Because of being away and then having to catch up on all the things I fell behind on because I was away, I was unable to find the time to make a new costume. I did, however, have something to wear. My grad collection from last year was a set of evening wear dresses inspired by some of the works of M. C. Escher, especially his "Three Worlds" lithograph (pictured below). Because of that, I've got a couple of dresses I made with fish appliqué. The one that fits me is partly inspired by salmon swimming upstream, jumping up waterfalls and such.
"Three Worlds" by M. C. Escher
The fish dresses from my grad collection.
I'm pretty anti-sequin- I've spent too many years white-gluing them to crafts in Girl Guides to believe they should be used in real clothes- but if I had had the time I think I would have liked to make some sort of tacky mermaid outfit with green-sequinned fabric for the fish scales.
On Thursday, I went to Dollarama to try to find some accessories to wear with my dress. I was hoping to find some nets that I could take apart to make a shawl or shrug (what I had in mind was something like the ones we used to use to catch frogs when we were kids) but they only had mesh butterfly nets. They didn't look nautical at all. I did pick up some seaweed-ish fake foliage, fake waterlilies, and fake cattails (It is FAKE prom after all). I also got some hairclips to sew the lilies to and some metallic string so I could try to tie some net. I spent the rest of the evening after I got home watching Youtube videos about different ways to tie net. It was a bit confusing without a "netting-needle" and in the end I gave up. I just stopped at Ardene on the way home from work on Friday to pick up white fishnets instead.
The whole net ordeal made me think of Finnick Odair's outfit from Catching Fire where he wore nothing but a strategically-knotted fishing net. I thought it would be funny to capture that in costume if I had more rope and more time and had actually been successful at making net. Maybe it can be a cosplay project for the future, although it would certainly work better if I was a fit man instead of myself.
A picture of me from Fake Prom- the outfit I ended up with. I take photos with my phone and that doesn't always work so well in the dark.
I ended up sewing a lily to a hairclip (which you probably can't see very well); made a second pair of fishnet tights into a top; and, with the help of my boyfriend, stuck my "fake seaweed" into my two pairs of fishnets.
Fake Prom was a lot of fun. I really like costume parties and I wish there were more events like this in Toronto. It's sad that Fake Prom itself is over, but I hear whispers that it may just undergo a change of management. Hopefully there will be some other cool costume parties around in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment