“A fox’s teeth are very
sharp.” (2013-2019) Silk filament on silk-hemp blend with hand-dyed silk
chiffon scarf. Text is Sandman: The Dream Hunters by @neil-gaiman,
design inspired by illustrations of Yoshitaka Amano. Dress by L.L.K. Photo credit to Kenneth Williams.
Six years ago, my unbelievably talented wife decided to undertake a ridiculously long and complicated project: to embroider a story onto a dress.
We live in a very casual college town where no one ever dresses up for anything, so we began a tradition of throwing formal New Year’s Eve parties, and L being L, she made a dress every year. In 2013, she decided to take it a step further: she would create a dress inspired by Neil Gaiman and Yoshitaka Amano’s Sandman: The Dream Hunters and then embroider the entire story onto the dress. The dress itself was the work of a few weeks and looked beautiful on her at the party, and then the real work began: planning, mapping, embroidering and embroidering and embroidering. She estimated it would take approximately ten years of doing needlework an hour or two each evening, leaving plenty of time to take nights or even months off. She finished in under six.
I can’t summon words to describe how proud of her I am right now. I mean, I am always proud of her, as she is an exceptionally kind and caring human being as well as a polymath (seamstress, carpenter, baker, programmer, naturalist, and tenured professor of biology), but she has created a true work of art and I hope it ends up in a museum somewhere to immortalize her talent, skill, and patience.
She’s currently trying to figure out her next project.
I wish I could find the words to say how remarkable and touching and glorious this is for me. I’m still proud of the story and so honoured to see it made into a dress…
Safe to say that the creator of the dress has gotten a better Christmas present than I could have ever purchased for her.
I’m still going to try to find her a good bandsaw, though. Now that she’s done constructing an exactingly measured scale replica of our house and yard, complete with slope, out of craft foam board and card stock, she’s been talking about getting back into woodworking… as soon as she’s finished with her *other* fabric project, v. 4 of her replica of the Fortuny Delphos gown, a form-fitting dress where the elasticity of the fabric comes entirely from micro-pleating the silk (painstakingly, by hand, which is apparently the only way she does things). The technique was lost when Fortuny died in 1949, but L has managed to recreate it. (To be fair, she adds, Fortuny’s company has also managed to replicate the technique.) And both the Delphos gown and the Dream Hunters dress should be on display at the Tompkins County Public Library in Ithaca, NY sometime in 2020 as part of an exhibit on folktales and mythology.
Unsurprisingly, the exhibit was delayed by the pandemic, but it’s up now!
The exhibit is called Fit For a Goddess, and is all mythology/fairytale-inspired textile art.
The Fortuny dress is dyed with pomegranate that’s been saddened (mordanted with iron), and so she called it Persephone’s Tears.
So if I put you in an L-shaped swimming pool, and you knew there was a corpse around the corner, you’d be fine?
loving the implication that I’m a little animal and you’re a scientist putting me into various bodies of water to test my corpse:water ratio tolerance
i think it has to be a moving body of water. like, if theres definitely a corpse in a lake, im not gonna swim in it, but if someone died in a river, and its been a bit, idk the water has moved on at this point, its probably fine
What about a lake? That doesn’t really move, but people swim in all of those. I think it’s more the SIZE of the body of water. A river or lake is much bigger then a pool.
We already covered the lake one but i like how your response implies that all lakes have corpses in them
I mean, there are lakes with corpses people swim in despite the existence of corpses being known. The lakes are just big enough you can’t see the corpses.
Same. But also, i live in Ohio so when i say lake i mean like great lakes. I struggle to consider anything smaller than the size of Lake Erie to be really anything but a pond. Like i mean i guess if it’s deeper than i am tall it’s probably a lake. But people will pointvat a body of water and call it a lake and I’ll be like, “My dude, I can’t even kayak in that.”
Honorable mention to me and my bestie in Utah disagreeing on at what point a creek is officially a river. We have some local creeks that officially come up to my chest. So the one I play in that is knee deep at it’s deepest is 100% just a creek, not a bloody river!
82 YEARS AGO - BATMAN DEBUTED FOR THE FIRST TIME Eighty-two years ago on March 30, 1939, Detective Comics #27 hit newsstands, introducing the Caped Crusader for the very first time in a featured story called “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate.”
“And for all that fierce exterior, I’ve never met anyone who cared as deeply about his fellow man as Bruce Wayne.” - Amanda Waller, Justice League Unlimited, Season 2 Episode 13 (2005)
This is your sign to change your Harry Potter URL. This is your sign to edit your house out of your bio. Trans people are going to see you in their notifs and worry you’re a terf or block you. Edit your blog description. Come up with another handle. Thank you.
tbh they are being transphobic if they haven’t done these things. not worrying about “if” anymore, it’s on them
While I agree with the general idea, in the spirit of respecting the original intention of this post— I have had a fair number of people in the tags of this post go “oh fuck”, I have seen people edit their URLs in real time, I have seen people go “oh shit I haven’t even looked at my bio in years”. While I respect blocking on sight— it’s smart to be cautious— I would like to generally err on the side of assuming the best of my fellow human beings. This post is a courtesy call and final warning for everyone who hasn’t gotten to it yet to Do It Now.
I rarely open my actual blog page and so for a while I was unaware that I had a Harry Potter house scarf as part of the CSS thing. I’d had it in there for years and unless you open the blog in a new tab then it’s not something you really see. So yeah, it’s possible for people to not realise that there’s something they’d honestly like to remove on their blog because they just don’t see it.
Yeah, and you are Far from the only person who’s responded to this post with something of the kind. I had someone earlier who was worried about breaking their CSS and that’s why they hadn’t edited it!
That being said, it’s important to get it cleared out now, because TERFs are using that as a calling card now, and I have learned that the hard way since making this post by the TERFs who have found this post and reblogged it to tag their house and harass me. I got an anon informing me someone was going to add it to their bio to scare trans people. We’ve reached the Point here where a lot of trans people need to block on sight to protect themselves. So I can’t honestly say I’m against assuming the worst. I’d just like to warn allies that this is already happening so nobody else who’s well intentioned gets caught up in it. Nothing personal! But. Get Your Shit Sorted, Folks.
I stock handmade soaps from The Macbath at my shop (they’re great btw) and while they still make Hogwarts house soaps, they’ve renamed or retired the other HP-themed ones. and honestly, at this point I even feel weird stocking the remaining HP ones.
when I’m explaining what they are to customers I make a point of mentioning that they are not something You Know Who makes money from, but I think I’m just gonna sell out what I have and not restock them again. Thanks, this was the push I needed.
for my fellow psychotics who struggle with thinking someone is in their house, a method I’ve found that really works are these guys:
i put them on my front door and anytime it opens they ring. that way if i think someone has broken in or i see someone who isn’t there i can think back to if the bells have rung, and if they haven’t i can assure myself it’s not real. obviously it’s not fool proof, like if you are prone to auditory hallucinations, but it has really helped me calm down in time to avoid major psychotic breaks. it’s a real lifesaver
Lots of people make fun of Jonathan Harker for not recognizing what’s up with Dracula, despite the warning signs…And I feel the need to point out that Neil Gaiman’s “TheGraveyardBook” had Silas, a character who:
• does not cast a reflection
• only eats one kind of ( unspecified) food
• is very pale, has razor sharp nails, makes people feel insecure/ troubled for no apparent reason
• sleeps through the day and only comes out after sunset
• is neither dead nor alive
• sleeps inside a trunk filled with earth
• crawls down walls head first
• can fly and is compared to a bat when doing so
• has some form of mind control powers
• is bothered/ weakened by sunlight in some form
And people to this day question what kind of being this man could possibly be. I somehow doubt you all would have done any better than Jonathan. Modern readers seem to be just as, if not more more oblivious than him if a story does not explicitly spell out that it’s featuring a vampire.
