Alice of Wonderland, Despoiler of Halloweens and Scourge of Cobwebs Everywhere

When you move to a new continent, your life seems to start over in all sorts of unexpected ways, and sewing tends to get shunted to the wayside. Last september, about when I was getting back into the swing of things, I suffered a nasty wrist injury that left me unable to do any sort of fine motor activity for almost a year, and right when i was recovered from that, we were buying and renovating an apartment, and instead of stitching, I was watching walls go up, and instead of choosing pretty fabrics, I was choosing paint colors and laying tiles. 
            Now the renovations are almost finished, and the boxes are being unpacked, and it's Halloween, so I'm sewing again.  
          I began sewing this dress a couple of years ago for an Alice of Wonderland party, but I never finished it. I was dressing as the titular Alice - a rather bashy, brutal sort of Alice, with a contract out on the head (complete with frozen glass eyes and a zipper to make a purse) of the Cheshire Cat. On the morning of the party, before the final seams were sewn, the party's hostess called in floods of tears.  She'd found her beloved cat Horse lying in the back garden, dead from a snake-bite.
            We were all shattered. My costume stayed unfinished. There are some things that nice people just don't do. 

Three years later, Alice of Wonderland, Cheshire Cat Hunter, received her last stitch.  And she was a most appropriately Halloween-y sort of costume - absolutely loaded with horror and dread, and the day after the party, in the cold light of morning, what fifteen assorted people cannot understand is how European Civilization survived half a millennium of hoopskirts. 

I couldn't pass a decorative cobweb without trying to take it away with me on my pink petticoat - as well as whatever the cobweb had been attached to, which was usually a chair, which meant that whoever was sitting on the chair came too.  I nearly took down the buffet when I swooped in gingerly for a pineapple kebab - the host had cleverly swapped out the tablecloth for more cobwebs, and when three people reached out to catch me, i found that the pork platter and a bowl of punch were strung out on a cobweb lead line, teetering on the brink of total party disaster.   
            I was banned from the living room the second time I passed the coffee table - my swinging skirts were setting glasses of punch flying. That second pass had taken out the refills of the ruins of the first, and as I fled, disgraced, the conversation turned from how the hostess had illegally given herself a bye into the semi-finals of the Pictionary tournament, and moved onto candles and farthingales and pocket-hoops and how on earth the Victorians had managed to survive the fashion for the bustle.  Those inventive Victorians had lit their houses with kerosene lamp and gas burners at the ends of clumsy rubber hoses. Swinging hoops are bad enough, but a bustle you can't see coming or going.
            I had fondly imagined that, musing so, the other guests would thank heaven for small mercies and call me back, but instead I was banished to the corner of the dining room and set counting the votes for the costume contest. The seal on my funk was set when I found that people had been writing opinions in the margins of their ballots - my Alice dress had narrowly missed out on the prize for "most genuinely  frightening costume" because people were worried that someone would have to present that prize to me in PERSON.

And the evening's true ignominy? The final seal and funk? 
Reader - it was MY party.

Happy Halloween!

The Cracktastic Hat Bounces BACK

 

My little halloween-y hat, last seen looking like something Maria Shriver Schwarzenegger's bridesmaids would have worn, languished for a year, stripped and undressed.
Over this past weekend, I picked it out of my 'To DO, you great Procrastinator, you!' pile, and redecorated.
            Black feathers, ribbons, a spider-brooch with the brooch-ery stripped off, and voila!
It's still reasonably cracktastic: I'd thick-headedly attached the original decorations with hot-glue, and this time around had to use enough froof-ery to cover the hot-glue scars, but if you can't go bonkers with the frou-frou on Halloween, when can you?
            This little hat does not exist within a vaccum - it belongs to a halloween-colored outfit that I completed just before the move.
            Consider these photos to be in the nature of a teaser - complete outfit coming soon!

The Great MOVE

All doll-and-sewing-related activities went on Splendid Hiatus at the end of June when Mr Tabubil and I relocated from Whyalla in rural South Australia, to the teeming and tumultuous metropolis of Santiago, Chile.

            Even four months after a move, personal organization - and the time to make it happen - is precious difficult to find.  There's so much to do - household insurance to be sorted, GPs and dentists to found, bottomless lists of thises and thats for our new apartment, grocery staples that we once took for granted to be hunted down in a country that's never heard of 'em, Spanish classes to take, new friends to make, new streets to walk down, new parks and hills and museums to see -

            There's so much HAPPENING here. I've lived here before, twice, so my Spanish is less non-existent than mostly rusty, and I tear around the city dropping indefinite articles on the sidewalk and tying taxi drivers up in inappropriate verb tenses, but despite the frustrating refusal of certain type of patriotic Chilean to comprehend ANY Spanish spoken by a gringo (regardless of how local the accent - and I learned my Spanish fifteen years ago in a Chilean high school)  I'm getting along swimmingly, and only stop for cascading confusions of "Que?" "

But now I'm back in action, thank you very much.  We're all unpacked, my new sewing room is sorted -

And I'm submitting insurance claims for the disaster the Australian movers caused when they packed up my old one.

            The Australian packers wreaked hell on our stuff, particularly our clothes.  They used flat clothes boxes for about half of our garments (apparently hanging boxes are improper for international moves), but at some point they ran out of flat boxes and instead of going out and getting more, or at least folding our clothes properly and laying them down in regular packing boxes-
            The dear darling movers crumpled up our clothes into balls of cloth and wadded them into the corners of other boxes as padding for heavier items - like computer monitors, or stereo speakers.

            They didn't do it for lack of regular packing material.
            We have no idea why they did it.
            All we know is that this sort of treatment doesn't do very nice things to delicate sequined shirts, silk scarves, or hand-made costumes. Or bras that have had their foam cups folded into quarters for two months to pad out the side of a box of DVDs . 

            What they did to our clothes they also did to our wedding crystal.  Yup.  It's too unbelievable not to share: they used our wedding crystal to pad out the really heavy item in our shipment - like computer towers and chests of drawers.  Without necessarily bothering to wrap it first. Yep - unwrapped crystal wine-glasses used to brace computer towers.  Thank god for cameras. We documented the heck out of all that.

            It was all enormously  frustrating and angry-making, but when I came across my red and gold ballgown  I burst into tears.  I had asked the mover  to "please please wrap it in its very own box.  Just like this - padded with all this tissue paper right here.  I'll leave it right here all by itself right next to the very own box that you're going to put it in, okay?"

            Instead, the mover squashed and rolled and wadded the dress into the top of another box - the pleats are rubbed out, the flat layers  are screwed up and folded in a way that wrecked the underlying net in a way that can't be repaired by an iron or a steam-bath.  And those little shredded silk details - forget it. The whole dress is pretty well wrecked.

            The unfinished white hat (as yet unrestored. It was a damp winter) died as well.

            The golden wheat-ear embroidery has disappeared entirely.

            And my doll hats - I found a wired doll bonnet squashed and folded, buckram creased, wires bent.  Non salvagable.

            It just went on and on - if there was a way to bust or bodge something, the movers found it.  No matter how creative the mess needed to be - they managed to pull it off.

            One example in particular makes me stomp my feet and chew the curtains.   Surveying the wreckage in my sewing room, I had thought okay, maybe it's all my fault.

            Clearly, I had needed to carefully pack EVERYTHING myself.
            To leave nothing to the mover's imagination.
            Next time I'll do that, okay, fine, breathe deeply, dear - and then I opened a little box where I HAD carefully packed and SEALED with TAPE my straw doll bonnets for safe shipping -  in this this careful little box brim-full of straw doll hats - a mover had un-taped the lid and shoved something inconsequential and heavy inside - and squashed them semi-flat. It's INFURIATING.

            I've made many MANY moves in my 31 years, and I've never seen anything like this. 

            But there have been photographs, and furious late-night tear-filled phone calls to Australia, and things are sorting out. Or at least, getting paid for. The really infuriating part was that when I called the movers in a towering fury, the man on the phone said "oh... yeah.  I think I know who the person who did that is.  There have been a few instances of him doing it."

            So he's done it BEFORE?  And they're still paying him?

            Amazing!

            And - END rant.  Exuent omnes and all that.

            I have a drawer-ful of little projects to finish (that got caught up in the move) and photograph, and a dress to try and restore!

The Black Domino

Vogue 7923 sure gets around.

Here it is in black, with a scarlet satin lining - all out of Polimoda's lovely remnant bin, to match my Venetian doctor's mask.

While I was at Polimoda I planned a Carnival costume for my AG doll.

I did my due diligence, researching comedia dell'arte costumes in the school library, and scrounging in the heavenly Polimoda remnant bins for fabrics and trim.

I made a design of my own, proceeded as far as sewing the domino - and then I left Polimoda and the rest of the costume never quite got off the ground.

Maybe one day.

The White Lace Dress - Vogue 7350

Several years ago now, I bought a roll of doll-scale vintage lace in an antique shop in New Harmony, Indiana.  New Harmony Indiana is mostly antique shops. Antique shops, book shops and cornfields on the edge of the wide, slow, Wabash river. It's summertime heaven on a slow Sunday afternoon. A year or so later, I sewed Vogue 7350 with some very fine swiss cotton voile that has been in Mum's stash for years and years and years.
This pattern certainly got me over my fear of sewing with lace - the hours picking scraps of tissue paper out of thread seams on thread lace as I stitched the yoke panels left me with no mysteries and no terrors. Lace is now very firmly do-able, thank you.

Yummy dress details:

And because I love making wired ribbon flowers, she needed a sash with a big bow on it.  Just something simple:

The purse is the sort of thing that happens on Saturday afternoons when you have nothing scheduled to do and you can do exactly whatever you want to do. I had a scrap of white silk, a meter of beaded fringe and a bag of lace remnants from my mother's wedding gown - I cut out roses from the wedding lace and appliquéd them onto the silk, and across the body of the purse I scattered clusters of embroidered petals and beads stripped from the fringing.
More beads made the purse handle and I stitched it all together by hand.
I adore it. It's fabulous.

And so, Once More with Feeling:

Hide and Seek (but mostly hide)

Felicity the AG doll is hiding in the closet.  There's red dust outside!!!

(Felicity is not entirely rapt about living in the desert.  The red soil gets everywhere.  Which is problematic when your body is made of cotton.)