Swan Tower

Some of you may recall that for my book tour last year, I had a Victorian dress made (in dark red, black, and grey). Well, I need a hat to go with it — and while I could have one made custom, it seems a bit silly to drop that much money on a piece of headgear I will almost never wear.

So: please recommend to me your favorite Victorian-style milliners! My requirements are:

• late Victorian in style
• designed to perch atop my head, rather than settling down over it (I will have a rather large bun getting in the way of the latter style)
• not too expensive — less than $100 would be ideal
• either black or grey (I doubt I can match the red without a lot of hassle)

Any suggestions?

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

1) The first of teleidoplex's costume auctions are ending soon -- like, in about six hours. (Others have a bit longer to run.) Take a look, bid while you can, help her go to Clarion West!

2) I'm reading at SF in SF tomorrow night, with Ysabeau Wilce and Erin Hoffman. Hope to see some of you there!

I don't suppose anybody has any clever tips for how to find kimono and obi (and I do mean kimono, not yukata) for non-obscene prices? I'm looking either for stores in the Bay Area or for websites, but between the exchange rate and shipping costs, ordering from Japan tends to make prices obscene pretty quickly -- I'd prefer something more, er, local.

This query has been brought to you by eBay's utter failure to contain what I want, and Rakuten's tendency to make my eyes bleed with machine-translated Japanese.

I keep feeling there's some obvious way to make this simpler, but I don't know what. Maybe you, O Ever-Wise Internets, do.

I have a circular piece of fabric that needs be sewn onto the surface of another, larger piece. The circle is small (diameter ~3 inches) and has raw edges. Dealing with those is the issue at hand. Bonus points for a solution that minimizes the hassle if I have to remove the circle at a later date and transfer it to a new piece of fabric.

( Here are the possible solutions I've thought up. )

I really do feel like there's a smarter way to do this, but my sewing experience is limited enough that I don't know what it is. Help me, o internets; you're my only hope.

shveta_thakrar is hiring herself out as a copyeditor and proofreader to raise money to go to Sirens this fall; read her post for more details. (You can also just donate directly if you wish.) You all know I think Sirens is a wonderful, wonderful event, and I'm going back this year myself, so if those services sound useful to you, pop on over there and let her know.

Which brings me to the second thing. Just yesterday I was bemoaning the fact that I have so few costuming opportunities these days, compared to when I lived in Bloomington. Then it occurred to me that I have an absolutely smashing opportunity coming up this fall: the masquerade ball at Sirens!

The theme for Sirens this year is "monsters." I could costume as one of those, or as somebody who hunts the same. The sensible thing to do would be to raid my closet and re-use a costume I already have -- but who wants to be sensible? And really, the only monster-type thing I have is my old Hel costume, but I am damned if I'm going to repeat the makeup and hair you see in that icon; it was a bad idea once, and I'm not stupid enough to do it twice. I have a couple of other options, but one isn't exciting and the other doesn't count as "re-using a costume" so much as "re-using an accessory and buying a new costume to go with it."

This is where you, my faithful LJ readers, come in. Who or what should I dress up as? Get as creative as you like; just remember that a) I'm not going to cut or dye my hair and b) whatever I do has to be easily transportable via plane. Suggest as many things as you feel inspired to, and let me know if you think somebody else's suggestions sound good. I promise there will be pictures afterward. (And, er, I'll get around to posting the pics I have from last year. I swear I will.)

Have at it!

I'd like to attach EL wire to the edge of a fan, but I suspect it wouldn't like being doubled up when the fan folds. Am I right about that? Any suggestions for how to get a cool glowing edge by other means?

(What I really want is for the fan to light up automatically when opened, and go dark when folded. But I suspect that would require rather more engineering than I'm capable of, or want to do.)

Spent most of this evening working on a sekrit costume project.

In all those hours, there was only one outbreak of profanity.

Dude, this never. happens. Normally I'm swearing before the first hour is up. But I was probably a good four hours in before I busted out the four-letter words, and it only lasted a few seconds, and the thing is almost done, and it looks awful perty, and if the one thing I'm really worried about doesn't happen then this will have been the most successful Boggan Deathmatch ever. (Not that any of its predecessors constitute a terribly high bar to clear.)

Many thanks to khet_tcheba, my guide and partner in crime, without whom this would not have gone nearly so well.

(And no, you don't get to find out what the sekrit project is. Not yet, anyway. I promise there will be pictures after it's been put to its intended use.)

Because my browser is too full of stuff.

Pretty stuff:

V Magazine: Curves Ahead -- for those of you with an interest in issues of weight, body image, concepts of beauty, etc. A photoshoot (semi-NSFW) that treats flesh as a beautiful thing.

The Plimoth jacket -- the result of an epic, many-handed volunteer project to re-create an early 17th-century embroidered jacket. Scroll down to the bottom for pictures, include detail closeups that will make the costumey folks on this list drool.

The art of cutting leaves -- some truly stunning artwork, achieved by surgically excising leaf surfaces while leaving the veins intact.

Less pretty stuff:

The Americanization of Mental Illness -- an interesting discussion that highlights the strengths and weaknesses of how we conceptualize and treat mental illness, and what happens when our ideas get exported to other cultures.

Just when I thought I had escaped the Great Button-Sewing Extravaganza that was my life a month ago . . . .

Yeah, that's right. I spent tonight sewing on fourteen more &(*#@$!!! buttons.

On the bright side, the second Morwen dress has sleeves again. And on that note, I'll see ya'll at the Renfest tomorrow.

I have several things I've been meaning to post about, and lucky me, they share a theme: how awesome my friends are.

Let's take them in chronological order, shall we?

First up: khet_tcheba. Some time ago, she created the mask you can see in my LARPing icon, plus a mask for kniedzw, because I wanted something very particular for the White Court game and suspected she would have the costuming-fu to create it for me (and then my boy jumped on the bandwagon, too). The results were spectacular. So, like a bad person, I e-mail her a month or so ago and ask whether she can make me a fore-and-aft bicorn for the Regency LARP, 'cause the only ones I can find for sale online cost several hundred dollars (I can only assume they're vintage pieces, not replicas). The photo of me from the game doesn't show it all that well, but keep an eye out for an upcoming post with links to other people's pics and you'll get a better idea. (The thing is freaking ridiculous, but the fault for that lies with history, not Khet.) So the Swan Tower Millinery Award goes to her, for adventures in felting.

Second: tooth_and_claw. Back when I was running Memento, she made a number of awesome sketches for the game, and I commissioned from her a portrait of Invidiana. I ended up getting two: a headshot and a full-length portrait. So if you want to have an idea of what the fae queen in Midnight Never Come looks like, there you go. (I'm hoping she'll end up on the cover, but I have next to no control over that; all I can do is suggest it to my editor.) The Swan Tower Illustration Award goes to her -- as if she hadn't already earned it with the Memento cast painting.

Third: unforth. I have a hardcover copy of Doppelganger! Y'see, she's a librarian, and she knows how to bind books. A while back she mentioned that she was looking for suggested rebinding projects. Until she delivered it into my hands, I had no idea she'd decided to make her first project a hardcover rebinding of my very own novel, complete with a wrap-around paper cover replicating the front, spine, and back of the original. Unless there's somebody else out there with her skills and deranged enthusiasm, this will probably be the only hardcover edition there ever is -- certainly the only hardcover of the first edition. For her, the Swan Tower Bookbinding Award.

So there you have it: I have awesome friends. Seriously, you all (not just those three) have a stunning array of knowledges and skills, and if I occasionally get depressed that there are a million and one things I'll never learn to do, I cheer up when I remember that I might know people who do. Keep up the random hobbies, folks; they make me proud to know you.