White Medieval Wedding Gown with Long Sleeves and Gold and Silver Embroidery

Click for larger version (PNG); click for PDF version. Click here for the list of dolls.

“This may or may not influence what I end up drawing,” I wrote when I put up the wedding dress poll, but then “flowing, fantasy” gowns got over 50% of the vote, and, well, allow me to shamelessly pander for a night. I hope this is the sort of thing that people were envisioning; sorry that the bouquet looks so awkward. I envisioned it as a bouquet of ivy and sweet peas, incidentally, although I got a little tired towards the end.

Hey, let’s do a new contest! This one will be easy, so someone’s bound to guess it soon.
Last week (from the 8th to the 14th), how many different countries did my site visitors come from?
Post your guess in the comments! Again, the rules:
1) If you’ve already won this year, please don’t enter.
2) One guess per person per day.
3) If no one gets the exact date by 9:00 PM EST, June 19th, I’ll pick the closest guess.
4) I’ll give one hint each day the contest goes on.

Don’t worry, trazy, I will color yours next week, after I’m done with my week of weddings.


Mermaid Monday #18: Red Tattered Mermaid Wedding Dress for a Land Wedding

Click for larger version (PNG); click for PDF version. Click here for the list of dolls.

For obvious reasons, mermaids prefer thin, delicate fabrics for their undersea fashion statements. These are usually just in single layers, possibly two or three extremely light layers for special occasions or if your situation in life is such that you don’t have to move around too much; anything beyond that registers less as sumptuous and more as vulgar and ridiculous, if not simply dangerous. There is a mermaid fable, in the Aesop vein, about a particularly vain young thing with a pearly pink tail and a fondness for adornment. Despite the warnings of her more practical sisters, she kept adding layer after layer of richly embroidered skirts and tops and sleeves, as well as bangles and necklaces and hair ornaments; in the end her outfit becomes just too heavy and billowy to swim properly in, and she gets eaten by a shark. But then, there is also a mermaid fairy tale about a vain young thing with a pearly blue tail, who starts out with too many layers and sheds them, one by one, to give to others in need; in proper fairy tale fashion, the recipients repay her kindness later on. (From the mermaid point of view, neither story is a caution against vanity per se: the latter is about generosity, the former merely about self-preservation.)

This sleek, light aesthetic often carries over to what mermaids might wear on land. As a matter of fact, most mermaids mentally class humans with other mammals such as dolphins, so it’s only natural to them to consider themselves superior in every way. Because of this perspective, mermaids tend to consider their own style to be obviously better than the fuller, often gaudier fashions popular among human women. Still, sometimes even for a mermaid it’s fun to pile on the fabric. This bride wanted most elements of mermaid wedding gown design for her own dress: the traditional red, the romantic tatters, the bare midriff that would shock most human brides. Indeed the top is such a common design for mermaid wedding outfits that it’s rather cliché. But now that she doesn’t have to worry about sharks, she wanted a skirt with something like ten layers of fabric. The resulting creation looks odd to both human and mermaid eyes alike: the mermaids criticize the mismatch of tatters and heavy skirt, while the humans scorn just about every other part of it. But the bride and her partner adore it, and they’ve never quite been known for paying undue attention to the opinions of others.

The tatters are a long-standing symbol of enduring, patient love among mermaids (and someday, remind me, I’ll tell you the story that most mermaids know a version of that started the trend). Of course, to humans, it just looks ragged and ridiculous. The tailor of this particular outfit took one last look at her beautifully balanced layers of fabric, then actually curled up in a corner of a different room and cried while her apprentice “distressed” the edges.


Mermaid Monday #17: Layered Wedding Gown with Pink Pearls, For A Mermaid-Human Wedding

Click for larger version (PNG); click for PDF version. Click here for the list of dolls.

It happens, sometimes, that a mermaid falls in love with a human: maybe with a sailor, a brave seventh son, or maybe a shipwrecked prince. There are some that choose to keep their mermaid form (the houses built by such couples, designed to be comfortable for both sides, are architectural marvels) but many choose to pay a mystic for the spell that will grant them a pair of legs instead. Sometimes the love-struck mermaid forsakes the seas as part of her payment; sometimes she keeps her options open. Wherever the relationship may end up in ten years time, at any rate the wedding that starts it off is always a sight to behold.

I’ve written about traditional mermaid weddings, with their motifs of red seaweed and tattered gowns, but what looks romantic to mermaids just looks ragged to humans. Sometimes the bride will brook no compromise whatsoever, going with a dress that could just as easily be worn for a traditional mermaid wedding, except that it is the length humans expect for their weddings. These gowns will be the traditional bright red and have tattered edges, but they may also have more fabric than is considered practical or fashionable for an underwater wedding, just because the designer can get away with billowing skirts and so on on land. Such gowns are breathtaking, if unconventional to both humans and mermaids. But most such brides harbor romantic dreams of a human-style white wedding dress. (There’s a word in the mermaid language for the oddballs obsessed with human culture: our closest translation might be something like “xenophiliac” or “human otaku.”) As this bride did, they may include red accents or other reminders of the sea, perhaps as a nod to their heritage, perhaps just to keep their mothers happy.

I decided to go back to just the dresses in the thumbnails after all. Thanks, everyone for bearing with my experiment and giving your opinions!

No one has guessed the right answer to my question yet. This time, there are only 365 choices, so it should be possible. (I didn’t get married on Leap Year’s Day — no, that doesn’t count as today’s clue!)
What day is my wedding anniversary?
Post your guess in the comments! Again, the rules:
1) If you’ve already won this year, please don’t enter.
2) One guess per person per day.
3) If no one gets the exact date by 9:00 PM EST, June 9th, I’ll pick the closest guess.
4) I’ll give one hint each day the contest goes on.
– Today’s hint: It was in the summer.

This is my second mermaid-on-land dress in a row for Mermaid Monday. Shall I do a proper one with a tail next week, or shall I show you a traditional mermaid wedding dress adapted to land?


Strapless A-Line Wedding Dress with Feather Fascinator and Blue and Yellow Bouquet

Click for larger version (PNG); click for PDF version. Click here for the list of dolls.

I’ve been thinking a lot about weddings lately — specifically Japanese imperial weddings, but weddings all the same. It seems like everyone (in America, that is: the sort of thing one wears for an imperial wedding ceremony is rather different) is wearing strapless gowns with A-line skirts in recent years, and I thought it might be fun to take a stab at one myself. Plus, it afforded more opportunities to play with the white gel pen!

I have no idea if blue and light yellow is a popular color combination these days, I just wanted to use some unexpected colors. The fascinator is based on one created by Brian’s cousin Emily. As for the choice of strapless-A-line itself, it’s been popular so long that I’m a little bored of it, but it’s still quite pretty and it has the further advantage of not being a pick-up skirt.

By the way, I’m taking a cue from the new paperdoll blog A Paper Closet and showing the outfit on the doll instead of just having it floating on an invisible mannequin. Check that blog out, by the way, and all of the other paper doll blogs I’ve put up on my blogroll, after losing all my links in a server move. There have been some great ones that started while I was on hiatus, like A Paper Doll Blog and Karen’s Paper Dolls.

You get one more clue today, before the contest ends…

How many visits did my site get between (and including) April 1, 2010 and April 30, 2010?

Don’t forget the rules…
1) If you’ve already won this year, please don’t enter.
2) One guess per person per post.
3) If no one gets the exact number by 9:00 PM EST, June 2nd, I’ll pick the closest guess.
4) I’ll give one hint each day the contest goes on.
– Sunday’s hint: It’s between 10,000 and 30,000
– Yesterday’s hint: The middle digit is 6.
– Today’s hint: The fourth digit (counting from the right) is an odd number.