Individual Frog

My sister imaginaryalice is a big fan of the new Battlestar Galactica series, so this year for Christmas I decided to make her something related to it. I didn't want to do a straight-up replica of one of the costumes because she would never be able to wear it except maybe to a sci-fi convention. I also didn't just want to make a T-shirt that said BATTLESTAR GALACTICA on it or anything like that. I wanted to make something *based* on one of the costumes, enough that a big fan of the show might recognize it, but subtle enough that it could be worn around town.

Since her favorite character is Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, I decided to make something based on the flight suit that she wears. Here's a good picture of both the front and the back of the suit. Here's what I came up with:





I focused on the shoulder pads and the weird scales down the back as details I could work with. It's hard to see in the pictures but I also put a pocket on one of the sleeves like the suits on the show. I did it all from scratch, made the pattern myself from a hoodie of hers.

I do wish I had one more detail on the front, which looks a little blank to me. I tried to get a patch like they wear on the arms of the flight suits, but I couldn't find them anywhere but e-bay, which couldn't get it to me on time (this present was made pretty last-minute because all the stupid fabric stores around here have closed), and then I thought about stenciling THRACE K or something on the chest, but that didn't work out either. Oh well.

What do you think?

My brother on the right is the real star of this photo. The pants! The socks! The shoes! The hat!


Those seem to be Ranch Ruffles. No doubt this can be dated from that information.


My favorite, favorite outfit growing up. That was my "vacation hat", which I wore anytime we went on vacation. If I could find a shirt like that again, I would buy it in a second.


I got this suit at the Salvation Army. It was made in Dusseldorf in the 40s. Fit me quite well. Absolutely beautiful. But I didn't realize at the time that wearing the pants all the time would destroy them. I wore them constantly, they were the best-looking pair of pants I've ever had. Now they are in incredibly bad shape and I feel extremely guilty about destroying them and thereby destroying the suit.


In the 80s, a pair of shades made even a huge cast look good.

I pretty much hate this season of Project Runway, but I do like Leanne. She looks vaguely like my first girlfriend; I seem to be alone on the Internet in thinking she's hot. And she seems pretty calm and normal and she has made at least two great outfits, pretty much the only ones I've liked. But she will probably be eliminated simply for not being a big personality. That's the way it works on TV. Go, Leann! Do you have a boyfriend?

I want to be a designer like Lebbeus Woods is an architect.

Last night I read about the financial collapse of Steve & Barry's, the cut-rate clothing store, and immediately started trolling the web for employee anecdotes, out of a feeling of solidarity, or something: the stories read remarkably similar to those about the collapse of NOVA. A business "built on a castle of sand", wholly dependent on one-time nonsustainable payments to keep operating, and apparently based on a policy of ripping people off and not paying their bills, as well as hiring unqualified college graduates, all the while claiming to have invented a brilliant new business model. I have to admit that I feel a good deal of schadenfreude about Steve & Barry's, as I did about NOVA: not for the poor employees, but for the hubristic Steve & Barry themselves, who just a couple weeks ago were in the New York Times calling themselves the Google of retail. (Not that I am particularly impressed by Google, either, but to most people, that's pretty close to saying you can weave better than Athena.) But I doubt that, like NOVA president Nozomu Saruhashi, they will end up arrested, more's the pity.

It's strange to read people's takes on the news. I've been to Steve & Barry's only once in my life, and it was incredibly depressing; most of the stuff would be garbage even if it was well-made, and it was not well-made. But it seems like people depended on their low prices to buy clothes for their families, especially these days with gas being so expensive. I'm not going to judge them for that, even if I myself would much rather buy cheap clothes at the Salvation Army. Another thing, horrible to read, is people slinging around the fact that Steve & Barry are Jewish--this kind of racism pokes its disgusting head up everywhere on the Internet. In the case of NOVA the perpetually disgruntled employees often declared that only those self-disrespecting, credulously loyal Japanese (actually, Japanese women was usually the implication) would continue to work for a company that wasn't paying its bills, etc.; here we see the exact same behavior, but this time it's blamed on those dirty money-grubbing Jews. Everyone wants to imagine that their group is inherently better than the kind of cheating and bad-faith dealing in these situations, but obviously, the promise of money and the desperate fear of losing it can corrupt anyone.

Good luck to all the employees, vendors, and customers who have been caught in the middle of this. I feel like I know where you are.

Nobody sees

Back when I made the Galliano Pirate Jacket, I took a bunch of pictures of the work in progress that I was going to upload, but I never got around to it. Here they are at last.

We start with a bazillion pattern pieces, taking over my room:



( Pictures ahoy! )
I'm kind of feeling weird right now, so these are just placeholder captions, hopefully I'll redo them very soon. Anyway! There it is!

Newish one from Japan:


( More )

You can comment on these picture posts, you know!

Just on computer paper...not very nice.



( cut for gross )

A watercolor after maybe my favorite fashion photo of all time, a picture of Liberty Ross by Nick Knight.

CD Cover Meme

My first attempt:



A kind of medieval/gothy Dead Can Dance ripoff band, I imagine.

Here's St. Lawrence, St. Lucy, and St. Agatha! I did this watercolor yesterday.

Via message board watch guys, I have just learned about the crazy watches produced by SEIKO in the 1980s. The Dick Tracy dream of watching TV on your watch was realized (to some extent), but the real prize for me is the Computer Watch, which is like the world's biggest and most ridiculous calculator watch combined with the Nintendo Power Glove. I was immediately struck by the similarity to Kazuma Kaneko's early character designs for Shin Megami Tensei...there must have been something in the Japanese 80s air that made people want to wear huge computers on their arms.

Someone buy me this watch, please. I will put together an outfit entirely centered on it and go clubbing.

If there's such a thing as a high-powered fashion editor that I think I kind of agree with, it's probably Carine Roitfeld of French Vogue.

All she ever wanted was to be surrounded by very attractive people and very expensive clothes. It’s always been “fashion, fashion, fashion”—so much so that she lists beauty and jewelry as evidence that the job as editor-in-chief has expanded her range of interests.

And she doesn’t care much for the business aspect of fashion. In an industry where accessories count for the bulk of her advertisers’ revenue, she has this to say: “Right now I think that fashion in the world becomes a bit boring. There is so much money, and I feel a bit when you go to shows they want to sell so many handbags, and for me, well, I do not like handbags. I do not wear handbags. It is not a nice look, to carry a handbag.”

That's me all over. I don't care about beauty, jewelry, handbags, or any of it, just clothes. (I don't really care about the very attractive people, really, even.)

Carine interview in New York Magazine.

I love Craftster, but the quality of the work there is, of course, quite variable. One thing about it is that from the first-time sewer making a circle skirt to the skilled home dressmaker recreating a designer look, the cut and construction of almost everything is quite straightforward and traditional. The craftsmanship, in other words, is variable, but the composition is pretty much the same.

That's why it's nice to discover an oddball like JOODITO, a girl from Boston, according to her profile, who has a formula, but it is a completely unique one. She does reconstructions from (I assume) thrift-store clothes, that are boldly graphic, often play with texture, and which almost invariably feature a huge sci-fi collar like the one in Nick Knight's famous photo of Devon Aoki in Alexander McQueen. Check out her collected works on Craftster!

Look at this! I am "blogger individualfrog." I never think anybody reads this at all, and here I was getting quoted, and then corrected in the comments for my imprecision.

I guess this is why they have those trackback things, so you won't be so completely surprised by this sort of thing. I suppose it figures that out of all my posts, the one personal, NOVA-related one that I forgot to friends-only is the only one that got through to the real world.