Laura’s Blue and White 1870s Victorian Day Dress from J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla

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So yesterday I did the vampire Carmilla’s bloody nightgown, and then I got to thinking how unfair it was that she got all the attention and long-suffering Laura got none. As a matter of fact, I can’t even remember Laura’s name without referring to Wikipedia or my previous entry. Face it, you really have to pile on the lace to make mild victims as interesting as seductive vampire women in bloody nightgowns. And so pile I did, and here is a dress from 1870 that Laura might have worn. To be honest, even though as near as I can tell 1870 is an accurate enough date for the book’s setting, I thought long and hard about going back a few years for inspiration. After all, Laura and her father lived in a castle in Germany in the middle of nowhere and who knows how well Laura kept up with English fashion in between vampire ravishings. But then I thought, she was still a growing girl and if her dresses were two or three years old, maybe she’d have outgrown them and wouldn’t be wearing anything that old? Maybe since her father is sort of vaguely rich, she orders a lot of new dresses? Maybe she spends a lot of time remaking her dresses referring to whatever fashion news she can get, because life in an isolated castle is so boring? So I over-thought this until I got fed up and tried to make an 1870s style day dress anyways, like I had initially planned. Since it’s not a copy of any one dress, it’s probably not historically accurate (I definitely have my misgivings about the way the overskirt turned out) but oh well, it was sure fun to draw.

New poll tomorrow, but this one will remain open for a few days yet…

Halloween Costume Series Day 17: Dorcas Snodgrass’ 1910s Light Blue Nurse Outfit with Full White Apron and Cap

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“Nurse,” of course, is one of the more popular women’s Halloween costumes but I think they’re often of the “sexy” variety; I suppose the connotation is “hot yet nurturing” but it always makes me think of things like getting blood drawn, which isn’t really the intended effect. Thinking about nurse costumes did remind me of this Metafilter article about a nurse named Dorcas Snodgrass who died under mysterious circumstances in 1912. The article links to this picture of her in the Library of Congress photostream, under which there’s a great comment that brings together some New York Times articles about her disappearance and death, officially ruled a suicide. (The Metafilter thread itself is mostly just good for theories and chatting about the name Snodgrass.) So there — not much of an elaborate costume, but a genuinely creepy nurse story for Halloween.

Halloween Costume Series Day 8: Cleopatra White Linen Egyptian Dress with Blue Lotus Pattern, with Jeweled Collar and Red Sash

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I kind of broke my “no research all month” rule for this one, but it is not hard for me to find an excuse to look at ancient Egyptian clothes. This one is vaguely accurate, although I think the lotus pattern may be over the top, there’s no melting perfume cone and the clothes should be sheer anyways, for full royal style. That’s even further than today’s ’sexy Cleopatra’ revelers want to go… I used to want to be an Egyptologist, and I’ve even got a book or two on learning hieroglyphs in the other room. Then I discovered Japanese and kanji. No kidding.

If you’ve already taken my poll and answered “obscure costumes,” can you leave a comment and tell me what kinds of costumes you’re talking about? I’m very curious now, since that category’s done so well. I expected that sexy costumes would be low on the list for this crowd, but I wasn’t expecting that no one would choose ‘pop culture’ for a costume. What, no Jedis in this group? No Jokers? I thought everyone wanted to be the Joker this year…

Cornflower Blue 1927 Dress with Handkerchief Skirt inspired by Lucia in London by E.F. Benson

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Sorry, sorry, I’ve been playing with my bike too much and not drawing enough, I know. But you see, as the new toy novelty wears off, I return to my Prismacolors…

I am reading Make Way for Lucia now, which is a collection of the Mapp and Lucia novels all in one doorstop-sized book. I listened to Queen Lucia first as an audiobook from Librivox, and then, since that book stops so abruptly, was dying to have more, more, more. Luckily there is more more more — Make Way for Lucia includes seven books total. They’re quite funny in a dry, snarky kind of way; as a matter of fact, it occurred to me more than once that it’s a shame the word “snark” itself wasn’t used in the 1920s, because there are so many places where a speaker says something described as “ironical” or “sarcastic” and the proper word can be only “snarky.” So far it is about a small English community and its queen bee, Lucia, and although living with the gossipy, snarky, hypocritical residents of Riseholme would be a sort of hell on Earth for someone like me, socially clueless hermit that I am, it’s delightful to read about it. The characters are mostly so quite dissembling, thoughtless and haughty that I rather hope that they get their comeuppance, and the author then kicks them around quite so thoroughly. So thoroughly, actually that I start to feel bad for them and hope they don’t get hurt too badly, even if it was coming to them, because their gossip and vanity is really all very harmless and none of them are bad, just silly. There’s a comparison to a Jane Austen novel here (especially because now I’m listening to Persuasion), if she was a shade more malicious and didn’t focus on romance.

Anyways, the main character is Lucia Lucas, who in Queen Lucia portrayed herself as a sort of refined lady born in the wrong age who worshipped Shakespeare and Beethoven and had a perfect horror of modern contraptions such as gramophones and London, and she contrived so that the whole town seemed to revolve around her. In the book I’m reading now, Lucia in London, she and her husband inherit money and property in London and suddenly her hatred of the city, modern art and music and so on simply vanishes. She even — oh my! — shingles her hair and wears short skirts. When I was listening to Queen Lucia I thought I should do an Elizabethan paperdoll outfit in deference to Lucia’s despising of modernity (and, also, to my inability to figure out when the book was set, my normal attention to details fixing a book in time quite baffled by Lucia’s quirks and Riseholme’s sleepiness), but now that she has gone to London I thought I had better get with the times as well.

The style doesn’t fit my poor Sylvia or Iris well, as they have no access to the kind of undergarments one would likely wear with such a dress, but oh well. It is based off of a McCalls pattern from 1927, which is when the book was published.

Revision of a Boutique 1800s Regency Gown in Sea Green with White Lace

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For Annissa! :)

I’m still a little sick, so it’s not the best one I’ve ever done, but it’s a good start on the path to doing a paperdoll every day again… Anyways, this is a redrawing of one of the 1800s regency gowns I did for the Boutique. I must have based it off of something, but it was ten years ago, I have no idea what it was based on…

Three More 1800s Dresses from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique

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I guess I’m not quite ready to return to that once-a-day ideal with this headache. That’s what you get for reading essays full-time! It’s too bad because now I’m all excited about paperdolling. But that’s OK, I’ll do one tomorrow… or Wednesday, perhaps, when I have a day off. But I’ll try for tomorrow!

These are the final outfits from the 1800 collection from my old site, Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique. I believe that the green caped confection is a reproduction of a bathing suit, although I don’t know what the reference was for that and can’t give any more precise details, as it was something like ten years ago after all.

Here, too, is this week’s poll… So in preparation for the plane rides I downloaded a bunch of short audiobooks off of Librivox, rather at random, and put them on my iPod, but I didn’t listen to all of them. Here are the candidates: what should I listen to next? (Keep in mind a paperdoll usually comes from whatever I’m listening to ;) )
The Big Bow Mystery, Carmilla, The Enchanted Castle, Otto of the Silver Hand, The Lone Star Ranger.

Two 1800s dresses from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique

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Two more from the 1800s set from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique…

By the time you all read this, I’ll be in Washington State visiting my family. But I intend to have lots of time for paperdolling again!

1800s bloomers and hoopskirts from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique

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Here are some more from the 1800s set — bloomers and a rather fanciful ball gown. (I remember drawing that one: I ran out of paper.) Funny how the bloomers used to be so scandalous…

Three 1800s regency gowns from Liana’s Paperdoll Boutique

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Thank you everyone for the kind thoughts about our dear Maggie. It was a horrible time for all of us and all your thoughtful comments really made me feel better about her. The apartment seems so much different without her trotting around… Harume seems as placid as ever (we don’t call her Goldfish Brain for nothing) but she’s become more vocal, always meowing over and over. She doesn’t seem sad, though, but just chatty, so I guess she’s all right.

I’ve had a half-finished dress for a while now, so I decided to restart the process with some Boutique gowns… These are from the 1800s (though when I drew them I didn’t make any finer distinctions of time, so I forget exactly when they are supposed to be from). I put them up in honor of the kind link from Jane Austen Today, and also because I just finished Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and regency gowns are on my mind. I actually remember exactly where I was when I was drawing the gowns in this set: working in the computer lab at Tri-C back in high school, a job which entailed fixing jammed printers, cleaning up and signing people in and out. So I could sit at the desk by the door and have some downtime to draw, and I just thought I had it made!

Calamity Jane in Fringed Leather Jacket and Buckskin Breeches

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I’m listening to Deadwood Dick’s Doom, or, Calamity Jane’s Last Adventure, a dime novel western by Edward Wheeler. At three hours long I will probably be done with it by tomorrow, but if you like westerns or Deadwood, which I do, it’s an enjoyable three hours. The reading is a mite uneven, as with a lot of LibriVox books read by many readers, but overall it’s great, and some of the readers really put some life into it. I mean, how can you not love this line:
“Yes, I am Deadwood Dick, the celebrated cuss from Custer clime– the diabolical devil-may-care devotee of road-agency, from Deadwood the hunted hurricane, Harris, just as you see me. And according to a recent act of Congress, if you or any other two-legged individual attempts to harm yonder girl, whoever she may be, I’ll agree to furnish him with a free pass over Jordan by the most direct ethereal line. I mean business, so let some pilgrim of enterprising disposition open the market.”

Bullock couldn’t pull that off, but just imagine Swearengen chewing on it, preferably while waving around a pistol, even if the chivalrous sentiment isn’t quite his department…

Anyways, this is a drawing of Calamity Jane’s outfit, based off of this picture of her scan courtesy of this Calamity Jane site, Calamity Jane gets to show off in this book, putting a bullet through the neck of a bottle midair, but at the moment she’s in mortal peril. I’m not worried, though, Deadwood Dick has a 3 for 3 record of protecting helpless women, so far, and I predict that tomorrow she’ll be out of her predicament and back with him.