Neiman Marcus: Thanks Ants! Thants.

Posted on December 9, 2012 by nordahlia

The project: dressing bugs for the winter

I made several sets of mittens for the ants:

All dressed up and looking for food; must be on a date. Just like people!

This ant is motorized so that he looks like he’s trying to get at the giant cake. Or possibly bowing to it. Well, can you blame him? That is some fabulous cake!

This guy’s mittens are a bit hard to see in this shot, what with the red-and-white tablecloth background. The raspberry is motorized to spin:

This ant had been put in before I made their mittens, so I had to climb out on the tube to mittenize him. I dripped hot glue everywhere and broke the giant candy cane’s support threads, but all was righted in the end:

The whole “Yummm!” window:

Those are neiman&marcus candy-coated chocolates, not m&m’s!

Over by the “Buzzzzzzz!” window, a naked ant has escaped and is about to carry off any unwary children:

Here is a motorized ant offering a present to a bee. I wrapped a lot more presents than that, but those blasted ants must have already carried the rest off to their hive:

I wired the scarves on the bees so they would look like they were fluttering (also, they’re wearing Santa hats, though it’s hard to see them in any of the pictures):

I got my annual late-night glue-gun burn from putting the pipecleaners around the flower:

The whole “Buzzzzzz!” window:

For a video, go here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaI6kBVyu00

Neiman Marcus: Snowman

Posted on December 9, 2012 by nordahlia

The project: A cold snowman

The original prototype center: we had planned on stuffing it. I tested it out with muslin and filled it with small pieces of fabric, as I don’t have however many pounds of stuffing on hand that it would take to fill a whole snowman:

Since it was going to be on a machine that would shake him to make him look like he was shivering, and since it was going to be constantly shaken for over a month, we decided it shouldn’t have as much possibility of shifting. Hence, foam:

Since the fur was so thick, I could mark the pieces on the back with impunity, including an arrow to keep the nap straight:

What with all the cutting and the serging and so forth, the flying fur dust became overwhelming. I finally tied some fabric scraps over my face:

I soon discovered the difficulties in covering something round with fabric that was not stretchy. My original pattern pieces, designed to make 6 panels per sphere, worked okay on the head, but came out looking really lumpy on the bottom snowball. I draped a piece of fabric over it and figured out the maximum possible width, which more than doubled the quantity of panels.

I still had to pull the fabric on really taut to keep it from looking like an albino pumpkin:

Pulling, scootching, and pinning; stitching, then somehow finding more fabric that could be pulled, scootched, pinned, and stitched. Repeat.

Then go through each seam with a pin and loosen every tucked-in fur fiber.

It actually looked better in person than I could get a picture of, but you can see in this shot that it’s significantly better than the original pumpkin.

Now to style the face. Carrot nose:

Here he is pre-eyebrows, with all his features pinned in place, and his eyes cheerfully sad:

Eyebrows made from velvet-covered wire:

Nearly finished:

You’d think it would be easy to put someone’s hands into a position that looks like they’re rubbing their little mittens together. Not so. If his thumbs don’t show in the front, it’ll just look like socks. If you put the palms together, it looks like he’s praying. It was hard to keep the bend only at his elbows and not partway down his forearm, which would have, aside from the horrific element that added, solved the hand problem.

The sticks are holding his hands in place while they dry:

Big Carlos used techniques he’d learned in Columbia to dust the whole snowman with glittery snow so that it wouldn’t shiver off.

Taking this shot through the glass, it was difficult to keep that blue light reflection from landing right on his face:

Also in Mr. Snowman’s window, giant blow-ups of crocheted snowflake ornaments, some of them on motors to make them spin:

I had tried out making them out of rope, but it took a whole thing of rope just to start one snowflake, and we determined that the time involved and the logistics of how to make it stiff enough to even hang, let alone to spin, just weren’t worth it:

The screens set up to show the kids running through the tubes look like they’re in miniature glaciers:

The whole Brrr window:

Neiman Marcus: leaves of grass

Posted on December 9, 2012 by nordahlia

The Project: giant blades of grass

Foam tubes covered in more foam to make them thicker. The two foams had been glued together, then separated exactly one night before I went to cover them with the fabric:

The fabric socks, as previously pictured in a teaser blog entry:

Here’s the first end result–I had thought the ruching was for all the foam tubes, but it was not intended for the grass; just for the vine part. It was delightfully Dr. Seuss-y this way, but that wasn’t what we were going for.

I put pieces of pipe inside the foam to make it stiff, which made it easier to pull the fabric on. The vine:

Here they are in the window:

Belly Dance Costume

Posted on December 7, 2012 by nordahlia

One day, feeling particularly bored with all my have-to-do sewing projects, I decided to play with some of my some-day belly dance costume fabric that I accumulate for myself and then don’t do anything with. I put this together with a skirt design that I had come up with before, then draped the top and invented it by pinning and tucking. The veil came from some fabric that had the same pattern but was printed on a sheer, net material.

And here’s me dancing in it:

Flipping Through a Magazine

Posted on December 5, 2012 by nordahlia

While sitting in a waiting room today, I flipped through their copy of Redbook and found this trenchcoat with a clever feminization through the collar ruffle:

This jacket’s uneven hem works great with this length of skirt, though they probably should have told the model they were starting to shoot:

The magazine also had this ad–why is this man shaving his palms??

I couldn’t resist getting a shot of this:

This has got to be the worst selection of toys I’ve ever seen in a waiting room. It’s a torn-up basket with some toy broken furniture. I can’t tell if the coffee maker was originally designed to be a toy or whether it’s a real single-use coffee maker that hasn’t been washed and is missing part of a lid.

Old photos of clothes

Posted on December 4, 2012 by nordahlia

I came across this while wading through my stash of photos on facebook recently. The yellow part was intended as a sleeveless ghawazee coat to be worn with a belly dance costume. I like incorporating belly dancing clothes into regular wardrobes, and a lot of my ready-to-wear designs are based on dance ideas.

I had never gotten around to adding a clasp, so I put it on with a brooch. I found the boots on the side of the road and recently gave them to my chi gong teacher because apparently we both have large feet.

Longcat Scarf is Long

Posted on December 2, 2012 by nordahlia

Last year for his birthday, I made D. a couple cat-related items from some really nice scrap white fur left over from some window-dressing projects. One of them was a counterfeit tuxedo cat based on an inside joke (it was a stuffed white cat wearing a tuxedo and top hat, rather than an actual tuxedo-colored cat; there’s more to it than that, but it’s a joke based on financial humor, so more on that later).

This scarf has a pocket hidden by an invisible zipper. Inside it’s a charmeuse fabric with a black and white cat print on a baby-pink background because I figured the inside of a cat would be mostly pink.

I didn’t have any pink safety-noses handy, and the ones readily available look really cheap, so I painted some black ones and coated them with polyurethane so it wouldn’t scrape off.

The photo of pointing is actually pretty heavily photoshopped; I liked aspects of two different shots, so I merged them together and had to retouch pretty much the entire bookshelf, which is an emotionally unrewarding use of my killer Photoshop skillz:

Here is D. attempting to look hipster. Contrary to what the uninformed may think from various visual cues, he is not a hipster; he is a software engineer:

And here is a blank meme colorwheel for anyone who can actually come up with anything else to say about a scarf:

Racing Stripes

Posted on November 30, 2012 by nordahlia

These are some wool slacks cut like skinny jeans, with rivets and everything. The client generally wears boots, so I added some similar-weight cashmere godets in the side seams up to the knee.

I stitched some scrap fabric over the rivets so they wouldn’t poke out and wear on the ribbon or look lumpy.

I pinned this grosgrain ribbon up the side seam with a ruler inside the leg so I wouldn’t pin through more than one layer of fabric:

I matched the maroon of the stripes in the fabric and quadrupled the thread so it would show up. The grosgrain stripes made it easy to keep the stitches even–4 stripes on, 4 stripes off.