garland

March Birthday Gown with Blue Tunic and Daffodils

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

Today, we have a March birthday gown; the birthstone is aquamarine and the birth flower is the daffodil. I always like doing these, but I have an uncomfortable feeling that in all these months I’ve been drawing them, I’ve skipped a couple of months entirely… I had better make a chart sometime.

“What do you think you’ll do today?” my husband asked me.
“Oh, a March paperdoll.”
“Like the Ides of March?”
“Well, not that kind of March.”
Please do refrain from getting backstabbed in this dress, the blue is far too nice to spoil!

I think I have pretty much recovered from being so horribly sick, so I’ll do my best to get back on the paperdoll schedule! (True, today’s is a little late, but where I am, it’s 10:30. That’s not even approaching midnight! Plenty of time.)

White Natasha Liana Gown from Holy Clothing’s Design Contest with Flower Garlands

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

So last year I entered a contest run by my favorite clothing store, Holy Clothing. Rather than “favorite” it is probably more accurate to say that they are the only clothing store I have any regard for whatsoever! This might be a surprise, but I actually hate shopping for clothes: I just find it tedious and frustrating, I don’t like hardly any of what I find in stores, I’d rather spend money on other things and I don’t care for fashion in the least. Since I found Holy Clothing, one of their skirts paired with a plain white shirt has pretty much been my uniform.

They held a design contest late last year, promising to make the winner’s drawing into a real dress: I sent in three potential designs and one of them was chosen as one of four that were then voted on by the company’s Facebook fans. (I can’t find the link to the voting anymore, which is a shame, as all the sketches were very lovely.) I got $100 in store credit for winning, and the dress was supposed to be called the Liana Dress. It took longer than they expected to translate the sketch into a dress, though, and then they wanted to release it in the right season, so it just went on sale this month.

Here’s the original sketch, as well. This wasn’t my favorite of my three designs, and actually it’s not one I’d generally rush to buy myself because I wear my Holy Clothing stuff every day, so I don’t really have much interest in the garments that seem too costume-like or impractical. The reason I designed it is that a fair amount of people use Holy Clothing dresses as wedding dresses, and so I was thinking, what would my ideal Holy Clothing-style wedding gown look like? For this reason, I hope that the next run of the dresses comes in white as well, but in the meantime I drew my own white version for today, with two garlands to choose from. (I don’t own it yet, though, so I don’t know the details of the finished product; please don’t take my drawing as representative of the real thing.)

Unfortunately, by the time the dress came out (almost a year after the contest ended), it seems that some wires had gotten crossed and they neglected to name it after the winner, calling it Natasha instead. I had really been more excited about that than the $100 store credit, so I was disappointed and wrote about it, asking for the name to be changed; after Christmas, they did change the name to the Liana Dress! (Thank you to everyone who agreed it should be changed – I don’t know if it affected the decision, but personally I appreciated it!)

Well, in any case, if you want to wear something I designed, this may be as close as you’ll ever get! Check Holy Clothing out, as well as their very active Facebook fan page.

Medieval Gown colored in Yellow and Red

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The last time I got my mitts on this poor dress, I really made a hash of it, so, time to try again. I like it better when someone tells me what colors to use, though — it feels like a surprise I can enjoy, too. Sadly, I can’t ask Brian, or you would be seeing a muted turquoise/salmon pink medieval ensemble.

I’m curious about you all, and I don’t believe I’ve done this poll before. Mom and I call my readers “the paperdoll girls,” and I wonder if it’s about right. (Certainly I do have a couple of male readers — a minority to be sure, but I do!)

poll by twiigs.com

Black and White Medieval Gown with Flower Garlands

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

I wanted to play with long sleeves a little more, so that’s where this dress came from. You would have to cut the edge of the sleeve for the hand to fit, but I have confidence my readers or their adult paperdoll providers can figure it out.

I said there was a special contest coming up, and here it is! I use last.fm, a site that provides music recommendations, Internet radio and so on, mostly because I always listen to the radio while I’m working, but also partially because I’m a sucker for little graphs based on what I listen to. I was thinking it would be fun to do some paperdolls based on the music I like listening to, but there’s so much I couldn’t decide what to try.

That’s where you come in! To enter, take a look through my last.fm profile, choose any artist I’ve ever listened to, and post it as a comment. On the 28th, I’ll use a random number generator to pick five comments, and then draw something based in some way on those artists. For example, if one of the winners picked Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, I listen to the Scheherazade suite all the time, so perhaps I’d do something based off of the Arabian Nights, something from the ballet, or maybe something from 1888 when it was composed.

Here’s the rules:
1) Even if you’ve won one of my black-and-white contests, you can enter this one.
2) You can only make one guess, and it has to be on this post.
3) Entries will be accepted until 9 PM EST, June 28th.
4) Yes, Brian, even you can enter.
5) I’ll take suggestions, but I reserve the right to make the final decision on what exactly to draw.