When her partner suggested they sit, Linnetta agreed immediately, hoping that it wasn’t obvious that she was stumbling, rather than gliding, to the edge of the dance floor. He guided her to a chair beside another stranger, a woman dressed in shades of blue that seemed to shift and flow. Linnetta’s fatigue must have been getting to her; her head was swimming. Linnetta accepted a glass of punch, and — when she’d finished the whole thing in one decidedly un-aristocratic gulp — the woman in the blue gown had gone.

“I think I had better leave soon,” Linnetta said tentatively. “I’m exhausted… I think I’ve been overdoing it tonight.”

“But you can’t leave yet,” her dance partner answered, “the queen of the ball hasn’t been announced!” He leaned towards her and whispered conspiratorially, “You’re bound to win…”

This cheerful thought made her sit up a little straighter, eyeing her competitors. Certainly no other gown was as striking as hers, and no one else had a prayer of causing as much sensation as she had simply by showing up. Her partner scanned the crowd too, frowning.

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… Some dresses, like yesterday’s, take pages and pages of sketching and redrawing, and some dresses you sketch with a cheap pen while waiting for your car to be repaired and they come right together and couldn’t be any other way. Not complaining. I like this one, although the two middle blue shades are more different on the original than they are in the scan. (Today, after a good night’s sleep, I like the green one too…) The poll is still up, so please vote.

I didn’t really intend to return to elves for the last day of this series… I wanted to do an Entwife with an orange blossom theme, but I got started too late and my patience with making a dress out of leaves and bark just ran out. You can always tell when I just want to get done for the day, because the dress will be white. No matter how crazy and detailed it ends up, if it’s white, it usually means I started out in a grumpy mood.

Galadriel doesn’t get a lot of description besides “white,” making her good to paperdoll on a grumpy day. I really rather like how this gown turned out, although if I was to redo it I would probably cut off the gauzy middle layer of material on the sleeves.

That makes my seventh costume for Halloween: a whole week of Lord of the Rings, all finished. Uh, those of you who have followed me for a while (like, for more than a week) may have figured this out already, but it’s slightly rare for me to finish up a project so well and consistently: it’s usually one or the other. (See also my poor dancing princesses…) I’m rather proud of myself. Since I don’t think masquerade gowns are likely to be upset at this late hour, I’m putting up a new poll just to satisfy my own curiosity… It’s rather unfair to pit the black and white elf dress against the others, because I think it’ll be lovely when it’s colored, but oh well.

So, as I’ve discussed here before, my mom and I would doubtless be hobbits if we were in this world. I did start reading the Fellowship of the Ring again, and I’ve just finished all the Shire stuff; aside from all the stuff about who was whose third cousin twice removed, which I am quite sure I would forget entirely, it sounds like my kind of place. We might admire the elves from a distance, but at the end of the day I’ll take the hobbit-hole and frequent presents…

Now, my paperdoll is built a little more like an elf or human, and you will have to draw the hair on the tops of her feet yourself, but she still gets a hobbit dress because hobbits are fun. And they like green! Yes, I’m so there.

Poll is still going… fairies could still take it all, but I hope not because I would love to do a week of lavish masquerade gowns… is it bad of me to influence the voting?

Today’s costume is intended to be a dress for an elf, just something to lounge around and do elfish things in, whatever elves do with their time. (Nope, I haven’t yet started reading the trilogy again, can you tell?) I’m not quite sure how I like this one, but I think with the right coloring it could be really pretty… Well, hopefully whoever guesses this round’s quiz answer has good taste!

I really like Arwen’s dresses, but it seems like my three favorites – the red and blue one, the blue-grey one and the green coronation gown – are so close in construction to each other that if I did a similar style it would feel so much like I was just plain ripping it off. Yeah, the style is pretty enough, and basic enough, that maybe I will rip it off just a little anyways… just once…

As for the 1885 ball gown, Catie asked me to color it in light and dark blue, gold and red for the flowers… I like the way it turned out, I hope you like it Catie! For this week… sorry, I’m not feeling too creative…
What’s my favorite warm Prismacolor?
“Warm” being defined here as red, orange, yellow or pink… so there’s a big clue already, right? Please post your guess in the comments, first to guess it can tell me how to color today’s gown!

The poll for next week’s theme is still open, please vote if you haven’t yet!

So! Today officially starts day one of my Halloween costume month extravaganza. I foresee a lot of elves in my future, but I like Eowyn and couldn’t help but start with something she might wear. The dress isn’t intended to represent any specific costume from the movie – as much as I like the movie costumes, I won’t just be reproducing them all week because that would be boring – but it is vaguely based on this white gown that I loved.

I will try to re-read as much as I can of the Lord of the Rings trilogy this week, but keep in mind I’m not a LOTR geek in the same way that I am, say, a Final Fantasy geek. My mom tried to get me to read The Hobbit when I was younger, and it didn’t hold my interest until I was older for some reason. Although I have read the LOTR trilogy too, of course, it really has been quite some time. So if I draw an elf dress in some specific shade of purple that the Silmarillion says is reserved for mourning a nephew or something please do forgive me.

Here’s the poll for week 2 of Halloween costume possibilities. I dropped the bottom three results from last week, added the suggestions from yesterday’s post and added one of my own… Please vote!

You poor October birthday people… I was really hoping to avoid orange, because orange is so overplayed for October, what with the changing fall colors and Halloween, but then it turns out your birthflower is the marigold. So I couldn’t avoid orange in the end, but I hope you like it anyways. Even if it’s immodest for me to say so, I really do! It’s simple, but it’s my favorite of all the month dresses I’ve done so far. Of course, since I haven’t covered all the months yet that’s not quite saying much, but in November I think my project will be to catch up…

Tomorrow starts day 1 of the Lord of the Rings Halloween costume series. I’m also going to be putting up a poll for what I should draw for week 2, so if you have any ideas, please post them in the comments and I’ll add them to the poll.

So I was talking to my husband about what I should do for today’s paperdoll. “You should make a beginning of fall fairy,” he said. “Nah,” I said, “not if I’m going to end up doing fairies for the first week of Halloween costumes.” “You should make a beginning of fall mermaid,” he said. “Nah,” I said, “I just did a mermaid.” “You should make a beginning of fall human,” he said. “What a great idea!” I replied.

That is what it is often like talking to me, I’m afraid. I’m a lousy brainstormer. But anyways, he’s a good one, and that’s why we have this dress today. Remember that, when you are wondering why I have a Mega Man costume up, sometime in the next couple of days.

Congratulations to Catie, who guessed my favorite Prismacolor color: ultramarine! Now, you may be clicking back to the list of Prismacolors thinking “wait, what, that ugly thing?” For some reason, the color on the website is completely different from the actual color the pencil produces, a heavenly rich blue. I actually don’t use it all that often, because it can be a little finicky to blend with the other blues – it has a kind of reddish undertone, and most of the blues really don’t – but when I do it really makes me happy. The 1893 bathing suit’s blue is primarily done in ultramarine, with blue violet lake and cloud blue blended in – and still the scan doesn’t do the original justice.

The poll is still open for set 1 of Halloween costumes!

I do believe this is Ivy’s first Mermaid Monday… here’s a nice basic mermaid tail to welcome her into the club. Sometime soon I really should do a tail tutorial… It’s really a lot easier than it looks. I spent more time trying to come up with a top I like, honestly.

The Prismacolor sure is elusive, so OK… I’ll give you a hint. Between today and the 24th, I made extensive use of this color in one of the dresses… and you know it’s not green. Now someone should get it, right?

At this rate, the first week of Halloween will be fairies, but Lord of the Rings – or Ghostbusters, if my husband organizes his forces properly – could make a comeback. So vote in the poll, if you haven’t already!

Finally, another birthday dress! I want to fill in the months I never got around to this year as well, but for now I will start at the current date. September’s birth flower (one of them, at least) is the forget-me-not, and its birth stone (again, one of them) is sapphire, making it easy to pick the dress’ predominant color. Adding the necklace on top of it all was kind of gilding the lily, but oh well.

It is only September 4th, but I’m starting to think about October. Last year I did a month of Halloween costumes, and I had so much fun I’m thinking of doing another theme month. I could do another month of random costumes like I did last year, or I could do something more narrowly focused. For example, Brian suggested a month of famous witch costumes – the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch, Willow, the Grand High Witch, Minerva McGonagall and so on. If anyone else has any other ideas, leave a comment! I’ve got all month to think about it.

I’ve had the second Narnia movie recommended to me a couple times because of the costumes, and finally Brian and I got it from the library and watched it. I sort of made Brian watch it with me, mostly because he’s so funny when his picky English major nature is all riled up.

He says “You didn’t make me watch it with you. I volunteered. It’s true that people often volunteer to make bad decisions, but I volunteered. I enjoyed it, except for those times where characters were talking, or moving, or engaging in eight-hour long bloodless swordfights. I also enjoyed watching Susan throw arrows into the hearts of warriors.”

So there you have it, the Brian review. I liked it better than he did (I like just about everything better than he does) but I too am not thrilled by the creepily sanitary fight scenes. Not that I want to see bleeding battle elks and warriors or anything, just that in the books the fights seemed to me important and unavoidable, but also not so glorified. I like the books where the fights aren’t the focus, like the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and I’d add A Horse and His Boy which is my favorite, but I fear when they get around to that one about half of the time will be spent on the fight scene at the end. It reminds me of the Watchmen comics’ ambivalence about violence and the movie’s celebration of the same.

I did enjoy the costumes, of course! I’ve always envisioned the clothes of Narnia as being comfy and practical as well as beautifully made and graceful, and I can’t quote chapter and verse but I’m quite sure that there’s more than one part in the Chronicles where Lewis rails against stuffy, confining clothing, often preferring rather pagan garb. (There’s just enough costume description and scope for imagination in the books that I’ve often thought of doing a Narnia paperdoll series…) I especially liked the split skirts over flowing pants that Lucy and Susan wore, so I borrowed the idea for today, although it looks more like a plain old overskirt and underskirt combo if you didn’t know what it was supposed to be.

In other paperdoll news, I’ve figured out what colors to use so that I can take one hair style and change it in Photoshop to make a bunch of different hair colors. It’s not as easy as it sounds, unless you like really tacky yellow instead of blonde. So far I have ten realistic hair colors and eleven rainbow colors (those are, of course, easier to do!). Do me a favor and look at the hair colors and tell me what you think of them. If you have any suggestions as to what other colors I should try to do, I’d love to hear them (and if you have any reference pictures, that’d be great too). I think I’ve got more than enough blond colors and I need more shades of brunette.