Robots 4 U

Moving has eaten my brain PLUS I'm traveling for work this week, so in place of any coherent post, I bring you ROBOT ART, courtesy of Etsy. (As always, click on the images to visit the listings.)




Robots in love. With guns. What is better than that? Nothing.




These are the robots capitalism was supposed to bring us. Where are they?




Even robots get cranky.




Awwwww, robot earrings!




Robots + cupcakes, two great memes that taste great together!

And one last one:




Robot fabric! I wish there was more than one yard ...

Here's hoping that robots put YOU in a good mood, too. Happy Wednesday!

Bacon dress!

Thanks to Ben for this link to the Bacon Dress. You can read more about it here.

Of course, you'd want to accessorize with this and these. And don't forget this. If you're wearing it to a party (which I hope you are, because wearing a bacon dress to sit around at home and get grease on your own couch seems pretty sad), you could wrap a present in this. If someone gets too close to you with their fork, you could cover the resulting puncture wounds with these.

But I still don't know what this is all about.

Happy Belated Birthday, A!

Excellent co-conspirator and artist Beebe (click on that link, you won't regret it) and I put together a scheme to give A. a present for her recent Birthday Celebration, and to thank A. for completing another kick-ass year of Being Awesome. The plan: he'd draw one of his fantastic characters in a dress of my choosing!

Above, you see the result -- it's this dress, Spadea 1338. I'm sure you agree that Porthole Woman with Comb Hat is the perfect model!

Happy birthday, A.!

An "I'm Not Dead" Post

Really, I'm not -- just traveling for work, and really really busy, even more busy than usual!

So a few random items for you:

Kay sent this dress made from junk mail, very cool:




Also, I recently sent all my scraps away to have a quilt made (pictures soon, it is AWESOME), but I'm building them up again at a good clip, and when I have another bunch I'm planning to send them to a new quilting club in Corona, CA. Their goal is to make several quilts a month to be donated to charity. Their first projects are going to Quilts for Valor for wounded soldiers, but they will also be providing quilts for community health groups Corona, foster children, and the elderly. If you want to send your scraps as well, they can use any cotton, silk, velvet, or denim scraps of any size. Most of their quilts will be twin to lap size. (Don't forget that you can pack a flat rate box or envelope with as much as possible ...) They asked me to let you know that you can send your scraps to Jane Ellen Smith, 3192 Via Mazatlan, Corona, CA 92882

There was something else, which I can't remember, but while I'm trying to think of it, you could do a LOT worse than go read La Bastiole. She lives in France! She's really funny! She has twin teenage girls! She writes about roadkill, olive oil, and how to take your driver's license exam in French ... anyway, you will enjoy it. I promise.

A Dress A Day: An Artist's Rendering

So, didja miss me? Sorry to be AWOL for most of last week -- I was at Pop!Tech08, and Pop!Tech is the kind of conference that is so engrossing you forget about the entire outside world, including your sadly neglected blog.

I talked for five minutes (and possibly some seconds over, although nobody would tell me how many). One of the many cool things about Pop!Tech is that they have a real live artist interpreting all the talks ... Peter Durand, from alphachimp.

So I wore this dress:




And this is the artist's rendering:



I should point out that I wore blue tights and brown shoes, and not brown tights and blue shoes as shown in the picture, but I think that's permissible artistic license. And it's not like I *wouldn't* have worn perfectly matching blue shoes if I only had a pair ...

Cool, huh? I think the artist really rose to the occasion -- and remember, I spoke for FIVE MINUTES, so he had just that long to do this picture in!

With any luck this week we will return to our regularly scheduled dress blogging. Also: I'm working on a rant about underwear: do you guys want to read it?

Doubling Down

Remember Robin Barcus? The dress artist who was doing a dress for each of the 50 states? She's got a new one, and I really like it:




Click on the image for other dresses she's made recently, including a series of dresses made from dollar store items. (My favorite is the whiffle-ball wedding dress.)

Spoiled for Choice

I'm so sorry I didn't post yesterday -- there were some internet-connectivity issues, and then there were some "I have to give a talk downtown" issues (compounded by the snow issues), and then there were the "back from a long weekend" issues. I guess I "have issues." (Except for issues of the magazine, which are the only issues I want to have. THOSE are still at the printer!)

Of course, any day on which I don't post is NOT a day in which I have NOTHING to post -- I usually have the OPPOSITE problem, as in, I could post so much every day that I would do nothing else. For instance, just in the last 36 hours or so, I was sent links to:

-- this incredibly cute squirrel-print sundress (sent by Julie)
-- a reminder that PurlSoho has new Liberty cottons in stock (from Rebecca)
-- a link to a wedding-perfect satin dress WITH POCKET (from Kai, and let's just see a picture of that pocket, okay?)




-- some paper art dresses (sent by Theresa)
-- an Anne Fogarty polka-dot midriff-emphasizing dress on eBay (sent by Robin, and let's just peek at that one, too, shall we?)





And there were several more links that I will save for another day. Aren't I the luckiest blogger in Blogdom? Thank you (and keep 'em comin')!

More Dress Art!

Check out this work from artist Robin Barcus: "Collecting Kisses". She put up three dress outlines in a gallery and had people leave lipstick kisses on them. Participatory art, yay!

Robin's also doing a series of location-specific dresses for every state in the US, *and* making a movie about it, which is about as cool as you can get without resorting to the illegal use of Freon.

Here's one of her state-specific dresses (for Maine, naturally):




She also did a leaf dress that's worth seeing -- click on either of the images above to visit her blog.

I had a whole list of art-dress projects to post about before my hard drive decided to become an ossified, non-spinny lump ... a list I don't really want to recreate by hand, because I'm lazy. So if you emailed me an art-dress link sometime in the last month, and feel strongly about it, would you email me again? Or at least leave a link in the comments?

I only wanted 2 see u laughing in the purple rain

Jennifer (of the excellent Naughty Secretary Club) sent me the link to this dress, which is by her sister Hope (of Hot Pink Pistol).

It's hand-painted, obviously, although I would like, for a moment, to entertain the notion of a world where the image of Purple Rain-era Prince is omnipresent and heavily marketed, sort of like all those Che Guevara t-shirts.

It's such a short leap, isn't it, from finding a purple satin dress to thinking "I should paint Prince on this dress! That would be awesome!"

And lo, it is awesome.

If I had this dress, I wouldn't wear it ... I'd put it on a mannequin and keep in my living room (or, if my husband objected, the bedroom, or, if he REALLY objected, my office) because, as a work of art, it would make me happy every day.

Even better would be to have one of those recordable greeting-card sound chips stuck inside it, hooked to a motion sensor, and then, if people got too close to it, BOOM! Purple Rain would play. (The really climax-y "I only wanna see you" part, naturally.)

I think paintings on dresses are the new dogs playing poker. Ever-so-slightly cheesy, but cheerful in a way that you can't really explain.

Whether you'd display this, wear this or just admire from a (very long) distance (I admit no other options), be sure to check out the link to Hope's other stuff -- the David-Bowie-in-Labryinth-dress is equally fantastic, if slightly scarier. (Bowie was terrifying in that movie, was he not? Sure, half of it was the known fear-inducing quality of spandex, but still ...)

dreaming of dresses

India sent me the link to this artist, Kirsten Harper -- this is a dress Harper saw in a dream! I wish I had those dreams. (Last week I dreamt I was arguing with someone while my son powerwashed the INSIDE of the house. No, I have no idea what that means, except, PERHAPS, that I had fried oysters for dinner.)

I love that the pink bow emits a mushroom cloud. So often they do, you know, those bows. Gotta watch out for that.

And while we're talking about dresses and artists, an exhibit inspired by the book The Hundred Dresses has opened at the Artspace in New Haven, Connecticut. If you're nearby, you might want to check it out!

Tent Dress, I mean, Dress Tent

Barb sent me this interesting work by Robin Lasser and Adrienne Pao ... it's a series of photographs of dresses that are also tents.

This is the "Ms. Homeland Security: Illegal Entry Dress Tent," about which the artists say:

... the Illegal Entry Dress Tent, originally installed beneath the California/Mexico border, contains military blankets embroidered with the names of those who have lost their lives crossing the border. Those who seek refuge beneath the skirt are implicated with their own relationship to border issues. In this way, the dress tents address body and land politics as they interface with the nomadic nature of contemporary life.

I don't know why artists' statements don't just say "I thought this would be [cool|beautiful|moving], and look! I was right." This one could have said all three ...