White Gown and Corset with Peach Embroidered Inset from Taylor Swift’s Love Story

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Now I don’t really listen to country music, possibly because I fear being disowned by my dad, who says if he starts to listen to it of his own volition, we will all know he’s gone senile. Still, when Janel wrote about a beautiful dress that she was helping a young friend reproduce, it was almost a foregone conclusion that it’d end up on my blog, even if it did come from a country music song. It’s called Love Story by Taylor Swift, and I think it’s a lovely music video even if I am getting teased by Brian about it.

Since she spends almost all her time in this dress standing behind a balcony, and because I’m watching the video on YouTube, I can’t really tell how the skirt looks; the corset should be about right, but the skirt is more of a guess. From this photo it seems to have some interesting construction going on, but that’s just about the only picture I can find with the full skirt. (The arial view in the video doesn’t count, but it does give away that there is a longer train on the real thing than on the paperdoll. Unfortunately, while her costume designers likely have access to yards and yards of fabric, a proper train would have run off the side of my paper. Paper Dolls 1, Real Life 1.) Should anyone else wish to reference it, I used these two pictures when drawing the corset.

I’m glad there’s no clear winner in the poll yet, it makes the Grand Halloween Showdown so much more fun…

Smoke Grey and Pink Butterfly Gown by Charles James via A Dress A Day

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This dress is based on one of Charles James’ “Butterfly” evening gowns, although I’m not thrilled about how it turned out. Erin from A Dress A Day linked to an ivory, fall-colored version as an example of her dream dress, and I really like this smoky, pink version. I’m thinking about Erin and her blog today because recently she wrote about a new book Outliers: The Story of Success, condensing it into a sentence: ten thousand hours of work will make you an expert in your field, and it has little to do with being “naturally talented.” That, of course, made me wonder what percentage of that I’ve already gotten through. I estimate I spend one to four hours on each new blog post I make here. For example, the Metafilter dress probably took about an hour, because it’s a very simple design, the post itself is mostly a collection of links, and I wanted to get that sucker posted while the posting was good, not three days later when my Metafilter traffic was all gone. Something more complicated like my version of the Star Princess dress? Probably three hours to sketch out and settle on a design, finish the drawing and write the post; that’s not including the time I spent looking at other web sites to see what other versions looked like. For simplicity’s sake, I think I can average it out to about two hours per post. Between this blog, the 2004 one, the Boutique and all the other paperdoll related things I’ve done, I think I can safely say I’ve put in 800 - 1000 hours towards my 10,000.

I’ve been thinking about success in this way for a little while; I’m used to skating by on natural talent, things I already know and short bursts of inspiration, and keeping up with a project consistently feels very unnatural to me. (Although the Boutique was up for a couple of years, I updated it in bursts, not one a day like I try to do now.) It was actually zefrank’s the show that helped me see value in long-term approaches. He did a short video blog for a year, one every day, writing songs, making jokes, inviting his audience to participate, and some of his videos were OK, a lot of them were great, and a couple of them sublime. My style was usually to do something great in a rush, with all my attention, then to be done with it. (Or as I told one of my friends, I do my best work in the grip of an obsession.) the show was really Brian’s thing more than mine, but I certainly took this away from it: a new video every day for a year, even if it wasn’t the best, delivered a greater impact than ten wonderful videos alone. Ten wonderful paper doll outfits, I can do that easily if I’m in the right mood. Beyond that, it gets hard.

A new paper doll outfit every day isn’t easy for a perfectionist. You all see the cute ladybug costume, I see “wow, one of those shoulder thingies is so much bigger than the other, and the lace is so sloppy, and why didn’t I put in the red first and draw in the black dots later, instead of smearing the black into the red parts and getting the shiny part all messy?” But at last count 11 of you voted for it as your favorite. Wow. Someone like me has to stop and think about that, because it doesn’t make sense from my perfectionist perspective. It says to me, this is a good approach, that that ladybug costume was created and I learned from it and someone likes it, and that makes it OK.

I’ve got a lot yet to learn in my remaining 9,000 hours — how to draw humans, obviously, and their annoying hands and feet, how to make fabric look right, how to get the most use out of my 160-some colored pencils and how to draw delicate seafoam and seaweed to wrap around my mermaids. It feels like it’s going to take a while, but hey! I’m only 26. Hallelujah, it’s a brand new day (a-chicka quack quack)

This poll ends the 21st, so do get your vote in. I’m so curious if Miss Daae will pull through with the win, if the dark horse ladybug will be ahead or if my gypsy girl will have some good luck for once.

Hillary Clinton’s Orange Pantsuit from the 2008 Democratic National Convention

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For someone like me who is enamored of skirts and frills, Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits are alien, but I suppose if I was a tenth as busy as she must be and people were following me around hoping for a picture of me looking unkept, I would probably switch to the pantsuit as well. Also, after looking at dozens of pictures of her in pantsuits, this picture of her jackets being checked against stage lighting completely cracked me up. It’s not like there’s anything inherently funny in it, but just the fact that the jackets are all the same except for the color made for an amusing tableau. It feels like online shopping for clothes, where you select a different color on a skirt or something and the color switches but the picture stays the same. You can almost see the intern fussing around with Photoshop sliders. (I tried changing this image that way, but had mixed results.)

Anyways, this is a rendition of the pantsuit that she wore on the second day of the Democratic National Convention. Not quite right, as usual — the doll’s body is too long, which is a lot more forgiving to work with for skirts than for pants!

And don’t forget to vote…

Michelle Obama’s Turquoise Blue Dress from the 2008 Democratic Convention

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I’m sorry I’ve been such a slacker for the last few months! My essential nature, or the problem with my essential nature if you will, is that I can do just about anything for two weeks, and then it’s on to my next all-consuming interest. I do my best work in the depths of an obsession. So, I’ve worn out about two months worth of other projects, and now I’m back to paper dolls. I have a project for October, so I want to start again now… a warm-up, if you will.

Since the U.S. presidential race is much on my mind as of late, I thought outfits from the current political scene would be a fun way of burning up the days between now and October 1. I’ll do one from Michelle Obama’s wardrobe, one of Cindy McCain’s dresses, a Sarah Palin outfit and of course a Hillary Clinton pantsuit. Please note that this is not an invitation to debate politics or insult any of these women on the comments here! (Well, paperdoll fans are a civilized lot, and I probably lost all of my readers in my two-month vacation anyways, so I should be safe.)

I personally like Michelle Obama’s dress here that she wore when she spoke at the 2008 Democratic Convention. Can’t find any good pictures of the little center ornament, though — and the color of the dress changes from picture to picture, it seems!

Pink and White Princess Gown (based off of Janel’s Pink Birthday Dress)

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This is based off of a dress that Janel made for her daughter’s birthday. After yesterday’s Calamity Jane, I needed to draw something extremely cute!

In my imagination, this version of the dress belongs to a young princess who loves pretty things, but isn’t prissy or as high-maintenance as a lot of princesses are these days. She loves being outdoors and she especially loves gardening. She’s growing tomatoes and wildflowers now, and she feels like she works hard to make her little garden grow, although that’s kind of a pleasant fiction created by the indulgent head gardener. I like her and would write more about her, but I didn’t finish this dress until it was late, and I’m tired, so she will have to wait for another dress…

If you remember a different shade of pink for this dress, it’s not just your imagination: when I first posted it, I posted the first version, which scanned very poorly (the color changed, I lost a lot of detail on the white parts, and so on). This version is closer to my original drawing.

Jill’s Flowered Easter Dress and White and Green Flowered Easter Hat

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So when Jill saw my rendition of one of Min’s hats, she asked for me to do her Easter hat, a gorgeous confection (that Brian termed an “ultra-hat” — sorry) that she made to match her dress. That request has since been percolating in the back of my mind until I was reading her blog earlier and saw that she got robbed at a “Mad Hatter” contest.

Paperdolls always make a great consolation prize. In my world, anyways, where they also make good hobbies, gifts and eye candy.

If one was cutting this out, the hat would be cut underneath the brim, right underneath the broad green ribbon; on the large version I put a dotted line there. Krysti will have to tell us if it works anything like how I hope it does!

Bai Ling’s Green Satin Corset and Plaid Balloon Skirt via Go Fug Yourself

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Now, I don’t read People or any of that, beyond what I can’t help skimming at the checkout line or if I’m reeeally bored at the dentist’s office. I don’t mean to be snobby about it — I’ve certainly got enough nerdy, timewasting obsessions to make up for the lack of this particular one — but the whole celebrity gossip thing just never has been quite my thing. Except… for the blog Go Fug Yourself. It’s shallow, catty and downright hilarious. I think the appeal, for me, is something like, “Here is this gorgeous woman, and she has looks and money and access and stylists, and she’s at some amazing event where she knows there will be pictures taken of her and… she is wearing… what? why?” I haven’t a particle of style and I don’t really follow fashion, but even I’ve got better sense than to wear a dress like this.

And now they’re doing their Fug Madness, and I was Team Peldon, but then she got spanked by Sharon Stone. So I switched my allegiance to Team Bai for the final rounds. (That would be Bai Ling. “She was in Star Wars, right?” says Brian. Among the followers of Go Fug Yourself, that isn’t precisely what she’s known for.) She and Posh are squaring off on Monday, and I have total confidence in my girl Bai… Posh just doesn’t have the crazy I associate with quality fug.

So this is an outfit that Bai wore sometime in 2007 and, the more I look at it the fonder I am of it, actually. I mean, that skirt.

Good news, bad news

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Hey, this is Brian.

So: there’s good news and there’s bad news.

So: what? There’s always good news. And always bad news.

But here we go:

Liana and I met about a decade ago. That’s a long story. You know 2001? This movie about time. Long story. Cave dude throws that bone up into the air — it spins — sunlight — cut to spaceship. Yes, the movie says, some deliberate, ordered sequence of events happened between the bone going up into the air and this spaceship out way beyond the bleeding edge of the sky. But none of that is important, now, since we’re watching this spaceship. And that’s sort of how the movie starts. People mark time. Birthdays, durations of video screen calls, all this garbage. And by the end, there’s all this weird kick the can stuff that makes you want to lie down in the wet popcorn dust on the theater floor and feel time and space and so forth kind of loop out, and then the guy is old, and he’s walking through these rooms, and then there’s this spacebaby. And that’s sort of how the movie ends.

The point being that I could go on for a long time about Liana, how we met, what a joy it’s been to have her companionship and sweetness and laughter since. But instead I’ll jump cut to the fact that, well, she’s gone.

I never had her pegged for the ninjitsu type. True, the warning signs were all there. But she’s up and left us. She didn’t write a note. Ninjas don’t write notes. Nor do they leave forwarding addresses, or even, apparently, lock the doors on their way out.

To the ninja, every door is unlocked. Locks are illusions. Doors are illusions, too. So it makes sense, from a certain perspective.

Hers, not mine.

So now you know the bad news. To wit: ninjas don’t draw paper dolls either. Paper shurikens, maybe. But then they cut them out with the force of a thousand burning eagles and — well.

Thinking about it, I’m glad I’m still alive. I was married to a ninja!

But I feel bad for all of you, who apparently derived some satisfaction from Liana’s paperdoll art.

And I feel bad for myself. Because, come on, I don’t know where she is. Maybe she’s under the fridge. Hiding in the cabinet. Hidden in the shadow of a table leg. Waiting to strike, with the force of a thousand burning eagle paper shuriken.

Hence I’m making the best of things, and I’ll be drawing some paperdoll costumes for you. That’s the good news.

Today’s doll is a celebration of Springtime in the Rust Belt. Frog legs for springing through the mud, a stupid hat for the usual reasons, and a sandwich board bedecked with the smiling sun, token of the King of Shadows and the elves, and also the only thing anybody drinks in this state between approx. March and September.

Happy spring. Also, send me your ninja evasion tips. I’m already doing all the usual stuff: garlic, wolfsbane, mousetraps.

Min’s Royal Blue Pillbox Hat with 1960s Dress via Dress A Day

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I found Min’s blog when she linked to me a while back, and I’ve quite enjoyed perusing her charming vintage hat collection since then. (It’s called “It’s Raining Min,” which always makes me think of warriors falling off a cliff…) I really liked this royal blue pillbox, but what to partner it with? The answer came in a recent A Dress A Day post in which the weird poses of the models were discussed at length. But the outfit, a slim 1960s dress, was cute, so I borrowed the look to go with the hat, and voilà.

Pink and Yellow Chiffon 1940s Evening Gown Via Damn Good Vintage

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Julie the Vintage Goddess linked to me recently and said some very kind things about my dolls. She also buys and sells vintage clothing from her site Damn Good Vintage, so I was looking through her site and her blog for some inspiration when I found this post, “You Can’t Save Them All”. It tells of her attempts to restore two dresses, one of which was too stained to save, and one of which was a yellow and pink chiffon 1940s evening gown that cleaned up nicely, but tore easily and couldn’t be saved either. Well, if there’s one thing paperdolls are good for, it’s to right the wrongs of damage and time. Or to put it simply, Paperdolls 1, Real Life 0.