As promised, here are some shots of the finished, printed on, and finalized plastic covers I sewed for the windows we’re working on for the Neiman Marcus Christmas window display:
They were too big to get straight-on pictures of without running out into traffic, so here is also one of the “small” ones:
Also, here is another preview:
The Project: The slinky dress worn by Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters.
I whipped out my copy of Ghostbusters to get a good shot of the dress, as all the ones online show her sitting down. Here she is showing off her new look to Bill Murray:
And a convenient possession pose that shows more detail from a different angle:
Bill Murray can be seen examining the technique used to hem her lined skirt.
One of my clients commissioned me to make this for a relative who lives in California, and told me that its future owner was about my size. Convenient! I learned to sew on that size!
I draped the pieces on myself and decided to make it a shirt and an elastic-banded skirt for more size-range, with a whole lot of belt to cinch it at the waist.
I made the gold lining smaller for the top and cut the skirt at a different angle to maximize the movement and make it a little more obvious that it’s got two layers.
The fabrics used were tissue lame and crinkled tissue lame, so they puff out instead of draping nicely and looking wispy. I also tied a large bow on the belt because I was feeling too lazy to style the belt during the testing process.
I put it in these bags for transport because it was for a party:
Some years back, D. thought it would be funny to build a shed around an old trashed out piano. More lately, with a non-functioning piano taking up space in his shed, he didn’t find it quite as amusing. Our friend who can manifest anything, make anything work, and throw any item into any other item managed to pull it out into the yard a few weeks ago. He’s been spending all that time slowly dismantling it to salvage out the harp.
I managed to lug it into my loft and now it’s sitting in the middle of my cutting space just being a giant 1-200 pound harp with screws sticking out.
The screws on the floor are from pulling a piece off in an attempt at getting some other screws off from behind the strings. A quarter can of WD40 and a lot of sewing machine oil later, I now know they are not going anywhere.
I put the paper behind it to see what the brassy harp will look like on a white wall instead of on a similarly-colored floor. It’s kind of got that difference-lines thingy going on, though you can’t see it too clearly in this shot. (Yes, that is the technical term. And yes, I am sitting right here next to Google.)
The back isn’t quite as pretty–some of the wood is NOT coming off. After asking nigh-expert, Denise, who advised me that “if you really want to, you can take anything apart; it won’t be a pretty, decorative item afterward, though,” I’ve decided to give up on it, but rent tools to slice off the giant screws sticking out and leave the remaining wood.
I’m pretty handy about a lot of things, and I came up with a number of methods I could use to hang it on a non-studded wall. Then again, after quite a bit of assessing with the nigh-expert, I’ve determined to use resources other than my own handiness; one of the many benefits to working with a lot of creative people on various odd projects means knowing folks with pretty much every skill possible, or else knowing folks who know folks. One of the people on the other end of the panel-making process I do the velcro for also professionally hangs huge things from buildings. While it would probably take me several days and quite a bit of further research, as well as a gang of large men (why didn’t I get those bodybuilders’ numbers??), it will probably take Ivan about 30 minutes and the tools he has in his pockets.
I’ve started working on some of the stuff that actually goes into the Neiman Marcus windows, rather than just prototypes. Grauwyler got to play with the selvage edges I cut off:
