How to Store a Strapless Dress, et al.

Friends, I have nothing but admiration for Joan Crawford as a movie star, but I couldn't resist this cheap shot.

As you know, the BurdaStyle dress is finished, and Leah will be taking it home with her next week.  Good thing she is, too, because with my recent obsession with The Daily Ditch, it might otherwise end up at my local Goodwill -- or worse.



Now, while not actually strapless -- it's a halter-top dress -- it does present some storage concerns.  Did I mention the straps are removable?



I can't just hang it from a hanger for two reasons.  For one thing, there's nothing to hang the dress from.  I can't just knot the halter and loop it around a hanger; it would slip right off and wouldn't hang right even if it didn't.

Some of you are probably thinking I should sew in hanging loops.  But the weight of the skirt would pull too heavily on the skirt and stretch the bodice out, I fear.

What I'm going to suggest to Leah -- unless somebody has a better solution -- is that she wrap the dress in tissue paper or a towel or sheet, and keep it folded in a box or drawer until she wants to wear it, and then steam or iron any creases out first.  The dress doesn't have to be starched flat, but it does crease pretty easily.  What do you think?

I'd been working on that dress for so long, I almost don't know what to do with myself now.  Of course, we have our boxers sew-along starting in October, but that's not for a while yet.  What's next for me -- or for any of us, really?

Moving right along...

Yesterday, I caught the Daphne Guinness fashion exhibit at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and while it's not really my kind of thing, it's a beautifully curated show.  It's bursting with Alexander McQueens in particular, including fantastic accessories, and despite having just opened, there was hardly anyone there.  I just love the FIT museum, and it's always free. 



Now on to today's Daily Ditch.

Remember how I've always said we don't own a TV?  Well, that's not entirely true.  We own two TV's -- cute little Sony portables from the Seventies -- but they've been sitting at the bottom of my bedroom closet for years collecting dust.  They work, but I don't think you can get reception on them anymore without some sort of converter, and how many door stops does one really need?  Reception or no, they get pitched today.  Pity.

I can actually see glimmers of the bottom of my bedroom closet again!





Friends, that's all for today.  If you have any insights in the best way to store a heavy cotton strapless dress, I'd appreciate it!

Happy Friday, everybody!

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Clothing vs. Costume

Friends, this is a costume.  In real life, nobody wears pottery-shard crowns on their head.

This, in contrast, is clothing -- bland, nondescript, contemporary men's clothing, no doubt from Uniqlo, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Clothing covers the body, preventing over-exposure and ideally enhancing our skin tone, nothing more.  Costume says, I am living in a world all my own; for tickets, please see the box office.   Get the difference?

Clothing.



Costume.



Now one thing I can say with certainty is that a lot of us sewers -- and non-sewers too -- live in fear that something we put on our bodies will be labelled costume, when we intended it to be merely clothing.  Am I right?

Only yesterday, I was reading the elegant musings of our friend Casey, who was discussing her extensive ladies glove collection (though I'm not sure she has ones like these).  To paraphrase Casey, she loves her gloves, but "cannot muster the courage" to wear them in public, unlike, say, hats.   Casey is the perfect example of someone sensitive to the difference between clothing and costume, and I'd love to hear more about how she makes the distinction.  (UPDATE: Don't miss Casey's comment below!)

Just to reiterate:  Clothing (Michael's shirt courtesy of Debbie Cook).



Costume.



Clothing.



Costume.



Wait, now I'm confused...

Once upon a time, when Western fashion was dictated by a handful of Parisian designers, the dividing line between clothing and costume was crystal clear.  Today, not so much.

Especially for lovers of vintage, or for the slightly eccentric, the difference between clothing and costume can get blurred.  Who's to say what is and isn't costume, after all?  And a lot of what distinguishes clothes from costume is the styling, or which gender is wearing it.

Readers, do you ever cross the line -- or live in fear of crossing it?  Are you dying to wear crinolines to the supermarket but fear being mistaken for June Cleaver or Alice Lon -- or Milton Berle?

In other news, while preparing for my Daily Ditch ritual, I found this lovely cotton shirting I picked up many months ago at Metro Textiles.  I'd totally forgotten I had it!  I really should make a shirt out of it someday soon, or boxers (don't forget our imminent sew-along) -- or both.



And now for today's Daily Ditch.  This groovy metal and glass mirror is something I picked up in the Nineties at the Chelsea Flea Market.  It's sort of cool, but I find convex mirrors to be big dust collectors, plus I'm at that point in my life when I don't need to see myself distorted every day.  Off it goes!



In closing, friends, how do you feel about clothing vs. costume?  Do colleagues mistake what you're wearing to work for something Lana Turner wore as Lady de Winter in The Three Musketeers? 

How do you distinguish between clothing and costume, and how do you determine when you've crossed the line -- or do you intentionally cross the line (and not just on Halloween)?  Are ostrich plumes and gauntlet gloves always wrong for daywear?

Especially if you love vintage, when does it just become too much?

Rules please!

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A girl, a camera, and a pretty dress

Friends, the BurdaStyle halter dress is finished and the photo shoot completed!

Actually, the dress still needs a few tweaks, but nothing visible from the outside.  Both Leah and I love the look of the dress strapless as well as with halter straps, so I'm going to make the straps button-on so she can remove them whenever she wants to.  Leah came up with that idea; I was thinking velcro.

Unfortunately, I think I should wait until the BurdaStyle sew-along formally ends next week to show you the full photo shoot -- I don't want to get sued or anything.  Picture all the glamour and thrills of a Cathy photo shoot, only without the occasional 5 o'clock shadow.

We all love Cathy, but Leah is a such pleasure to work with and -- I hate this about her -- doesn't have any bad angles.  Just like Lana Turner.

I enjoyed playing photographer for a change but it's a lot of work -- especially if you're also the stylist, the gopher, the director, and the location scout.

As you can see up top, my vintage luggage set (the one with the permanent stink) is prominently featured in the shoot (and sadly, may find it's way into the Daily Ditch) and this classic image appears as well. 



Identify it and win....well, the satisfaction of being right!  And speaking of the Daily Ditch, here's what's getting tossed today:

This milk glass vase used to be somebody's old lamp base (hence the hole in the bottom).  I've had it for a zillion years, half-a-zillion of which were spent in my closet.  Let someone else enjoy it.





Not all of Cathy's accessories are fabulous.  This handbag looks like something Ruth Buzzi carried on Laugh-In (Anyone remember that?).  Out it goes.

I often enjoy Bollywood musicals, but some are duds.  Next stop, Salvation Army.



Now, here's an example of the Magic of the Daily Ditch.

When I went to drop off a bag of Cathy's shoes at the Salvation Army yesterday, I found this beautiful Alvar Aalto vase, in its original box, for $5.99.   Yes, $5.99.





A very good deal indeed and I immediately felt better about that horrible Huskylock serger.

It occurs to me that some of you might be interested in seeing all of my Daily Ditch items to date in one place.  You can view them here.

Readers, I'm off to put some buttonholes in halter straps and continue digging myself out of my junk.  You?

Have a great day, everybody!

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The Ditch is Back

Readers, you probably already know that I do not do things by halves.  I hope you'll remember this as posts about throwing stuff out (aka The Daily Ditch) become the new normal here at MPB, at least until I've cleared most of the junk out. 

You may or may not recognize the serger above.  I bought it used on eBay and it didn't even come with a thread stand or presser foot -- I had to find those on my own.  This machine caused me nothing but nightmares from the get-go -- it's simply hell to thread -- and since I jammed it on a flat-felled denim seam two years ago, it has sat on a shelf at the top of my bedroom closet.  Every time I look at it my blood pressure escalates and yet I have never mustered the courage to get rid of it.

I have finally decided that this baby has to go.  I'm putting a sign on it that says "Works, but needs a tune up."  I'm not mentioning that an exorcism might also be required.  I apologize to those of you who are offended by my decision, I just can't look at it any longer, though I admit it's a better looking machine than my Brother 1034D, and much more solidly built.



Let's move on.

No ditching effort would be serious without addressing Cathy's shoe collection.  Cathy has more pairs of shoes than I do by a multiple of ten.  Many of them were picked up for a pittance, some even found in the street (obviously I'm not the only one with a daily ditch obsession).  Too many are cripplingly tight or need repair and Cathy is not the type to repair her old shoes.  Where I'm miserly, Cathy is an utter spendthrift and fortunately at present she has very little money, though her taste is impeccable.

I managed to identify four pair that must go and go now.  Their memory will live on in various Cathy photo shoots.



 

But there's more!

I bought this knapsack for a song right before a summer vacation and it is the most uncomfortable knapsack ever made.  It looks good, however, which explains why five minutes after I left it in our building trash, it was gone.  Like shoes (men's, at least), I really think when it comes to knapsacks, you get what you pay for.



Readers, in our disposable age, there are so many cheap appliances created that are utterly unnecessary, and this battery-operated crapola Conair beard and mustache and ear and nose hair trimmer is one of them.  There's nothing this trimmer does (in theory) that you couldn't do with a pair of scissors, and I'm not exactly Sasquatch, after all.   OUT!



You probably own or have owned computer speakers in your life.  You can probably tell from the color that these were purchased back in the day when all computer equipment was beige or putty or sand, or whatever that awful color (or non-color) was called.  These were actually good speakers in their day and they still work, but I don't need them anymore.   Plus all those dreadful wires...

Via!



If you're like me, your medicine cabinet is bursting with expired health and beauty products that really should be tossed.  This Burt's Bees facial scrub was never much good -- way too coarse for my delicate punim -- and the peach smell made me gag.  Coming to a landfill near you! 



But wait -- there's more!

I picked up this compact fluorescent "putty" (blech) Luxo lamp on eBay for a great "Buy it Now" price (which should have been my first clue), thinking it would be the perfect lamp to sew by.  Think again!  Like many fluorescent lamps, it hums and -- at least until it warms up -- flickers, which drove me crazy, and the cold, depressing light it emitted made my skin crawl.  Hopefully some aspiring mortician will find it.



Finally, I used to have a thing for mid-century modern dinnerware.  I still have too much of it.  These Finnish Arabia dishes are (nearly) all I have of a set called Anemone.  They are scratched something awful (don't let the photo fool you) and weigh a ton.  I found them at a local thrift store and that's where they'll return.



Friends, I apologize for only indirectly alluding to sewing in this post.  In fact, I feel so bad about it, I will share my latest pattern purchase.  I'm not only about ditching, after all!

Love!



In closing, I hope I am inspiring at least a few of you to downsize -- or to shop more selectively so that you never have to reach this point of desperation.

It's so true what they say that at a certain point, your stuff owns you, rather than the other way around.

When in doubt, toss -- and don't look back.

Happy Tuesday, everybody!

P.S.  If you simply must read something about sewing, check out my latest BurdaStyle sew-along post!

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Is Sewing an Art?

Readers, today's topic is challenging, but after re-reading yesterday's comments about the resurrection of dead couturier's fashion houses (specifically, whether Balenciaga was closer to a tractor manufacturer than to an artist like Picasso), I started wondering: is sewing an art? 

Just to be clear, I am not an art historian, though I did take a few art history classes many years ago, and I have been involved in various forms of artistic production throughout my life.

It's important to be clear about what one means by the term art, and throughout history the word (in all its various translations) has meant different things to different people at different times.

When I think of art, I think of a highly trained person expressing her- or himself through a particular medium.  So a writer of fiction could be considered an artist, but not a journalist.  But it gets confusing.  Poets are artists.  How about the people who write commercial jingles?  I think most of us like to think of art as something non-commercial, but this has likely never been the case.  Art has always been commissioned by others.  The artist has to live, after all. 

I took a look at the definition of artist on Wikipedia.  One of the modern definitions is "a person who engages in an activity deemed to be art."

So the question of today is: can home sewing -- or any sewing, for that matter -- be considered art, and who gets to decide?

I visited the Alexander McQueen show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and my hunch is that 95% of the visitors to this exhibit (or more) would consider his creations to be art.  Of course, it's rather a self-selecting group!  But given the popularity -- and increasing frequency -- of fashion-related museum exhibits and the rise of fashion departments in art museums, there seems no question that today, we (meaning the majority of people who think/care about such things) consider fashion to be an art form.

The same goes for commercial photography.  Original fashion photographs are highly collectible and valued today.  Who is the artist in the photograph below: couturier Balenciaga, French model Regine Debris, or photographer Irving Penn?  Or all three?

And if you go see the revival of Follies on Broadway, who are the artists involved there?  Stephen Sondheim, the composer, certainly.  Actress Bernadette Peters (below) too -- or not?  How about the orchestra players, the set designers, the costume designers?  I don't think we often think of costume designers as artists.  Should we?

This famous Cindy Sherman photograph, one of her Untitled Film Stills, belongs to the Museum of Modern Art. 

Would you consider this Cathy photo to be art?  (Oh, my, you flatter me!)  If it is art, who's the artist?  Cathy, Michael (who took the photo), or me (who set it up and sewed the dress)?

How about the sewing you do?  Looking around at sewing blogs as I am wont to do, there are a number of people whose projects look like art to me.

To be able to call it art, however, does it have to be original?  Can you stitch up a BurdaStyle Halter Dress and call it art?  (What if you draft your own, say, pants pattern?)  Doesn't the fact that you chose the fabric, that you had the image of how it should turn out in your head, somehow make it art?  Isn't sewing a form of self-expression?

Or are home sewers in particular more wisely considered technicians, or artisans?   It's easy to get mired in semantics.

So perhaps it's best to go directly to you, wise reader, and ask:

Do you consider yourself, as a sewer, to be an artist?

NOTE: We'll skip the Daily Ditch today.

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