Dear Lucy, (Dress 112)

Dear Lucy,
The first time I met you you were wearing a man's shirt and a pair of tights.
Damn brave.
This one's for you:
(The 'tails' are the back of the dress. cotton.)
All my love,
IP

Dear Wine and Cheese (Dresses 67 and 68)

Dear Wine and Cheese
you are the only things i have ingested today. not feeling so good.

All my love,

Dear Monfash (Dress 50)

Dearest Monfash,
Run by the lovely Benny, you're a record of the interesting, the surprising and the just plain crazy fashion my fellow uni students get away with. Seeing what you pick from the melting pot of clashing styles makes me look more broadly across the campus. I found that the day-to-day fashion which most fascinates me is the more simple, well tailored designs with small pockets of detail or bright colour.

(Dress Specs: Each dark section is a continuation of the light section above it- folded over on the base line, showing the lining,- then it is tacked up, pressed into place, and the next light section is pieced in underneath it. Cotton with satin tartan lining.)
All my love,

Dear Bree (Dress 10)

Dear Bree,
You were wearing a lovely pinafore at uni the other day, and it got me thinking about that lovely cut, and a whole lot of vintage-thrifting-blog-reading got me thinking about oversized bakelite buttons...
Ta Da!

All my love,

Dearest Ovid/Ted Hughes (Dress 9)

Dearest Ovid/Ted Hughes,

I was reading your short story (from Metamorphasis) about the abduction and Rape of Proserpina and the mental image of 'She was heaping the folds of her dress with flowers' meant that all day my ideas involved grecian inspired dresses and using Kansashi Flowers (Japanese fabric flowers) to 'spill' flowers down the front.

This is a two-tier meshy material dress, with full circle skirts and piping on the bottom hem to accentuate the fullness of the skirts. There is a headband attatchment that has a ribbon (possibly wire-structured?) to 'spill' the Kanzashi through the hair. below the bust (the two lines of flowers from left and right that meet in the middle) are attatched directly to the dress.

Kansashi are an AMAZING artform, really delicate and pretty- but fiddly and difficult to make. I'm yet to perfect it, but I plan to do some serious folding in the next little while.

Vivcore has a phenomenal resource page where she posts the extreme old-school Kanzashi she makes:

The occasional Pop-Inspired arrangement:

And tutorials, with step-by-step photos.

Hurrah!

(Tutorials FTW. Some tutorials planned for ImPrint in the next little while.)

All my love,