Inara Serra's Red Satin Gown with Gold Girdle from The Train Job episode of Firefly

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As I noted earlier, Brian and I have been watching Firefly (and we just finished the full series plus the movie, so spoil away if you feel the need). I enjoyed it a lot, although I felt that some of the later episodes were rather weak and that the first five minutes of the movie changed a lot of my perception of the whole first season, which is a kind of jarring way to start out a movie. Brian had to pause while I was going “Wait… what?” In general I loved the dialogue and the characters, but the thing that really hooked me was Inara Serra’s costumes. Inara is a Companion, a sort of futuristic geisha or courtesan, and her clothes are amazing. She wears mostly warm colors (lots of reds and golds) and sumptuous fabrics and has this great style, sort of a mashup of Asian and Indian influences with a big dose of 1930s starlet. I want to paperdoll just about everything she wears! Look at this page with her outfits. Brian and I watched the Dollhouse pilot and weren’t all that impressed, but even if the next few episodes aren’t all that great I’ll probably keep watching just because Shawna Trpcic, the same costume designer that did Firefly, worked on Dollhouse as well. (So far most of the costumes are centered around yoga pants, but that tiny white dress Echo wore to the guy’s birthday party was smashing, even if she probably had to tape it to her thighs.)

I’m afraid the banding looks horrible on this one, and the color isn’t all that great either — the real thing is really pretty, if I do say so myself, and the scanned version is a pale imitation. I’ve been putting off the search for a new scanner, but it looks like I’d better get started. If anyone has any suggestions, I’d appreciate them!

Powder Blue Airship Hostess Jumper with White Blouse via A Dress A Day

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So I saw this pattern on A Dress A Day and thought it was just beyond cute and it needed paperdolling. Seriously, look at the little collar and the pointy shoulders. Adorable. Erin thought it made a good airship hostess uniform, so I added a little cap and little airships around the hem. (Yes, that’s what they’re supposed to be…) Check out the original post and a post about a version of the dress being auctioned off.

I don’t have too much else to say about this dress other than that drawing tiny airships is fun and that my scanner is starting to annoy me (see the banding? It’s been doing that recently, plus the blue is cuter in person), so please go create a dress for me on my dress wiki.

Magic Wiki Dress

So my husband had this great idea: he suggested I draw a Wiki Dress. That is, have a wiki (a page that anyone can edit) with a dress description, let everyone edit it for a few days and draw the results. So please edit the wiki however you see fit: I’m going to leave this up until noon (eastern standard time) on the 21st and at that point I’ll draw what got described in the wiki.
Edited on the 20th: I love how the Wiki Dress is going. I don’t think I’ll be able to just draw the final version, as I had planned — I’ll draw a couple of suggested dresses instead. That means there will be dinosaurs, yes.
Edited on the 21st: The Magic Wiki Dress is done for now — thanks to everyone who had something to add!

Lady Clarisse d'Cagliostro's Second Wedding Gown from Studio Ghibli's Castle of Cagliostro

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So I adore the Ghibli movies, and since I also adore the original Arsène Lupin it can hardly be a surprise I love the Castle of Cagliostro, the collision of his grandson Lupin III and Hayao Miyazaki. Brian and I watched it again the other day, and it’s definitely one of my favorites, full of action and Lupin getting the better of people. Clarisse here gets two wedding dresses, and I opted for the crown of the first and the dress of the second, because I can’t pull off the thing she wears that covers all her hair unless my paperdoll fans are willing to mutilate their copies of Iris and Sylvia to make it fit.

I have a lot of movies coming up in my future, so tell me what Ghibli movies you like and I’ll paperdoll them a bit…

Mermaid Monday #11: White Mermaid Ball Gown with Embroidered Choli Top and Aquamarine Overskirt

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Mermaids are not universally welcome at human balls. In most kingdoms near the sea their presence is unremarkable, but the further inland one goes the less mermaids visit, and the appearance of one at a ball can be a serious disruption. It’s not surprising that they cause annoyance and envy among the human women and prompt duels and inconvenient attachments among the human men, but besides that they are difficult to feed, not always aware of proper deportment and their air of superiority and condescension is often a little hard to take for humans of either sex. One insecure queen went so far as to ban them from all events given during her reign. (Mermaids mostly stay out of human politics, but stung by this, the equally insecure empress of the nearest mermaid empire ensured that said reign would be a short one by secretly inciting treason and eventually civil war in that kingdom. The loss of life and damage to the kingdom was incalculable, but the mermaids got their dances back.)

A mermaid choosing a gown for a ball thrown by humans generally wants to outdo every other woman there, human and mermaid alike, because the most common fault among them is vanity, followed closely by pride. Some of them do it by going with human fashions, thereby beating the human women at their own game, and some prefer to go with gowns designed for mermaids, which tend to evoke the sea, be less formal and hide the legs. (Most mermaids are self-conscious about having legs, as the vast majority of cheap mystics really don’t have the skill or knowledge of anatomy to form perfect ones for very long, so mermaid skirts are inevitably long and loose. The mermaid wearing a miniskirt is the one who gave up her firstborn.) This dress is definitely a mermaid gown; the human women at the ball where this will be worn will all be wearing more elaborate gowns, closer to what I think of as stereotypical princess gowns: tight bodices, poofy skirts. (Although some human women near the sea, where mermaids are more likely to show up to balls, have taken to wearing things mermaids can’t: shorter dresses, gowns slit up the side, tight skirts.) The choli-style top, the lotus and wave pattern, the fluttery aquamarine overskirt all make this gown arresting and otherworldly: just the thing for toying with the hearts of humans, leaving them crushed like a shellfish dropped onto a rock by a seagull. Later the human women will gossip about how revealing and tacky the top was, how unfashionable the whole savage getup was compared to their gowns, but the target of their ire will be already safely back under the sea with new stories to tell.

1778 Light Blue Robe a la Polonaise with Rose and Flower Trim Inspired by Fanny Burney's Evelina

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So I recently finished listening to the Librivox recording of Evelina by Fanny Burney, which is not a book I knew of before browsing the Librivox catalog but I’m quite glad I put in the sixteen hours necessary to listen to it. I don’t recall Evelina being referenced in any of the Jane Austen novels, but I believe a couple of Fanny Burney’s other novels are mentioned in Northanger Abbey. Certainly Austen would have read Evelina, and her characters might have secretly wished for a Lord Orville like everyone seems to wish for a Mr. Darcy these days. It’s about a timid and innocent girl, who is overly both, I think, for modern sensibilities, but still a sympathetic main character. Her situation was so precarious (she has a “mysterious” background and no powerful friends looking out for her interests) and she always seemed to be getting into so many misunderstandings that I had to look the ending up on Wikipedia to make myself less nervous about the possibility of her being deceived by a rake or exposed to ridicule in a way that would destroy her reputation forever. (Having recently come off of The Age of Innocence, and having abandoned Ruth after skimming its Wikipedia page and finding out that things didn’t end well, I couldn’t sink hours into listening to another depressing novel.) I think, though, that it’s a very fun novel even if I fretted over the heroine and her perils. Sir Clement Willoughby is a tremendous bounder and it’s quite satisfying to despise him, and Evelina’s family and acquaintances are all colorful even if they’re mortifying to her. It might remind a modern reader of Austen, but the feeling that something is always about to go wrong makes it more salacious. Elizabeth Bennett was never caught by Mr. Darcy in the company of disreputable women, that’s for sure.

The book was published in 1778, and there aren’t any time references inside the book that meant anything to me, so I’m just going to go with what its readers might have worn although the book perhaps was set a couple years earlier. Corbis has, for some reason, a great number of fashion plates from 1778 (just search “1778 dress”) and I was struck by how different many of them appeared from what I think of from the late 1700s, the robe á la française and the robe à l’anglaise. The style that struck me is apparently the robe à la Polonaise, and even if perhaps Evelina is supposed to be set a couple years earlier than 1778, I will comfort myself with the thought of her wearing many of these dresses after the novel ends. Don’t ask me about the hat. It didn’t quite work out, but the first draft ended up with antennae and a windmill so this is sort of an improvement.

Incidentally, I was a little surprised to find Evelina mentioned in a recent article about the movie Confessions of a Shopaholic, as it boasts “literature’s first shopping spree”. Yeah, I’m probably not going to see that movie, even if it has clothes like this unholy concoction of neon ribbon and dalmatian fur that beg for paperdolling. I was reading an article a while back (couldn’t find it, sadly) talking about how in this economic climate, over-the-top chick flicks like Shopaholic might be edited so that the protagonists learn a couple convenient lessons before the end, which made me think, yeah, I’d probably fork over $8 to watch a movie like “Confessions of a Shopaholic” if the main character ended up like Lily Bart.

By the way, mark your calendars for the 22nd, a week from now: I’m going to be liveblogging (livedrawing?) the Oscars. I don’t know precisely how that will work, but it’s going to be fun.

Kaylee's Pink Shindig Dress from Firefly

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Happy Valentine’s Day, paperdoll fans, and you’ve got to admit that even if it looks like it was bought in a store, this is a delightful Valentine’s dress. Brian and I have been into watching Firefly lately, and we’re almost through the series. (So please don’t spoil anything from the movie or the last few episodes just yet; I know River Tam beats up everyone but I don’t want to know any more.) Kaylee, the ship’s mechanic, falls in love with this dress and gets to wear it to a party. In this very same episode Inara wears what may be the most gorgeous dress ever, but there’s just something about this dress that’s so very Kaylee, and probably instantly recognizable to every Firefly fan.

Don’t be surprised if you see an Inara outfit here too, or two or twenty, because I swear every episode she wears something new that just bowls me over… but for now it’s all about the layer cake dress. Until I revisit the ‘verse, then, do enjoy these Firefly paper dolls. Holly also did two Kaylee outfits for one of her dolls, which you can find here and here. Thanks also to Can’t Take The Sky, a Firefly fan site with great screen captures.

Hinata's Lavender Hoodie and Purple Pants from Naruto Shippuuden (with bonus Might Guy Green Jumpsuit)

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So I’ve been horribly sick lately, that is to say I got sick late January, had less than a week of health and then I caught something else altogether. That means I’ve been spending a lot of quality time with Naruto and the rest of the Konoha kids, because when I’m this sick I’m too stupid to follow anything more complicated. Naruto’s great for brainless times because it’s a Naruto law that you never see any important scene just once. If it’s good the first time, it’s even better in flashbacks! Plus, everyone is always announcing the names of their attacks beforehand, giving away their techniques and cunning plans and providing little chibi diagrams for the excitable seven-year old following along at home. If I was a ninja, things would be on a strictly need-to-know basis, but anyways if I was a ninja I’d be total fodder-nin (that is to say, dead before I was 15), so I guess you get the right to give away your secrets if you can back it up with power. Well, I kid because I love. Naruto’s kind of my Battlestar Galactica, which is to say Brian tolerates me talking about it with something akin to politeness, and he’ll never understand the joy of Shikamaru avenging Asuma’s death just as I don’t really understand the whole fracking Bob Dylan thing.

Anyways, I’m totally team Hinata, although I think Naruto will end up with Sakura because Kishimoto has this thing about the generations mirroring each other. Just look at the Sannin triangle between Orochimaru, Tsunade and Jiraiya, every bit of which has been replicated in the relationship between Sasuke, Sakura and Naruto. When history repeats itself like that there doesn’t seem to be any place in that triangle for sweet, loyal and sadly shy Hinata, only for annoying tsundere Sakura. Well, to heck with you Sakura, you don’t get a paperdoll dress even though I like your Shippuuden outfit better than Hinata’s hoodie. If it was up to me, Naruto and Hinata would wind up together, I actually like Sakura and Sai as a couple in the anime, and Shikamaru and Temari round out my Naruto ships. I wouldn’t mind Sasuke and Karin getting together if it’s the sort of tragic love that ends with Sasuke dying disgracefully in a ditch. Yep – I’m the sort of annoying Naruto fan who couldn’t care less about questions like “who would win in a fight, Guy with the sixth gate open or Gaara post-Shukaku?”

… yeah, if you seriously read all of that, you deserve a present, so here’s a bonus costume: the green jumpsuit that Might Guy and Rock Lee wear. The jumpsuit itself, according to Guy at least, is the perfect thing to wear in training, “a miracle gown for all youth,” so I can make it into a paperdoll for a girl with a happy heart. I drew it while I was sick, though, and I don’t like the way it turned out very much, so hey, bonus, enjoy.

Mermaid Monday #10: Mermaid Mystic with Purple and Gold Top and Skirt with Orange Tail

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It’s been such a long time since Mermaid Monday, how very cruel of me… in penance, I’ll reveal some more of their world.

I often think about how, in my paperdollverse, the mermaids interact with the humans, but that is because I myself happen to be human and have that particular bias. Frankly, the majority of mermaids don’t give it as much thought as I do. I’ve come to think of mermaid excursions to the human world as something like American college kids studying abroad. Not everyone is going to be interested in the first place, and some might like to but have other priorities under the seas. Of the ones who do, most might spend only a season of their life exploring the new culture, some might enter into it to some extent but always consider themselves mermaids first and foremost, and a minority, like my bitter crimson mermaid, become permanent expats. Generally, mermaids consider themselves slightly superior to humans, and for the most part there aren’t oodles of mermaids longing to escape to land and legs.

My mom wondered how the switch between tails and legs is actually affected. There are mermaid mystics, with varying amounts of experience and power, who can control such things for a price. Surely we’re all now thinking of Ariel sacrificing her voice? It’s not often so serious; curious young mermaids attending their first human balls usually do so on wobbly legs not shaped quite right (which is why most mermaids favor long ballgowns), thanks to a friend’s crazy old grandmother who will perform the necessary magic for a string of pearls. (The accompanying rite of passage is for excitable mermaids to forget how long the magic lasts and transform back right there on the dance floor. If the girl is lucky, her gallant dance partner will help her back into the water; if she’s not so lucky a couple of already overworked servants will do it, talking maliciously about seared mermaid fillets with lemon sauce over a bed of wild rice.) The longer the magic lasts, the more skillfully the legs are formed and the more control the mermaid has over switching back and forth, the more it will cost. At a certain point, a desperate mermaid switches from grandmothers paid off with pearls to dangerous creatures who demand voices, lifespans, firstborn children and so on. Today’s mermaid is one of these mystics, exceptionally long-lived because she’s always happy to trade legs or looks and so on for a portion of the petitioner’s lifespan. (She isn’t at all ashamed about the price she asks: the study of mermaid mysticism is dangerous, and she sees it as a fair deal given the years she’s devoted to her craft and the scarcity of competitors.) In the face of her present problems, your average impetuous young mermaid couldn’t care less about five or ten years that come off the end of her life anyways. Between the sharks, nets and mystics offering one’s heart’s desire with a price to be paid much later, it is only very smart mermaids who live to be old.

Red and Yellow Raas Outfit with Mirror Embroidery and Red Dupatta

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Yesterday Brian and I went to see Dandia Dhamaka, which was an intercollegiate raas dance competition. Raas is a folk dance from the Gujarat region in western India, and it’s great, very high-energy and fun to watch. (Here’s a video of the University of Michigan group from 2007.) I say “folk” dance but it was a competition between ten college teams, so a lot of the groups worked in cute themes with their introduction videos — one had a Willy Wonka theme, there were two circus themes (probably a source of some consternation) and a couple I couldn’t figure out what precisely the teams were going for because I couldn’t hear very much over the clown with drums leading the “Go Blue!” chant a few rows over. (I was grateful to the group that subtitled their video.) I haven’t found out who won yet, but I really liked the University of Miami’s overall energy, Michigan State University’s choreography and University of Michigan’s costumes.

Of course I loved the costumes in general, which were all brightly colored and dripping with mirror embroidery, bold designs and metallic fabrics. From our balcony seats I couldn’t get a great look at the details (specifically I’m a little sketchy on how the dupatta is fastened to the top of the skirt) but the overall effect was dazzling, especially for the moves where the girls get flipped over the guys, which fans out their skirts. I liked Michigan’s costumes best because they looked sophisticated and very nicely done. The skirts had a huge amount of shiny decoration covering the front, and then the back was only lightly decorated, so the audience saw both the front pattern and the rich-colored fabric as the dancers moved. They kept to just maize and blue, too, but with the guys in mostly maize and the girls in mostly blue there was enough contrast to be interesting. MSU’s group, to me, went over the edge in the costume department: their costumes looked to be the most sumptuous with rich jewel tones and gold accents, but from where I was sitting the men and women looked to be wearing the same thing cut differently, and it was just a little too busy. Still, I liked their dancing best, so let it not be said I’m biased against Spartans!

Anyways, this is my version of a raas dancing costume, although it may not be accurate. The dupatta (the red veil part) was, I think, for most of the girls fastened at the waist, but I can’t really figure out how it works in real life and how to make it work for a paperdoll, so I’m afraid this version is just loose. (Cut it on the black dotted line, below the silver part.)

Anyways! Yeah, hello. Brian says that’s why he never makes New Year’s resolutions, because then you never do them anyways. So I decided to make a New February resolution, which was not to take any guff from my husband. In entirely unrelated news, here’s a paperdoll outfit.