Increasingly less-rare sighting of alphabet dress in the wild

[photo from GEL 2008 by the fantastic Gene Driskell; L to R: Michael Montes, yours truly, Bran Dougherty-Johnson]

I know y'all are always clamoring for pictures of me wearing the dresses I make, and I know I have been consistently disappointing on that front. (I would do so more often if I weren't too lazy to go get a tripod to use with my camera. Also, I never know what to reply to the inevitable comments of "Erin, I thought you'd be taller.")

But here, ta-dah, is a brand-new dress that I made to wear to last week's GEL conference. (If you don't know the GEL conference, it is my great pleasure to introduce it to you -- go check out the link above! Watch the videos! Pressure your employer to send you next year!)

This is made from some fabric I bought from Reprodepot, but which seems to be missing from their site now. And the pattern is Butterick 7513, which sews up like a dream. So easy! (I left off the sleeve bands, though, as I thought they'd be bulgy under a cardigan.)

What you can't see in the photo is that the buttons are covered in scraps of a different-scale black-and-white alphabet print. (You also can't see how hard Michael was making me laugh a few minutes earlier.)

This was a two-alphabet-dress trip for me; I wore the blue letter-and-number print dress the next day. Eventually I suppose I'll have made enough alphabet-print dresses that I can wear nothing but fonts for a week straight, and will have completed my descent into caricature.

Every Dress Tells (or Sometimes Reads) a Story

Robin sent me this adorable dress, which is being listed (by fandon) on eBay and ends TODAY so scoot scoot if you want it.

Here's the full dress:




I was actually thinking about dresses and stories yesterday, because Friday I was at the GEL conference and heard Ira Glass talk about what good stories do, and how they do it. And of course, whenever I hear anything I particularly like, I think "how does this apply to dresses?"

And then I realized: stories are why I sew. Personal sewing gives a garment an inescapable story, with an inherent narrative that pulls you along to the next bit: where I found the fabric and the pattern, and how long they waited to be made; how difficult or easy it was to put together and what halfassed compromises I made with my original vision; how it turned out, and so on. (Compare this with "I saw it at the Gap and bought it.") Every dress I make is an opportunity to recount a story, as well, and being (mostly) Irish and an aspiring raconteuse, I rarely turn down an opportunity to tell a story ... especially ones that are (as so many dress stories are) stories of triumphing over adversity, however small that adversity is.

Sewing's not the only way to give a garment a story, of course. Think about your favorite clothes: don't they have stories? The clothes you bought on vacation, or received from a friend or inherited from a relative, the clothes you wore on a special day or with a special person ... I heard a great story about a jacket this past weekend from Henning Rübsam (I heard this story because I exclaimed over how beautiful his jacket was). He saw a gorgeous jacket in a shop, a beautiful one that not only fit him perfectly physically, but fit him spiritually as well. It was far, far, far too expensive, so he regretfully left it behind. He went into the same shop a year later, and it was still there ... and, even on sale, far, far too expensive, still. A long while after that ... he found it waiting for him at Century 21, finally at a price he could afford, and now it is his, and he's been wearing it, and its story, ever since.

I can see why maybe some people don't want all their clothes to have stories—it'd be exhausting to be overwhelmed with associations each time you pulled on a pair of socks—but I think, in general, garments with a narrative of their own are preferable to garments without.