Halloween Costume Series Day 12: Black and Purple Deadly Nightshade Evil Fairy Dress with Red Berry Jewelry

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So for some reason one of my most popular keywords these days is “printable paper dolls deadly night shade.” Hello out there, whoever it is who wants a nightshade paper doll! I hope you enjoy this one.

This fairy is a lackey for the Fairy of Malice, who you can see if you check out my old paper doll page and scroll a bit. And, I think, she also should make those of you who voted for skimpy costumes happy, and those of you who actually cut these paperdolls out sad, because I can’t imagine this being very easy to cut out!

Continue blasting back the zombies through the magic of paperdolls:

Halloween Costume Series Day 11: Gypsy Girl’s White Tunic with Purple Embroidery, Violet-Blue Paisley Sash, and Pink and Purple Belled Full Skirt

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Violeta claims she makes up all her fortunes like everyone else and it’s not her fault there’s so much bad luck in this wicked world, but all the same her family won’t let her talk in the future tense. She can never get past “I will” or “Tomorrow” before one of her sisters tackles her and claps a hand over her mouth, none too gently either. They resent her because as the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter of the legendary gypsy mystic Simza, she was supposed to inherit the family powers, and since they were all brought into the world to facilitate her arrival there should have been some payoff for them. Instead, they switch off days shadowing her, protecting their family, their friends, for all they know the world from this lightning rod of misery, their uncanny and dangerous sister. Violeta floated the idea once of billing herself as a sort of goddess of curses, and her mother would have thought it a terrific joke for another of her daughters, Zora perhaps, to make up theatrical fake curses and fleece all those who sought to bring harm on others. Violeta, however, seemed to be at the mercy of some demon that hijacked her tongue when she foretold the future, and her mother had better sense than to try to profit off of such a thing. Even the fortunes she told that sounded positive brought only wretchedness. (Would that she had never told Carmen about that darkly handsome rich man!)

Forbidden contact with the future and silenced by the tender ministrations of her sisters, she pours her energy into other things, trying her best to walk straight on a twisted road. She paints and repaints intricate and vivid patterns on her family’s wagons, she knows all the names and uses of everything that grows in the forests, and she makes up wild, violent dances, stamping the ground with the intensity of a curse.

New poll, and rather a silly one. I drew from my Halloween pile, but all my paperdolls are potential warriors here, so if you want Calamity Jane’s trusty shotgun I’m not going to stop you.

Halloween Costume Series Day 10: Queen Guinevere’s Gold-Edged Heavenly Blue Kirtle with Flowered Girdle and Crown

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I’ve got to log in for work — but I love you all so I’m posting this real quick with no story or complaining about how I don’t like the girdle. Thanks to rainbowjehan for help (way back when!) with Arthurian garments!

Last call for this poll…

Halloween Costume Series Day 7: Red Satin Vampire Dress with Silver-Edged Black Capelet and Black Bat Lace

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When Brian writes me a vampire story, it will go here. I just couldn’t let this dress wait, though! I mean, it’s got bats.

To cut out the collar, cut down across the white line and cut out the blank space over the chest, then slip the black part behind the doll’s neck. It’s one of those things that should work in theory…

While waiting for the vampire story, please amuse yourself with this week’s poll:

Halloween Costume Series Day 5: Green Princess Gown with Pink Rose Trim and Gold Lace

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So what if “princess” is possibly the least imaginative costume for anyone past second grade? It’s pretty, and if there’s anything I like in this world it is pretty dresses. I believe, now, that I may be the foremost non-Disney expert on what makes a dress princess-worthy, for these are the kinds of things one thinks about when one draws lots of paper dolls.

I don’t know much about the owner of this dress except that she does like her roses, and I would be surprised if she cultivates them herself as the owner of this pink princess gown does. No, this princess is a bit of a terror, and she insisted that her dress should lend her a sort of mature innocence, that it should be both heavy and light, serious and frilly, and highly becoming to her porcelain complexion and rich brown hair. It it is no coincidence that her dressmaker took a very long vacation after its completion. But this, I think, is not the kind of princess to worry too much about the anguish of such people. I for one hope the dressmaker got far enough away not to hear about the princess saying, at her next ball, “Oh, this old thing? You like it? It’s just an old rag I had lying around in my closet.”

The veil should be cut between the gold part and the white fabric, such that the doll’s head can be slipped through and the gold band goes around the forehead while the veil flutters behind.

Take my new poll:

Halloween Costume Series Day 4 / Mermaid Monday #6: Pearl Blue Mermaid Costume with Pearl and Lapis Lazuil Strands and Pink Shells

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You thought I forgot about Mermaid Monday! I never forget about things, I just don’t do them and then become consumed by guilt.

The good thing about my October project is that it’s quite freeing not to worry in the least about what time period something is from or if it’s accurate or realistic. I started sketching for my ghost, ending up with something that looked like a ghostly Juliet (hence the reference in the text) and thought, well, is this OK? Is it like something from that time period? Maybe I’d better look it up… Then I realized it was a costume and I had perfect license not to care. Since with my historical dresses I attempt to stay in the style of the times right down to the year without just copying another dress, it can be difficult to do them properly. This month, I’m winging it! and it’s great!

The bad side is that most of my outfits are costumes in some way anyways, so the energy I don’t devote to thinking “is it accurate?” instead goes to “is it a costume?” There can be no mermaid costume in our world better than the costumes Iris and Sylvia already have access to, since our world does require feet. With imagination, most everything I’ve drawn is a costume already and my October project is redundant. (But fun!)

There are plenty of masquerades in the mermaid world, both among the mermaids and on land with the humans and elves, but the mermaids certainly don’t dress up like mermaids and for any of the others to do so would be in bad taste. No, this costume (really just a hobble skirt with ruffles sewn on the bottom) is most certainly from our world, and since here there are no real mermaids to compare it to it does its job well enough. What do mermaids dress up as for their Halloween, you might wonder? Unsurprisingly, they dress as things that scare them or things they aspire to, although mermaid takes on human culture are becoming popular as well. There are three more Mondays in the month, so we’ll see.

New poll on the 8th! So don’t neglect to take this one…

Halloween Costume Series Day 3: Fancy Lady Pirate In Red, Black and Gold with Plumed Tricorn Hat

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Reading smalltown mom’s blog has put me in a nautical mood, so…

The most powerful pirates wore whatever they pleased, and that was as much of a sign of their power as the fancy ships or fantastic treasures that they posessed. Among the cabal of the fifty or so most elite of the lords of the sea, it was understood that there was no need for artifice or the peacock-like preening of the lesser pirates; when you were that good at what you did, any excess started to look tacky. Captain Christopher Blood, feared master of the legendary Dreadfall, often wore a simple shirt and trousers and went barefoot, making him look for all the world like a new recruit, while Lady Bethany Star was fond of simple shifts without the slightest bit of embellishment. (Since she loved snow white linen and her clothes were so routinely bloodstained, it was actually more efficient to buy a year’s worth of shifts at once than to add the job of washing them properly to her favorite attendant’s duties.)

It was really only those still trying to make names for themselves who fussed over their buttonholes and silks, donning ropes of trade beads and piling feathers onto their tricorn hats until they looked like they might very well fly off themselves. The poorest of recruits with any ambition at all would soon have at least a snazzy handkerchief to show off, even if the rest of his clothes were castoffs older than he was. Extravagant flamboyancy was the look everyone aimed for, but make the mistake of snickering at a young pirate dandy with his waistcoat so adorned with lace it looked like a skirt and you’d be lucky to get away with interesting designs carved down your back and a majority of your fingers.

My pirate girl, Elaine Morgain, is well on her way up. No ship of her own yet, and not as much jewelry as she would like, but she’s got plans. In the meantime, she’s her current captain’s right hand and the second-best shot among the crew, she’s faced down some tricky situations (the most notable of which was surviving being marooned for a month, then having a delicious revenge a full year later) and she’s gained a reputation in certain circles for charisma, ruthlessness and the devil’s own luck. Not bad, she thinks, for someone who started pirate life with a dress barely patched together and a couple of throwing knives. (And yes, throwing knives have a place on a pirate ship. You have to be extra skilled to use them right, though.)

To cut out the left sleeve, cut around the lace, then put the hand over the skirt; to cut out the hat, cut on the white lines. (It may need to be cut past where I have the lines, though. Call it a guideline.)

Take this week’s poll!

Halloween Costume Series Day 2: Violet Blue and Black Witch’s Robes with Runes and Silver Accents

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It seemed to Aithne like she was the only one of the three who bothered keeping up appearances anymore, the only one with any sense of propriety. The things her sisters wore these days! You couldn’t even blame it on a generation gap, as they were all equally old — no — they had positively lost their pride.

It had come to a head two years ago when Medea came to visit, breezing through her door with a tan and a take-out box full of hen’s teeth. First off, she had insisted on being called Madison. (Madison!) Second, she displayed her new cardigan (did she say it was from the End of the Land? Horrid place, she was sure) with wicked, rebellious delight, stretching out an arm as though she expected Aithne to pet it. Finally, she had laughed at her sister’s new robes, remarking that it looked like she had her grocery list written on her hem and that she was totally stuck in the 1800s. Aithne replied that she very well might be, but it was much better than being stuck as a newt, the truth of which she proceeded to demonstrate. Mehitabel had had to step in (and stepping was something she quite liked since she had discovered thousand-dollar high heels — imagine that, going to your kitchen, instead of having your tea come to you, just for effect) to de-newt Medea, since Aithne refused to do so without an apology, and Medea’s communication skills had been reduced to skittering around and switching her tail.

Aithne had had no contact with Mehitabel or Medea since, after yelling at the both of them that the family art was going to hell in a handbasket, a handbasket filled with pastel cardigans and Italian stilettos. They had left in high dudgeon, but she had been proved right by the grave injuries Medea had sustained attempting a ritual wearing her capris and cardigan one day; one does not, apparently, serve a traditionalist entity in modern styles.

For any of you who follow my paperdollverse, I believe that this set of robes is from a new collection from my wizard-world fashion designer responsible for this set of sunset-colored dress robes and this cool-colored set. Aithne is a witch, but she isn’t technically a part of that universe, so she had to go rather a ways out of her way for it and ended up paying quite dearly for it; she believes Medea got off lightly for insulting it.

Plurk Paper Dolls with costumes, memes and renowned computer geeks

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You may have heard of Twitter, the latest way for web 2.0 types to revolutionize the world, and what I use for off-the-cuff paperdoll updates, over on the sidebar. I also started using plurk, which is similar but has better organization and makes it easier to carry on conversations. (Twitter now is just paperdoll stuff while plurk is more “here’s what I’m making for dinner,” but feel free to visit my Plurk stream.)

Anyways, Plurk had a design contest recently, so I drew up this one-off paperdoll that uses three of the “plurk creatures,” Plurk’s creepy-cute mascots. Besides the Halloween costumes, the other sets have a more geeky bent to them. Top left, you’ll find three memes that geeks have obsessed over to ridiculous levels: Portal’s Weighted Companion Cube, CATS from Zero Wing, famous for the All Your Base dialogue, and Twitter’s failwhale, the image that signals the site is down. Bottom left, there’s Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder, Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder, and Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s “father of modern video games.” (His outfit was taken from this BusinessWeek article because it was so cute.)

Sadly, I didn’t win the contest with my little plurky paperdolls, so I’ll have to buy the book I wanted, McGee & Stuckey’s Bountiful Container, with my own money after all. Still, even if I didn’t win the contest, I at least have something for my blog today!

Halloween Costume Series Day 1: The Good Queen’s Ghost

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I can’t tell you why someone who was called “The Good Queen” during her life now haunts a ruined castle of no consequence; queens don’t tell their secrets to paper doll artists. I took on the assignment in the hope of a good story to deliver to my readers, but she condescended to tell me very little about her life, although she was quick to tell me that I had the bodice quite wrong, that I was obviously phoning in the lace, and so on. The older history books paint a glorious picture of her, but I couldn’t help but think that the historians that speculate that the epithet “The Good Queen” was applied to her much like “the Kindly Ones” was applied to the three Furies very well may be on to something. My romantic mind first imagined that she plunged the dagger into her own heart for love, a pre-cursor (possibly inspiration?) to Juliet, and I still think she died by her own hand but the more I sat with her the more I sensed her desperation and anger, and despite her annoyance with my lace, I don’t think it was directed at me. Now I feel her death had nothing to do with love but rather with intrigue of some sort, a power play that went wrong enough to bind her to this world. Still, I’m dying to know what’s with the blood on her hem, but if she will not tell me, fine; in a few hundred years her power will wane further and she’ll wind up telling anybody, probably a bunch of thirteen-year-old girls staring into a bathroom mirror at midnight, just for one last chance at peace.