screen printing through the ages + polo dress

History Lesson:

I don't know what happened to all the photos of my screen prints, but I thought I should put what I do have up. I'm going to hunt down the rest. These are circa 2007.. the old days.

Also included:

Enormous polo to tennis-eqsue dress/tunic. Another very old creation, from before I had a real dress form!

kitties

- printed using a styrofoam meat tray and really speedball block printing ink that is totally not fresh anymore but more or less usable.

-yay cats! :)

slightly tacky cat shirt

I bought this cat shirt at Buffalo Exchange. It's the kind with the cats' faces on the front and their butts on the back. The best part is the cats are in western wear, which ups the tackiness. (I love western wear, as we have been over before.) The only people I've ever seen wearing a shirt like this are retirees with 97 cats, but I still like it.

I combined the cat shirt with a large grey shirt from Goodwill to make the sleeves and collar and came up with this:

the cat with the bushy tail looks like it has a 'fro.

a simple western shirt re-do

i really, really like western shirts so i bought quite a few when blue velvet had their everything $1 sale. this was orginally a large or extra large long sleeve, so all i had to do was resize and create fluttery cap sleeves. making bias binding for the arm holes was the worst part. i hate ironing! i will hire a minimum wage worker to press my clothes and make bias binding one of these days.

modeled shots to come!

oh look my dress was in the window

Little Black Dress Photos, No 2

I think the lighting in these pictures is better, but my face looks kind of silly because I am not very photogenic and I don't like to strike poses. :D I usually prefer to have my sister model accordingly.


I think the above photo shows collar detail well and I also thought my face looked cool.










Thoughtful pose. Always a classic.

Public Humilation/Little Black Dress Contest No. 1

Here are some lackluster photos of my entry for Blackmail Boutique's "Little Black Dress Contest". I will take some with better lighting when I get the chance. My collar also looks really uneven in these. :(

For this contest I had roughly a month to design and sew a little black dress for a local boutique. I'm fairly surprised I actually finished this (mostly) in the time constraint. I only skipped one day of school in order to finish.

The body of the dress is a black on black plaid, some kind of synthetic, which looked not-cheap once all was said and done. :) The collar is silk dupioni. I only bought about half as much as I needed, but I was thankfully able to rework my pattern to accommodate.

The judging wasn't very encouraging. I had to go first, which scared me out of my wits and I didn't really get much useful feedback. All I was told: a) match your plaid better, b) cut your collar on the bias to make it poofier c) make your collar more overstated (which I totally don't agree with). Needless to say I didn't get any kind of prize, but another designer coming over to tell me she liked my dress is worth more to me than some judges' opinion. They gave the 3 other young designers in the contest consolation prizes for being young, which was slightly aggravating to be excluded from, but condescension is a "prize" I am better off without. All in all, the dresses that won weren't anything I found particularly original or exciting, so I suppose my taste just differed from the judging panel.

Better pictures soon! Thanks to everyone who supports me in my designing. :)

yay buttons!