Doris Day’s White Evening Gown from Pillow Talk

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I got an e-mail from one of my readers, Kim, a while back, talking about the designs of Irene Lentz, a costume designer who worked on some Doris Day movies that she recommended to me, one of which was Pillow Talk. I have to do further viewing before I can be familiar with her work, though — it looks like Pillow Talk was costumed by Jean Louis (who, credited for “gowns,” probably designed this costume) and Bill Thomas. Anyways, whoever designed them, I love Doris Day’s outfits in the movie. Her character is an interior designer, and she always looks fabulous: the movie was released in 1959, and her clothes are right there between smart 1950s femininity and 1960s clean style. The movie itself was something I had to kind of turn off the overly serious and feminist parts of my brain to enjoy: I know it’s supposed to be a light-hearted sex comedy, and the way the guy manipulated the girl (and her revenge) was really quite amusing. Still, when viewers are supposed to take the baby at the end as proof that our hero and heroine achieved ‘happily ever after’, it signified to me “she’s got three, four years tops before he gets bored of her.” Yeah, call me a cynic but I can’t watch a movie like that without scripting out a few months worth of premarital counseling for the dysfunctional couple in my head. Doesn’t mean I don’t have the other Day/Hudson movies on reserve at the library…

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.

1955 Rockabilly Dress (inspired by my new Crystal Blue Trek Wasabi)

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So I got a new Trek Wasabi. I haven’t had a bike in years, much less a good one, and I’m so excited about it. This is a really geeky bike; not geeky in the sense of “My new bike is perfectly aerodynamic and has fifteen thousand speeds” but more of like horribly cute and retro. (Brian thinks I’m crazy for getting a one-speed, but I don’t mind — I never could work gears well anyways, and we live in Ann Arbor, not San Francisco.) I’ve wanted a bike for a while, one that I would actually use and love, and I think Wasabi here fits the bill. I drew this dress based on Wasabi’s coloring and a rockabilly dress pattern from Damn Good Vintage.

1950s Cheerleader for Color Wars 2008’s VeryGreenTeam

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So ze frank is running a game called Color Wars, a Twitter based production. People join groups of their favorite teams on Twitter, then those teams, apparently, participate in goofy challenges. For example, the first one was to dress up in your team “uniform,” whatever that might be, to take a picture of yourself throwing rock, paper or scissors and to post it on Flickr. I didn’t do all that, but I did draw a verygreenteam retro cheerleader uniform (based off of the uniforms in this picture of a 1950s cheerleading group). Of course I’m on the green team — everyone else is, apparently, which makes it slightly less cool than Brian’s favored Clear Team, but what the heck, it’s green and I’m sticking with it. Go Team Green!

Moxie’s Tonic’s pink shirtwaist inspired by Pushing Daisies

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So I saw that Moxie Tonic had linked to me, and when I clicked through the first thing I saw was this sweet, hot pink dress she had made. It’s inspired by a character’s dress from a TV series called Pushing Daisies, although she made some changes to it. I don’t actually use hot pink much, so of course I wanted to try paperdolling it… It’s not quite like the original, I’m afraid, I think I didn’t get the collar right at all, and there’s too many buttons. I’ll pretend that it’s so blindingly pink no one will notice…

Sadly, though, my scanner kind of ate this one — I don’t know why, but when I scanned it, it previewed normally, but the actual colors ended up being weirdly super-saturated — yes, it’s possible even for hot pink — and it seemed to come out more… coarse, somehow. Lily’s gown yesterday did that too. (Plus this one has a few bands on the skirt…) It means I had to play around in Photoshop and try to make the coloring look like what I had, although it’s a lot less pink now, and it’s not so bad when resized. (The large image you see is 25% of the original, which ends up hiding a lot of flaws.) When I get a new scanner, I’m rescanning it, and then you all can enjoy how it’s supposed to be. On the upside, the dress looks pretty cute in blue, too.

Aqua 1950s V-Neck Dress from A Dress A Day

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I e-mailed Erin from A Dress A Day last week and submitted my blog for her Linktastic Fridays, and today, when she posted it, my traffic went waaaay up. Since I started I’ve gotten maybe a hundred, two hundred hits a day, and on Friday, over a thousand! My stats graph looks like a cute little worm sticking its head up and looking around curiously.

A Dress A Day always makes me wish I could sew. I can’t sew well, and I’ve thought recently of taking a class, but it is a little hard to be all that enthusiastic about it when two hours with the Prismacolors will get me a dress, done exactly as I wish it, with divine colors and as much lace, frills, jewels and amazing fabric as I care to lavish on for rather less than I’d pay for the real thing. And if I can’t wear it, Sylvia can, and that way it never gets dirty or torn. If I had carte blanche and a personal dressmaker, I would wear things like this all day, but as it is I have colored pencils, and that works for me. Anyways, this dress is based off of one on Erin’s page, although it’s more aqua and the collar isn’t quite right.

On a sadder note, I think we are entering the last days of my scanner. (You can kind of see the banding on the skirt, and that’s because I messed around with the placement; when I scanned it as I always do, the banding was VERY apparent…) Hopefully we’ll pick up a new one soon enough that I won’t have to miss any days. (I do a lot of the days in advance and post them later thanks to WordPress, but right now, I’m not any days ahead…)

Blogworthy Retro Cupcake Dress

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Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World claims in the introduction that “a surefire way to get people to look at your blog is by posting pictures of cupcakes.”

I wonder if paperdolls dressed in totally over-the-top fifties-style cupcake dresses and aprons might be similar enough to get some of the benefits?

(I must confess, that originally I was hoping to go for a cupcake-as-dress look. I had some wacky sketches of icing boas and cupcake wrappers done up as full skirts and frilly sleeves. In the end I couldn’t quite pull it off.)

I don’t eat cupcakes as often as I might like, but I do like flipping through my copy of VCTOTW and following Cupcakes Take The Cake… they’re just so cute, and often so inventive. I like the way this turned out, with the little cupcake pocket on the apron, although I almost scrapped the sketch because the skirt wasn’t quite poofy enough… maybe next time.

It’s probably really a stretch to tag this ‘historical,’ isn’t it?