of feathers and frankensteined frocks

the feathers, they are done.

DONE! i scream from the mountaintop. i am Captain of Mount Accomplishment! never has ruggy been so inundated with my trumpeting!

on occasion, i know if i begin a hairbrained project, it will turn out the way i expect it to. in this case, i had a completely botched muslin of a wiggle dress, made from a stashed medium weight satin, i believe. this thing was overworked to death. for weeks, i thought i could wrangle it into a skirt and get something out of all that work, but the idea of measuring and slicing was leaving me cold. then, the ever inventive adri suggested that I make the feathered bombshell dress as a skirt instead, to get more mileage out of the whole shebang. eureka. last weekend, i woke up and decided to marry the botched wiggle dress and feathers in a frankenstein bill. i would do it. hack across the waist, and see what happened. cut into five yards of mood feathers. i'd had them for over three months. JUST DO IT ALREADY.

after slicing the dress in half, i removed the center back zipper, and laid it out flat on my table. marking a line all the way across at natural waist, i then measured down four inches from that line. and again, to get four loooong horizontal lines in all. working from the bottom up, i folded the skirt fabric around the feather trim edge, enclosing it. as i finished each line, and it began to take shape, i started to get excited.

and then there comes that point when you get a little too excited. things are working out, and you keep going even though you've been crazyface tunnel vision on a saturday for eight hours straight and you know you shouldn't attach a pleather waist band over sazeracs. but you do anyway. y'all, i ripped this waistband out countless times. i knew the self-made bias tape was not wide enough, but icouldn't be bothered to cut more. no, no, fifteen minutes of cutting more bias tape is MUCH more irritating than sixty minutes of seam ripping and reattaching. and once i caved in and cut more tape, did i decide to fix all of my errors in judgement and figure out a lining first? nope. i decided the guts were pretty enough and i would leave them as is.

guess who has a seam ripper and some lace lining in her future.

although it was meant to be paired with a bustier top, upon accessorizing, i found ruggy's dress shirt to be the best match. i love that it dresses down the absolute audacity of the thing. it is a delicate flower, this birdy skirt, made for standing-only events. you know the kind: where your hand is never without a glass of champagne. the kind of event i always seem to be beleaguered by, the life of a kalkatroonaan: it is fabulous.

this standing-room-only skirt was made using my monthly fabric "allowance" as part of the Mood Sewing Network.