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 today is the other costume day that I promised to my husband – he was starting to offer me money, so I thought that I really had better humor him – and he wanted a Sniper Joe outfit. Apparently Sniper Joe is a Mega Man enemy, a mass-produced Protoman clone. (Brian’s been on a real Protomen kick lately, you see…)

Well, of course I get slightly bored with things like that, so I gave Sniper Joe – let’s call her Sniper Jo – a cute little skirt. Her shield is smaller than it is supposed to be, I think, so let’s pretend she’s an updated model who can take down Mega Man just fine without that clunky big shield, thank you…

So now you have a taste of what this blog would be like if my husband was the artist… Tomorrow, back to cute dresses, I think.

Today is sort of a guest post! My cousin Becky and I, as I mentioned a couple days before, drew some paperdolls together – she did two, and this is one of them. I love the way the yellow makes the petal skirt look so vibrant, and the detail on the corset top. Yep, my family is cool! Someday I’ll have a paperdoll jam session with my mom, too.

Becky loves her beautiful dresses too, as you see if you look around her deviantart gallery. This one is my favorite, with the gauzy layer on the skirt done so nicely (and the guy’s cloak! Unlike me she can actually draw men) The advantage of paperdolls over everything else, though, is that all I really care about is the outfits! Yep, paperdolls are a superior art form… haha, OK, maybe just for me.

So I said I drew a few prom dresses for the Boutique, and here are the first two of them! I don’t think they’re particularly based on any real gowns, but it’s been a long time…

Johanna at 18th century fashion linked to a sort of museum social networking site, Creative Spaces which is a way to tag, collect and organize works from different museums that are participating. I love this, because one of my biggest issues is, say, looking for gowns from a specific year and going through this crazy avalanche of Google image searches and bookmarks and links to sites I’ve never seen before and links to sites I’ve used before and then forgetting where I saw what. I’m sure there’s some widget I could use to fit with my stream-of-consciousness research style, but in the meantime I like where this is going. If you join up, add me as a contact and then explore the Things Liana Likes notebook!

So I did a birthday dress for January and then proceeded to ignore February and March — I’m very sorry, anyone with birthdays in those months who was waiting for one. (I’ll do them this month, since belated birthday presents are better than nothing, right?) This is a dress for April, since one of the birth flowers for this month is the daisy. Like January’s, it’s intended to be vaguely angelic, but not based in any particular theology — I think of the birthday dresses as like those little statues you can buy for a kid every year where the characters get older, actually.

January’s drives me crazy, because the white part on the red skirt, there were supposed to be flowers in there, and I got fed up with the dress and it was late and I never drew them in. Maybe I’ll dig it out of my box and put them in, then it won’t bug me… This one I like a lot, though, so that makes up for many failures.

Yeah, no April Fool’s joke for you this year, sorry. Maybe next year!

So now the black and white princess has a black and white mermaid friend to play with, or a mermaid secret identity perhaps. Either way, more coloring fun for you, less work for me, something that sounds good this evening! E-mail colored creations to me, or post a link in the comments. As far as the princess goes, I love how Freyja’s rich, warm version turned out, and yeah, I can’t not like anything my husband does.

Now, I happen to know my mom edited this revision of this dress, and therefore it had to be drawn, because my mom’s awesome. I think I ought to ask her to design me dresses more often when I’m feeling unimaginative! She’s also more dangerous with the Prismacolors than I am – she does absolutely gorgeous drawings of flowers and plants on cards, then sends them to people. She jokes that you only get to come to her funeral if you got a drawing from her. Here was her description of the dress:

A sunflower yellow bodice,green peplum with a beyond floor-length skirt done in blended colors of harvest. The hem is heavily decorated with a matching line of Celtic designs in dark blue, with golden accents.

She also has a pair of long dark green gloves that reach halfway up. The back of each hand is embroidered with harvest and Celtic designs. On her feet are soft blue satin slippers.She also has a subtle webbed crystal frill tiara (worn front-to-back)with dripping tiny blue seed pearls. Around her neck is a matching crystal and single pearl necklace.

I guess you have to imagine the satin slippers, and there wasn’t enough space on the glove for a harvest design, but I think this came out really nicely and hopefully close to what Mom was imagining. This is one where I wish I could show you all the original — the harvest colors on the skirt are a lot prettier on the real thing. It made me decidedly twitchy to finish coloring the skirt, then draw patterns all over the hem, but it worked, I think!

Happy Valentine’s Day, paperdoll fans, and you’ve got to admit that even if it looks like it was bought in a store, this is a delightful Valentine’s dress. Brian and I have been into watching Firefly lately, and we’re almost through the series. (So please don’t spoil anything from the movie or the last few episodes just yet; I know River Tam beats up everyone but I don’t want to know any more.) Kaylee, the ship’s mechanic, falls in love with this dress and gets to wear it to a party. In this very same episode Inara wears what may be the most gorgeous dress ever, but there’s just something about this dress that’s so very Kaylee, and probably instantly recognizable to every Firefly fan.

Don’t be surprised if you see an Inara outfit here too, or two or twenty, because I swear every episode she wears something new that just bowls me over… but for now it’s all about the layer cake dress. Until I revisit the ‘verse, then, do enjoy these Firefly paper dolls. Holly also did two Kaylee outfits for one of her dolls, which you can find here and here. Thanks also to Can’t Take The Sky, a Firefly fan site with great screen captures.

It’s been such a long time since Mermaid Monday, how very cruel of me… in penance, I’ll reveal some more of their world.

I often think about how, in my paperdollverse, the mermaids interact with the humans, but that is because I myself happen to be human and have that particular bias. Frankly, the majority of mermaids don’t give it as much thought as I do. I’ve come to think of mermaid excursions to the human world as something like American college kids studying abroad. Not everyone is going to be interested in the first place, and some might like to but have other priorities under the seas. Of the ones who do, most might spend only a season of their life exploring the new culture, some might enter into it to some extent but always consider themselves mermaids first and foremost, and a minority, like my bitter crimson mermaid, become permanent expats. Generally, mermaids consider themselves slightly superior to humans, and for the most part there aren’t oodles of mermaids longing to escape to land and legs.

My mom wondered how the switch between tails and legs is actually affected. There are mermaid mystics, with varying amounts of experience and power, who can control such things for a price. Surely we’re all now thinking of Ariel sacrificing her voice? It’s not often so serious; curious young mermaids attending their first human balls usually do so on wobbly legs not shaped quite right (which is why most mermaids favor long ballgowns), thanks to a friend’s crazy old grandmother who will perform the necessary magic for a string of pearls. (The accompanying rite of passage is for excitable mermaids to forget how long the magic lasts and transform back right there on the dance floor. If the girl is lucky, her gallant dance partner will help her back into the water; if she’s not so lucky a couple of already overworked servants will do it, talking maliciously about seared mermaid fillets with lemon sauce over a bed of wild rice.) The longer the magic lasts, the more skillfully the legs are formed and the more control the mermaid has over switching back and forth, the more it will cost. At a certain point, a desperate mermaid switches from grandmothers paid off with pearls to dangerous creatures who demand voices, lifespans, firstborn children and so on. Today’s mermaid is one of these mystics, exceptionally long-lived because she’s always happy to trade legs or looks and so on for a portion of the petitioner’s lifespan. (She isn’t at all ashamed about the price she asks: the study of mermaid mysticism is dangerous, and she sees it as a fair deal given the years she’s devoted to her craft and the scarcity of competitors.) In the face of her present problems, your average impetuous young mermaid couldn’t care less about five or ten years that come off the end of her life anyways. Between the sharks, nets and mystics offering one’s heart’s desire with a price to be paid much later, it is only very smart mermaids who live to be old.

So I started a belly dance class (beledi, to be precise) a few weeks back. Unsurprisingly, it’s always been something that appealed to me (fancy veils! shiny coins! etc.) but I’m ridiculously uncoordinated, disconnected from my body, overweight, quite self-conscious, can’t tell my right from my left, and in every way am the type of person who should stay well away from dance classes. But once I got over the abject terror involved in stepping into the studio and completing the first class, I was hooked. Hip shimmies are a lot of fun if you’ve got plenty of hip to put into them, for one thing, and the movements are something I can usually do once I watch closely and practice for a bit. Of course I’ll never be a “dancer” in any way; people say “just let go” and “just follow the music” and “don’t think about it” and apparently I walk around in a near constant state of tenseness because all that is impossible for me. In class I feel like I’m translating everything the teacher does into a flowchart for me to follow and when I do something with my body that I can’t explain with words, like pivoting or this one veil move, it’s really quite unsettling for me.

Anyways, as far as I know (and keep in mind I’m a total noob) there are two styles of costumes, cabaret and tribal, cabaret being the highly beaded bra and skirt look and tribal going for a more ethnic, fantasy look. I really like the tribal look, so that’s what I went with for this paper doll. She’s got a green choli, a red hipscarf and a black full skirt, all trimmed with gold and gold coins. I covet the choli I drew for my doll, but I’m not so sure I’d have the courage to wear it!

At the moment, the vampire has pulled ahead… there’s still time for the Good Queen to come back ahead though.