Green Dress with White Tunic and Daisies for April

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So I did a birthday dress for January and then proceeded to ignore February and March — I’m very sorry, anyone with birthdays in those months who was waiting for one. (I’ll do them this month, since belated birthday presents are better than nothing, right?) This is a dress for April, since one of the birth flowers for this month is the daisy. Like January’s, it’s intended to be vaguely angelic, but not based in any particular theology — I think of the birthday dresses as like those little statues you can buy for a kid every year where the characters get older, actually.

January’s drives me crazy, because the white part on the red skirt, there were supposed to be flowers in there, and I got fed up with the dress and it was late and I never drew them in. Maybe I’ll dig it out of my box and put them in, then it won’t bug me… This one I like a lot, though, so that makes up for many failures.

Yeah, no April Fool’s joke for you this year, sorry. Maybe next year!


Mermaid Monday 12: Black and White Mermaid for Coloring

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So now the black and white princess has a black and white mermaid friend to play with, or a mermaid secret identity perhaps. Either way, more coloring fun for you, less work for me, something that sounds good this evening! E-mail colored creations to me, or post a link in the comments. As far as the princess goes, I love how Freyja’s rich, warm version turned out, and yeah, I can’t not like anything my husband does.


Black and White Princess Gown for Coloring

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Posted without a lot of comment, as I’ve got to get out of the house, like, ten minutes ago — I’m pretty sure it was Fibro Witch who suggested something to color, so here’s a fussy, generic princess sort of gown with, hopefully, lots of scope for coloring imagination. If you color a version of it, send it to me and I’ll post it! I’ll color a version, too.


Doris Day’s White Evening Gown from Pillow Talk

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I got an e-mail from one of my readers, Kim, a while back, talking about the designs of Irene Lentz, a costume designer who worked on some Doris Day movies that she recommended to me, one of which was Pillow Talk. I have to do further viewing before I can be familiar with her work, though — it looks like Pillow Talk was costumed by Jean Louis (who, credited for “gowns,” probably designed this costume) and Bill Thomas. Anyways, whoever designed them, I love Doris Day’s outfits in the movie. Her character is an interior designer, and she always looks fabulous: the movie was released in 1959, and her clothes are right there between smart 1950s femininity and 1960s clean style. The movie itself was something I had to kind of turn off the overly serious and feminist parts of my brain to enjoy: I know it’s supposed to be a light-hearted sex comedy, and the way the guy manipulated the girl (and her revenge) was really quite amusing. Still, when viewers are supposed to take the baby at the end as proof that our hero and heroine achieved ‘happily ever after’, it signified to me “she’s got three, four years tops before he gets bored of her.” Yeah, call me a cynic but I can’t watch a movie like that without scripting out a few months worth of premarital counseling for the dysfunctional couple in my head. Doesn’t mean I don’t have the other Day/Hudson movies on reserve at the library…