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Queens of the Sea #3: 1650s Doublet and Breeches for Jacquotte Delahaye

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Welcome to day three of the Queens of the Sea series, part of the Random Magic Pirates book tour! Here is the mini-bio for today’s pirate, provided again by Lyrika:

Jacquotte Delahaye: The Gambler

Jacquotte Delahaye was a 17th century French pirate, or buccaneer, and her hunting ground was the Caribbean
Sea.

She was originally from Haiti and turned to piracy after the death of
her family. She faked her own death and later returned under her own
name.

Her nickname was ‘Back from the Dead Red,’ because of her vivid red
hair and seeming ability to return from the grave.

You can read more about Jacquotte Delahaye at The Book Swarm on May 16th, as part of the Queens of the Sea series. (I’ll update the link after it’s been posted.)

Other sources say she was active around 1650 or so, and that she started out disguising herself as a man but later worked under her own identity — so I gave her men’s clothes, but cute ones. The doublet just doesn’t seem very nautical to me… maybe it could be for formal occasions. In any case, at this point we are just a couple of decades away from the kinds of clothes, like waistcoats and justacorps, commonly associated with the “golden age of piracy.”

Don’t forget to enter my contests! Click here for the chance to win an original drawing, for those of you who can give me an address if you win, and click here for the chance to design a pirate outfit, open to everyone!

Check out the tour schedule here! And for more information about Random Magic, here’s the trailer for the book.

Also, check out the Rum + Plunder treasure hunt for more pirate prizes!

Queens of the Sea #2: Lai Choi San’s White Satin Robe

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Welcome to day two of the Queens of the Sea series, part of the Random Magic Pirates book tour! Here is the mini-bio for today’s pirate, provided again by Lyrika:

Lai Choi San
The Queen of Macau Pirates
(or)
The Jade Empress
(or)
The Enigmatic Empress

Lai Choi San was a 20th century Chinese pirate, who prowled the South
China Sea during the 1920s and into the 1930s.

She commanded a fleet of a dozen junks based in the South China
Sea. Finnish adventurer and freelance writer Aleko E. Lilius managed to find a way to
work among her crews, and he recounts his impression of the
cool-headed commander this way:

‘What a woman she was! Rather slender and short, her hair jet black,
with jade pins gleaming in the knot at the neck, her earrings and
bracelets of the same precious apple-green stone.

She was exquisitely dressed in a white satin robe fastened with green
jade buttons, and green silk slippers. She wore a few plain gold rings
on her left hand; her right hand was unadorned. Her face and dark eyes
were intelligent…and rather hard. She was probably not yet forty.

Every move she made and every word she spoke told plainly that she
expected to be obeyed, and as I had occasion to learn later, she was
obeyed.’ (I Sailed with Chinese Pirates (1931), Aleko E. Lilius

Lai Cho San was also the inspiration for a 1930s comic strip,
Terry and the Pirates, featuring a
cold-blooded villainess, The Dragon Lady. The series, by artist Milton
Caniff, sparked a radio series (1937-1948) and a later TV series
in the early 1950s.

You can read more about Lai Choi San at In the Library of LadyViolet, as part of the Queens of the Sea series.

It was kind of Lilius to describe her outfit so well, wasn’t it? That made today’s overall design very easy to come up with, meaning that I could spend less time thinking about it and more time admiring pictures of 1920s-era vintage Chinese robes. I could have sworn that the word “necklaces” appeared in that description at some point, though. Oh well. I’m sure she had a least a couple of necklaces!

Imagine trying to keep a white satin outfit like that clean anywhere near a ship… Even if it’s not what she might have worn on duty, so to speak, it can’t have been easy. I imagine that’s one perk of what was no doubt a generally rough existence — she could task some poor underling with the duty of keeping her clothes immaculate. Although, given that she may have never existed at all, I suppose a fantasy character could keep all manner of delicate white clothing perfectly clean.

Don’t forget to enter my contests! Click here for the chance to win an original drawing, for those of you who can give me an address if you win, and click here for the chance to design a pirate outfit, open to everyone!

I wanted to clarify one thing about the first contest – it’s open to international visitors as well as domestic ones. And yes, all you have to do is post a comment to enter — although it is a little boring for me to watch the comments roll in, next time I do something like this, I will make people write something more imaginative! But I won’t change the rules on you mid-stream, this time.

Don’t forget: check out the tour schedule here! And for more information about Random Magic, here’s the trailer for the book.

Also, check out the Rum + Plunder treasure hunt for more pirate prizes!

Green and Red Elf Gown

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So this dude named Brian won my Academy Awards contest, and he wrote:

In an alternate version of “The Lord of The Rings”, the Council of Elrond determines that the only way to get the One Ring safely to Mordor is to deliver it using an iconic promotional vehicle from 20th century American culture. Please color the black and white elf gown (with circlet) to suit an fair elfin maiden as she pilots the following vehicle to Mordor: http://bit.ly/bmJLcf

This guy is obviously bad news, but he won, so I guess I’d better humor him…

Nah, just kidding. He’s my beloved husband, which usually disqualifies him from my contests, but since I was open to having multiple winners for that particular contest I thought I might as well give him a chance for once. I rather ended up regretting it; somehow, when faced with such a description, my normal creativity deserted me entirely.

“I won it fair and square,” he says. “Not saying ya didn’t,” I reply. “But I’m excluded from the future ones, right?” “Well, I usually reset it every year…” “I’m excluded for bad behavior.” “Yeah, I think so.”

Anyways, I’ve put it off for all this time, but I thought I had better just get it done and hopefully never think of it again. So here we have the ketchup-swirled tunic with mustard yellow borders over a gown patterned with an abstract relish-and-white onion design; a mustard yellow circlet completes the ensemble. Oh well. This is why I do the paperdolls and he writes snarky things on Twitter.

Help me get the taste of this one out of my mouth (rimshot) – let’s do a new contest! Thanks to Brian for suggesting the question for me, as penance. Winner, as always, gets to tell me how to color a black-and-white dress (and please please choose pretty colors).

What (present-day) US state was my great-grandfather born in? At the time, my great-great-grandparents owned a hardware store in a boom town.

Update: Nikki guessed it! He was born in Skagway, Alaska.

Green Regency Gown with Ivy Pattern

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Ana won my last contest for guessing that my favorite flower is the morning glory, and she wrote:

I’d like this dress https://lianaspaperdolls.com/2010/06/12/black-and-white-regency-gown-with-flower-lace/ coloured please.

The main part of the dress I’d like an English Ivy pattern, with vines looking like they are growing up from the bottom of the skirt. I’d like the background of the dress to be a vibrant shade of green like lush grass in summer and the piping and lace to be an earth tone pink.

You know how if you put fabric or paper out in the sun it fades, and you can create patterns but placing objects on it? And then the background is faded version of the pattern? Well if you were to reverse that process so that the main part of the fabric was covered (i.e not faded) and the pattern was faded that is how I imagine the ivy pattern on the dress to look like. similar to the pattern in the gold on this dress https://lianaspaperdolls.com/2010/06/23/colored-1700s-gown-in-gold-white-and-pink/ but more pronounced.

I kinda hope that makes sense, but if not I’m sorry and I did my best.

It made sense, but I don’t know if I quite captured your vision, Ana, so I hope you like it!

I hate to disappoint people, especially my mom, but I won’t be drawing the royal wedding gown: the biggest reason is that I avoid drawing sheer fabrics because the dolls have different skin colors. It’s been suggested that I do two versions, but when the create-a-doll page is up — which I have been working on, albeit off and on — there will be around seven skin colors, so I’m not going to spend that much time on a dress that would be limited to the two dolls that are currently available.

Beyond that, I didn’t really pay attention to the wedding preparations or ceremony, I admired a dozen pictures of the dress and assorted hats, and now it’s out of my mind, which is essentially where it should be. Although I do draw a lot of pretty princess gowns, my affection for them stems from my deep love for fancy dresses and fairy tales; it has nothing to do with real royalty, which just strikes me as sad, stifling and generally illogical. If not for the lace part there’s a good chance I would have drawn the wedding gown, as it’s an iconic dress and a beautiful one, but I don’t care enough to spend the time on a substitute just for the sake of commemorating the fact that the House of Windsor is propagating itself. (I may yet make an exception for Princess Beatrice’s hat.)

If you all are so keen on royalty, I’ll put some time into a series of posts about the Japanese imperial family weddings I’ve been batting around in my mind for a while; my opinion of the Japanese institution isn’t particularly different from my opinion of the English one (if anything it is more critical), but the clothes and history interest me more. And maybe another paperdoll blogger will pick up my slack and draw the dress? Send me a link if you do, I’ll post it here.

Let’s do another contest… Here’s a good one. I’m in this picture. Which one of these kids is me?
Winner gets to choose a black and white drawing for me to color as they direct, as usual!
Update: Shannon guessed it! I’m the girl with short hair at the top right, underneath the outstretched arm of the boy on the chair.