Year: 2008

Aqua 1950s V-Neck Dress from A Dress A Day

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I e-mailed Erin from A Dress A Day last week and submitted my blog for her Linktastic Fridays, and today, when she posted it, my traffic went waaaay up. Since I started I’ve gotten maybe a hundred, two hundred hits a day, and on Friday, over a thousand! My stats graph looks like a cute little worm sticking its head up and looking around curiously.

A Dress A Day always makes me wish I could sew. I can’t sew well, and I’ve thought recently of taking a class, but it is a little hard to be all that enthusiastic about it when two hours with the Prismacolors will get me a dress, done exactly as I wish it, with divine colors and as much lace, frills, jewels and amazing fabric as I care to lavish on for rather less than I’d pay for the real thing. And if I can’t wear it, Sylvia can, and that way it never gets dirty or torn. If I had carte blanche and a personal dressmaker, I would wear things like this all day, but as it is I have colored pencils, and that works for me. Anyways, this dress is based off of one on Erin’s page, although it’s more aqua and the collar isn’t quite right.

On a sadder note, I think we are entering the last days of my scanner. (You can kind of see the banding on the skirt, and that’s because I messed around with the placement; when I scanned it as I always do, the banding was VERY apparent…) Hopefully we’ll pick up a new one soon enough that I won’t have to miss any days. (I do a lot of the days in advance and post them later thanks to WordPress, but right now, I’m not any days ahead…)

Windows XP-tan

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Now, this one requires some explanation. The Wikipedia page gives more information than most humans really want to know, but I’ll explain here, too… There’s a huge Japanese image board (like a message board, only based around images) called Futaba Channel, which has spawned a bunch of memes and original characters. XP-tan here is one of them, along with 2K-tan, OS X-tan, Linux-tan and so on… They’re all representations of operating systems. (Although it’s expanded since then…DS-tan is an example.) The “tan” is a corruption of “chan,” which is an affectionate, informal Japanese name suffix. XP-tan here is essentially pretty but useless…

I was thinking about XP-tan because I use Windows XP for my job, since it and Internet Explorer are required for the ETS test rater setup. Thanks to Brian setting up Bootcamp on my system, I can switch back and forth easily, and since I work at home, it helps with the feeling of being done with work for the day… to switch from annoying, ugly XP to my lovely Mac OS is like coming home. (I use the wrong keyboard commands for about an hour, though…) There are various Mac OS-tans, but I couldn’t find one with a design that was as well-recognized as the Windows-based ones, and I didn’t really like the green one that Wikipedia bases its image on…

Yellow Flower Dress from the Far Side

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I was reading an old Far Side book the other day and I swear, half the women wear this dress. So I drew it, because I think it’s funny. (And “I think it’s funny” is always more than adequate justification for paperdolling. Yeah, I do it for the lulz.)

Now that I’m trained in teaching English as a second language, I often read things with an eye to explaining them to a non native speaker, or using them in a lesson. The Far Side fails those tests, 90% of the time, or at least it’d be really darn complicated… It’s amazing the amount of cultural background that goes into just a single one. I’d love to use them in a larger lesson plan, though…

Oz’s Female Form From The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

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After the eighteen hour exercise in class consciousness, eternally frustrated romance and parade of death that was North and South (I tease, I tease — actually I really enjoyed it, but it was somewhat hard to take at times), I thought that perhaps I would enjoy something lighter. So I’m now listening to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Of course I’ve seen the movie, but I’ve never read the book before. I wasn’t sure about the paperdolling opportunities — Dorothy is too young, the Good Witch of the book is Munchkin-sized — and thought that I might be doing a Wicked Witch of the West outfit from this one. (And I may yet do so…) But there’s a part where Oz appears to the Scarecrow as a beautiful fairy, and the description says that she “was dressed in green silk gauze and wore upon her flowing green locks a crown of jewels. Growing from her shoulders were wings, gorgeous in color and so light that they fluttered if the slightest breath of air reached them.”

Now, after years of paperdolling, I cannot possibly read a paragraph like that one without thinking “Bingo!”…

So here is my interpretation of Oz’s female representation. I must confess, too, that if this hadn’t shown up I’d be drawing one of the Emerald City court ladies. I haven’t drawn anything green for a while, and it’s my favorite color!