Dearest Mario (Dress 23)

Dearest Mario (Dress 23)

You're turning 21 this saturday! And since you're wonderful (and wonderfully strange), you're having a Toga Party (which should be fun). Seeing as I havn't any togas lying about (surprising really... I have a ballgown, a velvet bodysuit, an oversized tutu, but no toga.), I've been thinking about what i'll make, which (as inspired by the hooded-flowing gown I saw on Charlotte Kemp Muhl in a magazine today at work) turned out something like this:

(headband affixed hood, two grades of mesh, one elastic-blend under-playsuit)
All my love,

Dearest Federation Square (Dress 22)

Dearest Federation Square,

Passing by you on the tram, delirious with the current illness that seems to have everyone in it's grasp, I gaze at the gorgeous panelling, remeniscent of the beautiful panelling on antique planes.

(via johnnyjet.com)

Which reminds me of the absolutely STUNNING original 1960's Ford Falcon belonging to the greengrocer, distressingly bad condition, except for the perfect hood ornament, a flying aeroplane/stingrayesque shape...

(via taillightking.com)

And then, we have the 'no hangers here' dress:

(sorry about the poor quality of the image. I'll do it later when I feel better.)

All my love,

Dear MadebyRAE (Dress 21)

Dearest Rae,

Because I’m designing every day, I've been coming to realise there are certain design-crutches I lean on- I'm very prone to dress-specific printing (particularly in dresses 19, 15, 6 and 3) and over-the-top stiff-shaping that wouldn't really be practical. What I love most about your designs is their utility and simplicity- they apply to all types of fabric patterns, so if you find something that you really like, you can make/buy it in various patterns. I bought two different prints (blue and silver flowers
 ,and red and gold stripes) from the upholstery centre near my house (5$AU for 2m. they must be insane!) and I've been thinking about what I could make out of them. Then I saw the Buttercup Bag (Made by Rae, via: The PomPom) and all was revealed:

(Dress specs: heavy upholstery fabric, satin lining, rubbery band on top of the bust-line to hold it up)
All my love,

Dearest Long Lost Friends (Dress 20)

Dearest Long Lost Friends,

You remind me to look forward- the past's been awesome, and the present's hot stuff, but the future... that's where it's at.

(Please take nothing I say today to be of much consequence. Cider FTW.)

All my (slightly inebriated) love,

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!