Dear Edward Craven-Walker (Dress 19)

Dear Edward Craven-Walker

You utilised the fascination that is the contact between unmixable substances (in your case oil and wax, in mine- oil and water.) and created something that was a symbol of a generation. I used to have one as a small child- although I remember most of the appeal being that it was warm when I was reading and got cold hands in winter. Nevertheless!

All my
,

Dear Monash Radio (Dress 18)

Dear Monash Radio,

You host wonderful parties, full of people dancing exhuberantly unimpeded by embarrasment or fear. There is wonderful conversation to be had, and inspiring dresses to be seen. Therefore:

(Black mesh for the shoulders/sleeves area, Aluminium discs (2cm Diameterish?) sewn; scale-like on a satin-lined cotton shift.)

All my love

Dearest Frankie (Dress 17)

Dearest Frankie,
You're whimsical and fun, and unfortunately, you always run off the shelves so fast that i can't have a quick scan of the sweet and the silly. Oh well.
As summery weather quickly deserts us, here is the last of the spring picnic frocks.

(Cotton with applique in fabric and ribbon.)
All my love,

Dear Chekhov (Dress 16)

Dearest Chekhov,
You're REMARKABLY boring. It does not help that the lecturer looks like a marine biologist. Maybe next tuesday you'll get a dress with a turtle print or lizard scales or something. It would not surprise me: anything to distract myself from the brain-corroding boredom of this class.
I'm not particularly pleased with how today's dress turned out- it was meant to be more opulent and ridiculous, but I think i'm saving that for something Mcqueenesque and/or Baroque in the coming week.

Costume for one of his silly-girl characters. The upper portion of the flower is held in place with a choker-style ribbon tie. Muslin and Silk.

All my love,

Dear David Behar-Perahia (Dress 15)

Dear David Behar-Perahia.
Your gorgeous works captivated me at the Beit Ticho exhibition in early January, and have rested on my mind since.
http://ww.imj.org.il/exhibitions/2009/VideoDrawing/Bhar-Perahia.html
Today's dress mixes the physical act of drawing in time to music, and the act of drawing on the human body- the dress will be tight, with the contours of the lines drawn on in chalk, and then printed on with fabric paint.

All my love,

Dear John Noble (Dress 14)

Dearest John Noble,
You're a wonderful actor, and your portrayal of the (admittedly jackpot) character of Walter Bishop in the enjoyably silly/serious Fringe is a pleasure to watch. Particularly of interest to me is Walter's obsession with sense-memory (a passion I share) and his attention to detail, particularly in Season 1 where his attentiveness to the unique 'fingerprint' of a specific typewriter lead to a major plot revelation...
In honor of antique typewriters, with a footnote to Lee Alexander McQueen:

(Screen-Printed Cotton, black mesh patch for the " on the back/shoulderblades.)

All my love,

Dear John Gould(Dress 13)

Dearest John Gould,

I first experienced your research into birds when friends of the family, emptying out a warehouse they'd just bought, came upon a tattered, watermarked copy of your 'Birds of Australia' (I'm not sure which volume)

(Image credit: National Library of Australia Archives.)

The pages were stuck together and yellowed with age, but I remember gazing with some awe at the faded drawings (meticulous and strangely pretty- your wife's hand.). Today's dress would be printed with a pattern borrowed from those same meticulous drawings: perhaps a tawny frogmouth?

-Black heavy cotton, with a printed fine mesh back/capelet/ruff (all one piece.)-

All my love,

P.S. Sorry for the dreadful image res. I'm at the bf's house, will re-post later.

Dear Friday Night (Dress 12)

Dearest Friday Night,

You are a strange and elusive creature, prone to the bizarre, the wonderful, and the just plain stupid. Tonight's entertainment brought to you by the irritating couple sitting next to us, who were explaining to the waiter that they'd spent some time in japan and that the establishment he works at is really just 'cosmetic food' and not the real stuff... Because you're a real authority- Man who wears sunglasses at night. Douchebag extrordinaire.

Anyhow.

This work is a direction i'm looking at going in- dresses with architectural hints- yesterday's corsetry somehow blended with feathery textures and owl-tawny-colours. Let's see where this takes us, shall we?

All my love,

Dear Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin (Dress 11)

Dear Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin,
One of you, I think is hilarious. The other- not so much (could have something to do with the cruel and unusual massacre of one of my favourite plays ever... Cruelty to Rostand: IP says no.)
My point: 1/2 awesome, 1/2 awful, to the power of Academy Awards= pure butt-kissing-hollywood-schmoozing-BOREDOM. We get that Meryl's amazing. We get that you hate Zac Efron and Whatsisface Lautner because they're youthful. We get that ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE who got nominated needed to be mentioned and fauxcomplimented... Even Neil Patrick Harris, song and dancemeister extrordinaire was boring. How is that possible?
But it gave me time to look at the pretty dresses, and the bending motion of the song-and-dance number Vegas Showgirls' fans inspired the corset-boning in the back of this dress.

Off the shoulder burgundy crepe with architectural (metal) boning to enhance the curve of the back.
Now: Alec, man up. Stick with 30 Rock, that's your forte.
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,

Dear ShoulderDusters (Dress 8)

Dear ShoulderDusters,
You're kind of silly, and over-the top, but between a girl in my classes' Art Nouveau diary, and the tutor's earrings, I got some sort of strange costume.
(The piece to the left is the continuation of the back of the dress' 'top layer'. Detachable so that the bottom layer can be washed thoroughly, while the top layer is more slowly-delicately-hand-washed.) The piece to the right is a side-view.

I'm not sure what the costume is for, a personification of the moon or an elf of some sort.
All my love,

Dear Melbourne Weather,

Dear Melbourne Weather,

You're crazy and wild and wonderful. And when I saw piles of golf-ball sized hailstones piled up against the RMIT facade I knew you'd pop up in my designs at some point this week. All mixed in with the sweet pollockequeness of this exhibition by Julia Chiang:

(via designboom)

Comes on cotton, and could be done in particular colour groups (autumny colours, pastels, straight blues etc.)

Goodnight,
All my love,

Dear Melbournian Graffiti Artists (Dress 6)

Dear Melbournian Graffiti Artists,

Spending three hours (at best) on the craptastic victorian public transport system gives me a huge window of opportunity through which to study your work (pun very much intended.)

It's lovely; thankyou for the idea.

The Graffiti rabbit continues around the back, Stylised 'Flash' goes over the hip/waist and around the back of the dress. Printed on teeshirt material.

All my love,

Dearest Dana (Dress 5)

Dearest Dana S.,

Your gorgeous part of the lovely MADCube (Monash University Student-Run Gallery) Exhibition (Co-Curated by Flo D.-C.) had a strong emphasis on the prettiness of vintage pictureframes; and when I saw two people today wearing cutout-style clothing (the old-style ripped jeans-knees-look and the new striped leggings look- where there are slits laddering down the sides of the legs.) I just couldn't help but put it into the day's design.

I'm not happy with the drawing- I had such a clear image of the dress in my mind, but i'm not yet sure how to represent elements of that. The 'shredded' look on the sleeves and neckline is meant to be fraying, and the frames themselves are made of a slightly tougher linoleoum-esque material (so that the fabric does not stretch/warp). There is also a round/oval frame version.

Thanks Dana, for making (with the wonderful Flo) a lovely exhibition which I really enjoyed, and which (as would be obvious, seeing as it popped up in my work two weeks later) really stayed with me.

All my love,

Dearest Sean Ellis (Dress 4)

Dearest Sean Ellis,

There was this girl walking through the university in a pretty green and white polkadotted dress, and suddenly there sprang to mind this image, Sean Biggerstaff leaning on a freezer, staring, one arm propped up; as a galaxy of frozen peas melt at his feet.
(Cashback, Sean Ellis 2007)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTG7u1R6cUQ&feature=related
(See 1:50-2:05 in particular)
So gather the spots on your dress pretty girl, and you can have a galaxy of peas:
All my love,

(not so) Dearest Dell (computer fail.)

Dearest Dell,
Why is the SD card slot not working? You're mean.
All my love (except the love reserved for Macs.),

P.S. I will scan the dress and upload early tomorrow morning. Sorry!

Dearest Metlink (Dress 3)

Dearest Metlink,

In the lull of the to-ing-and-fro-ing of your trains I often daydream and mentally wander off staring at the clouds. Such is a day like today when the gorgeousness of the moon in the morning, and the happy advent of hot air balloons made for a moon-sky-inspired dress.
Two layers, one white silk with a light blue tint all over(except where the moon is), and the cotton underlay the more prominant image of the moon and clouds. Comes with a hot-air-balloon brooch for those days when you need a bit of colour.

All my love,

Dearest Co-Commuter (Dress 2)

Dearest Co-Commuter,
You had the most amazing eyes- they looked somewhat like a collage of autumn leaves in chocolate hues, and the idea of printing photographs of irises on fabric stayed on my mind, until this idea popped in:

Definately a better idea to start designing earlier in the day- I had time to work on both colouring/patterning and actual dress shape.
Really excited for tomorrow!
All my love,

Dear 6-Year old IP (Dress 1)

Dearest Six year old IP,

In memory of the traditional six-year-old's dress criteria (the only category of which is: does it look pretty when I twirl in a circle?) And to kick off the 365 days of dresses project:

I'm not alltogether pleased with today's outcome- but it was a crazily busy day, and since I promised myself that I wouldn't pre-plan any dresses I was rather pressed for time... I imagine the 'ring' patterns would fall quite prettily- in wavy monochrome.

All my love,

Dearest Philip, (A New Project)

Dear Philip,

It’s been four years since LiveJournal spotlight brought your ‘2006: A year of giving flowers to people’ project to my attention. It’s been a little while since then, and we have weathered the storms of the years (your blog is the only thing that has survived the shifts in my internet-content consumption). You travel all over the world, changing it intimately, and documenting it with gentle candour. I think it’s marvellous.

2005 started the projects, when you documented each day with two lines of iambic pentameter. 2006 was the start of your interactions with strangers, giving a flower to a different person every day of the year. 2007’s spiritual journey into the life of the saints was both serious, and silly, and marvellous in every way. 2008 harked back to the public interaction of 2006, with you following a different person every day and seeing where it led you. 2009 brought strangeness, silliness, and silver stars, as you altered a lemon in a different way every day:

In the present project, you are kissing a different person on the lips every day. For me, it is a gentle dialogue about the nature of intimacy, and both your most ambitious, and most interesting work yet.

In the same vein, I have been inspired to use this kind of motivational tool to commit myself to broadening my creative horizons.

From March 1^st, 2010, until February 28^th 2011, I intend to design a unique dress, every day. Each month, I will make the most well received dress. The intention is not only to keep my creative mind ticking, but to experiment with new approaches to design- taking inspiration from as many sources as possible, and seeing (and documenting) the elements of the day that have culminated in that design. For example, Fridays, when I have work, will most probably be influenced by the indie designs I see on most of the customers, peppered with the Haute Couture elements I pick up from reading magazines in the slow-periods. Mondays, when I have a full schedule of theatre classes, will no doubt include costume elements, and will be substantially more practical for long-term wear.

Thankyou Thiel, for the interesting reading, and the inspiration,

(Check him out at: http://thiel.livejournal.com/ )

All my love,

xox

IP.

Dear Ted Wallace (C/O Stephen Fry)

Dear Ted Wallace
It's probably a rather long stretch, but I just devoured your story (otherwise known as Stephen Fry's 'The Hippopotamus') and it was marvellous and frazzled and in the two days i just lay on my bed and read, and ate, and went to work, and came back to read some more, all the pent-up creativity of idle hands built and are now coming to life: shaping up to be: (and you'll like this; it is a list, after all)

1) Preliminary sketches for the Imprint-By-Ip Banner

(Have I mentioned watercolours are FTW?)

2) Easy peasy tutorial, up soon...

(Strangely simple... hmmm.)
And the early stages for what I think might turn out to be a cross between this:


Alice+Olivia Red Belted off-the-shoulder Dress (image credit: fashionfuss.com)
and this:

Jason Wu Isadora Sundress (image credit: Couturecarrie.com)

A most inspiring week to you all,
We'll see what we can glean from this crop of productivity,
All my love,
IP.

Dear Australia Post (Inspiration and Pannacotta)

First of all, I'd like to make note of the tragic loss of Lee Alexander McQueen this week. Many have exaulted his ground-breaking style, his love of quality and colour and inventiveness. For myself, having only just begun my forays into the world of fashion in an independant way- having all the clothes i own now part of a concerted choice to create a specific style- what really made McQueen stand out in a world of his own was his daring- to never be predictable or plain or anything less than completely unique. He had a strange and beautiful vision, the reverberations of which will be felt for many years to come.

you for employing me, giving me money to work a job that is massively hardcore for twenty minutes and then slack for five, so I can read all the newspapers and magazines, and see beautiful things like this:

Dear Australia Post,
Thank

Joseph Altazurra,Fall/Winter '09(Image Credit: http://josephaltazurra.com/collections/index.php?collection=13 )

And come across clever little recipes like this (altered with experiance):Buttermilk Panacotta (Grazia of 2nd week of Feb.)

900ml Pouring Cream (35% fat)3tsp Gelatin200g Sugar (I used brown sugar, which made it slightly burnt-sour, in a nice way. regular sugar would make it much simpler, although not nececarily nicer.)300ml Buttermilk
1) Bring the cream and sugar to a boil and swiftly remove from the heat,

2) GENTLY sprinkle the gelatin on the cream, one spoon at a time, stirring as you go (I had a mini-disaster with the Gelatin, where I sprinkled it all on in one go and it formed a crusty gooey mess... Let the cream cool a little, and then work SLOWLY. It's well worth it.)

3) Whisk (gently) the buttermilk into the cream/sugar/gelatin mix

4) Pour into moulds. Best if they're indapendant rubber ones (image credit: http://www.tradeindia.com/selloffer/1563397/Silicone-Bakewares-Muffin-Pans.html)I got my set in Israel, and they're really brilliant. Connected rubber moulds are alright, you can always just put cling film in the mould before you pour in the mixture, but it messes with the shape, so seperate is best.

5) Best to allow to set overnight, or at least for 6 hours.

6) When shucking the pannacotta, separate from the mould with a butterknife or skewer, hold a plate over the mould, flip upside down and then peel up the side of the mould (if it’s rubber). Then separate the top of the pannacotta from the mould with the knife/skewer.

7) Serve with syrup, fruit, or a combination. I drizzled mine in Orange Syrup- recipe below.

Orange Syrup
(Adapted from Stephanie Alexanders' The Cook's Companion)

Half a cup of Sugar
One Quarter of a cup of Water
One Half of a cup of Orange Juice
Peeled Pieces of half an Orange
Half a shot of Cointreau

1) Heat the Sugar and the Water on a medium heat until glassy bubbles start forming (they begin miniscule, allow them to reach a maximum of one centimetre)

2) At arms length (to avoid splatter) pour in the orange juice, and mix until the syrup is smooth.

3) Pour the syrup into a jar, or bowl, and and the peeled pieces of orange- each segment cut into four pieces- and the cointreau.

4) Drizzle over Pannacotta, or Pancakes, into Croissonts (Plain or Almond) or other Baked goods which require a little spicing.

Never be afraid to Experiment: spices can open the simplest of flavors. Between steps 4 & 5 of the Pannacotta, you can sprinkle cardomom, cinnamon, or another spice into the mould- it makes for an interesting aesthetic experiance, as well as a more subtle gastronomic one. For a dinner party, it could be interesting to make many small petit-four sized pannacotta, and give each guest one of each combination- one plain, one with orange syrup, one with cardomom, one with cinnamon, one with coarse coffee grounds- the possibilities are endless!

All my love,

IP.