1955 Rockabilly Dress (inspired by my new Crystal Blue Trek Wasabi)

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So I got a new Trek Wasabi. I haven’t had a bike in years, much less a good one, and I’m so excited about it. This is a really geeky bike; not geeky in the sense of “My new bike is perfectly aerodynamic and has fifteen thousand speeds” but more of like horribly cute and retro. (Brian thinks I’m crazy for getting a one-speed, but I don’t mind — I never could work gears well anyways, and we live in Ann Arbor, not San Francisco.) I’ve wanted a bike for a while, one that I would actually use and love, and I think Wasabi here fits the bill. I drew this dress based on Wasabi’s coloring and a rockabilly dress pattern from Damn Good Vintage.


Cloud Strife’s Purple Dress from Final Fantasy VII

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This demure-seeming dress is actually not as innocent as one might think. It belongs to a videogame character named Cloud Strife; with each successive post-Final Fantasy VII appearance he makes, he becomes cooler and cooler. It’s as if to help us all forget that in FF7, rather shortly after you first meet him, you had to dress him up like a girl to gain access to the red light district. (The first time I played that part, I had my mom watching. Awkward.) Your female co-conspirators Tifa and Aeris have plunging necklines and bared arms in their chosen dresses, but with Cloud we are spared that vision…

FF7 has been on my mind recently on account of Brian starting to play it again, but our PS2 is now quite thoroughly kaput, and I don’t think he’ll have the heart to start it up again just to have it crash once more.


Marilyn Monroe’s Black Fringed Dress from Some Like It Hot

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So it turns out that Hulu has Some Like It Hot available for free, and I just had to watch it yesterday. Marilyn’s really good dresses have see-through parts, ruling them out for my paperdolls, but I liked this one that she wears near the beginning, even if I’m not quite sure I got the details right.


Pink and White Princess Gown (based off of Janel’s Pink Birthday Dress)

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This is based off of a dress that Janel made for her daughter’s birthday. After yesterday’s Calamity Jane, I needed to draw something extremely cute!

In my imagination, this version of the dress belongs to a young princess who loves pretty things, but isn’t prissy or as high-maintenance as a lot of princesses are these days. She loves being outdoors and she especially loves gardening. She’s growing tomatoes and wildflowers now, and she feels like she works hard to make her little garden grow, although that’s kind of a pleasant fiction created by the indulgent head gardener. I like her and would write more about her, but I didn’t finish this dress until it was late, and I’m tired, so she will have to wait for another dress…

If you remember a different shade of pink for this dress, it’s not just your imagination: when I first posted it, I posted the first version, which scanned very poorly (the color changed, I lost a lot of detail on the white parts, and so on). This version is closer to my original drawing.