by a fan of the matched fabric. It has opalescent cabochons with sparkly colored "gems"around them in a lovely  flowered vine pattern.  Behind that is a striped golden ribbon with one satiny gold panel and one sheer stripe.  Along these are arrayed dots of rainbow sparkle mylar like wee diamonds.  These are mounted on a starburst of orangey golden ribbon fanned in a single rosette and backed, finally, by a large fan of pleated satin fabric in wine red and yellow gold stripes.  There is an alligator clip on the back to be attached to the shoes lace track,and the whole is sewn together by hand with stitches you can't see from the front.  I added some hot glue to further brace the clip. More would be good but my sticks aren't in my hand and I don't want to look for them.

I'm so jazzed it worked!  I was going to wait for the closing night party but that would have been far more chaotic and as it went, I had enough for the people I worked with who showed plus a few of the notables like director, and the young woman doing the lighting, the props guy and the wardrobe, those two were dead important so I could move sideways and increase my portfolio and networking.  I have such a huge  job to turn this into a proper opportunity, but the work it comes with is a lot of fun.

I think now that the artist with the compliments is being sincere. She really is like that.  Or I really am quite good.  Everyone is still being super nice about my work. But yeah, they do that here. It kills me not to really know, but I guess that helps keep me from acting conceited or defeated.

Well anyway, I do think they'll love these.  They're fun.  Pretty sure they'll hold up for the run of the play and would indeed work as an owned fashion accessory at least until it got spoiled by mud.

It worked, it worked, it worked.  

I'm not a tailor by any means but that doesn't mean I can't be useful. I"m certainly motivated to learn more tailoring. This woman runs a corsetry and bra shop. The absolute keenest tailoring in women's wear these days. She will be making bespoke form fitting shaped garments for all sorts of women.  All that padding and understitching stuff that fascinates me so.  It's like a secret trick to bending space time itself.

Oh what should I wear to closing night?  Loud or tasteful? I mean, I think loud is the most fun, and this seems like the sort of occasion to break out the pink silk embroidered jacket and blue stripe wool homespun pants.

Eventually I want to redo the jacket of this suit and fix the embarassing lapels.  They stop me from wearing what otherwise be a gorgeous set. Tailoring. Then there's the velvet jacket and the real gold couching thread.  First I need to alter the jacket to fit me better, then I need to design and execute gold embroidery that uses no more or less than what i have of the actual gold thread andwastes none of it.

I really do want to branch deeper into textiles.  Paintings are so flat.  Sculptures are so uesless. Pottery and stained glass are insanely expensive. Fabric, thread, wool, dye, scraps and scrips, these things are stupidly cheap yet. Whether you salvage dead clothes, or old lady's sewing stashes, or like me, both, there's a wealth to be had in materials.  

I once made a barbarian maid costume with rabbitskin mini skirt and leggings and wrist braces, and a mink fur bra.  I still have the plywood dagger I made. There were leather ties for my hair and I forget about how I dealt with my feet.  Bare would have been the ideal but in the city you need at least sandals. I might have done that.  All the fur, and even a pillow I still enjoy of brown shearling as imitation beaver, used to be thrift store fur coats. These are rarer now, but there was a good 50 yrs of fur coat wearing and preserving involved when fur became dangerous to wear with activists attacking people in furs. Thrift store blew out the attic at $5 a coat and I spent what I could.  I used it too, making a fur lined bed. It was awesome.  Wooden framing was fur covered and the plywood between was painted black with artfully broken and cut glass pieces glued all down it. This was inside a large wooden crate originally built as a bed platform with a garden under it. So it had a ventilation shaft built into the back and the roof was strong enough for a sitting area.  The two ends had full mirrors mounted and the roof was black with glowing dots for stars everywhere, plus mini lights. The mattress was a water bed. People used to crowd in there to sit tripping out and smoking weed and laughing. Good times.  I miss house parties but it would be hard to get that kind of fun at my age. Peeps my age are more sedate and it's not seemly for me to seek out youth to hang with. Especially with the ongoing news reports of yet another terrible man with multitudes of young victims. 

I would ask what the world is coming to but it's really always been this way.  If anything, this awareness is a good sign of a maturing society. It's hard, though. The news is harsh.

I try to balance my awareness of the problems in the world with periods of ignorance where I just watch comical content and tune out the world. 

Oh, the new dog is a watch dog, as in a portable clock, and is pointing out the time.