powder blue

White Christmas Dress with Red or Blue Candy Cane Striped Sleeves and Santa Hat

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Click for larger version (PNG):red stripes, blue stripes; click for PDF version: red stripes, blue stripes. Click here for the list of dolls.

Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it! To those of you who don’t, I hope you can bear with three days of Christmas-themed stuff. If the candy cane stripes are just too much to bear, I think this wintery blue version is rather sweet, too.

Actually, this dress started life as a princess gown that had three layers right down to the floor, but the first two were too long compared to the third, and the proportions bothered me; then, I thought that the candy-cane striped sleeves looked kind of cartoony for a formal ballgown, but just perfect with a sassy above-the-knee circle skirt and a Santa hat! When I was sketching this gown out, I was thinking of the collectible holiday Barbie dolls of my youth: I don’t believe I ever had any, but I appreciated them. (That would explain the extra-puffed sleeves: I was a kid of the ’80s.)

Because of the placement of the skirt and sleeves, if you were to cut this out, you’d have to cut a space for the hand inside the skirt, just under the sleeves. If anyone attempts it, please let me know how it goes.

Whenever I put up two colors of something, I always have to ask…

poll by twiigs.com

Powder Blue Airship Hostess Jumper with White Blouse via A Dress A Day

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So I saw this pattern on A Dress A Day and thought it was just beyond cute and it needed paperdolling. Seriously, look at the little collar and the pointy shoulders. Adorable. Erin thought it made a good airship hostess uniform, so I added a little cap and little airships around the hem. (Yes, that’s what they’re supposed to be…) Check out the original post and a post about a version of the dress being auctioned off.

I don’t have too much else to say about this dress other than that drawing tiny airships is fun and that my scanner is starting to annoy me (see the banding? It’s been doing that recently, plus the blue is cuter in person), so please go create a dress for me on my dress wiki.

Halloween Costume Series Day 4 / Mermaid Monday #6: Pearl Blue Mermaid Costume with Pearl and Lapis Lazuil Strands and Pink Shells

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You thought I forgot about Mermaid Monday! I never forget about things, I just don’t do them and then become consumed by guilt.

The good thing about my October project is that it’s quite freeing not to worry in the least about what time period something is from or if it’s accurate or realistic. I started sketching for my ghost, ending up with something that looked like a ghostly Juliet (hence the reference in the text) and thought, well, is this OK? Is it like something from that time period? Maybe I’d better look it up… Then I realized it was a costume and I had perfect license not to care. Since with my historical dresses I attempt to stay in the style of the times right down to the year without just copying another dress, it can be difficult to do them properly. This month, I’m winging it! and it’s great!

The bad side is that most of my outfits are costumes in some way anyways, so the energy I don’t devote to thinking “is it accurate?” instead goes to “is it a costume?” There can be no mermaid costume in our world better than the costumes Iris and Sylvia already have access to, since our world does require feet. With imagination, most everything I’ve drawn is a costume already and my October project is redundant. (But fun!)

There are plenty of masquerades in the mermaid world, both among the mermaids and on land with the humans and elves, but the mermaids certainly don’t dress up like mermaids and for any of the others to do so would be in bad taste. No, this costume (really just a hobble skirt with ruffles sewn on the bottom) is most certainly from our world, and since here there are no real mermaids to compare it to it does its job well enough. What do mermaids dress up as for their Halloween, you might wonder? Unsurprisingly, they dress as things that scare them or things they aspire to, although mermaid takes on human culture are becoming popular as well. There are three more Mondays in the month, so we’ll see.

New poll on the 8th! So don’t neglect to take this one…

poll by twiigs.com