Finally: Tetris Dress!

Well, it's been a long time coming, but I have FINALLY finished my Tetris dress, and here it is.



Here's the back (with iPhoto enhancement -- the colors aren't really that bright):



Here's the bodice, so you can see the contrast facing (these colors are truer, too):



It's just in time, too, as I'm talking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today (about Wordnik, naturally!), and I hate giving a talk without a new dress. There's something about sewing that makes it easier to think out talks ... by the way, the talk will be STREAMED LIVE (ulp) at 3 pm PDT, so if you want to hear me talk, tune in! (Warning: I am shorter in real life than I am on the blog.)

If you like this dress, would you do me a favor and tweet/Facebook/delicious the link around? I'm having a personal-best contest to see if this one shows up in more places than the Darth Vader dress!

UPDATED TO ADD: Thanks to Jenny at ChronicallyUncool, the Tetris fabric is now available at Spoonflower! Even better, Jenny's donating her percentage from the sale of this fabric to FIRST, a nonprofit that encourages kids to explore technology. (Two words: Lego contests!)

Measuring Up to the Cutting Edge

Thanks to Helen I now have four yards of this fabric -- actually, thanks to Helen I now have the LAST four yards of this fabric, because I'm mean like that. But take heart! There are other colorways (some border prints!) of this adorable Yuwa scissors fabric available at PurlSoho, and it's on sale (which means $9 instead of $15, but hey ...)

It's only 43 inches wide, and I did only get four yards of it, so I'm not sure exactly what I'll make yet. (It may work for the same pattern as the infamous Target-curtain numbers dress.)

It might just be my monitor, but I think this colorway is very 1930s, especially with the old-fashioned scissors. I can't wait until it shows up ... I hope I can get my new sewing room organized before then, so it can hop right into the washing machine and onto the cutting table!

It's That Time Again

Crossword puzzle stunt dress time!

Yep, today's the ACPT tournament, and I'll be wearing this:



I haven't sewn down the facings yet in this picture, so they're a little lumpy. Can you see what else is wrong with it? No?



How about now?

Yep. I cut the ENTIRE THING OUT UPSIDE DOWN. (Insert forehead-slap here.) When I figured this out I was hopping mad for about ten minutes, but I didn't have enough time OR fabric for a do-over, so then I just laughed. It's funnier this way, and of course, from MY perspective (that of the WEARER), looking down at the dress, it's right-side-up! So that's how I'm going to think about it, anyway.

It's a Duro Junior (Simplicity 3875), which I think of more as a summer-type dress, but I'm just going to wear it with a black tee underneath it and tights and just hope it's not as cold as the weatherfolk say it's supposed to be. I'll be inside, solving (or, in my case, often NOT-solving) puzzles most of the day anyway.

I found this last stash of Michael Miller crossword fabric at Britex months and months ago -- for next year's dress I think I'm going to get some custom fabric made up at Spoonflower. Probably an easy NYT Monday puzzle solved in red ink and tiled to fill the yardage, or maybe even as a scatter print. What do y'all think?

Oh, and tomorrow -- check out my last column filling in for Jan Freeman in the Boston Globe; I'm writing about my inadvertent coining of the word "Duro" (and how cool you all were to use it, making it "real").

More Stunt Dressing: Crossword Dress #2

The ACPT (otherwise known as the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament) was held a few weeks ago in Brooklyn. You all might remember that I made & wore a crossword-puzzle themed dress for last year's tournament; this year I resolved to do the same. (It was much easier -- and much, much more likely -- than resolving to win!)

Unfortunately, though, my Quasi-Evil Plan to have some crossword themed custom fabric printed went awry (through lack of planning on my part -- I didn't leave enough time to get both the fabric AND the dress made). So, I wondered, what else could I do?

I did this:



I can't remember what pattern I used -- some vintage 1960s Simplicity thing -- I can dig up the number if anyone's interested.

The black and white fabrics are both quilting cottons (which, in part, explains how rumpled and mussed it looks -- that stuff is a pain to iron!). The black lines are black bias tape.

What I did was cut out all the dress pieces and do about half the construction -- darts, the major seams of the skirt -- and then put on the black squares, which are secured to the white fabric by the bias tape.

I did NOT do a good job of matching the blocks across seams, as you can see above, where the waist blocks don't meet the skirt blocks very well (darn pleats!) and here, on the back:



I would have tried harder on the back, but I was still finishing it very late the night before we left, and the only zipper that was right length was an invisible one, and nothing on earth will make me take out an invisible zipper once I have it (mostly) in. My rationalization was "It's Brooklyn in February; I'll be wearing a cardigan over it anyway."

I was also going to use the embroidery function on my machine to do numbers in all the appropriate boxes but it got really boring watching my machine embroider numbers, and again, late at night, so I quit after about three:




In spite of the construction bobbles and my laziness, I think this dress was a qualified success ... although it was just slightly too subtle, especially when compared to some of the other crossword-themed clothing at the tournament. (Although it was nice to feel tasteful in a stunt dress, for once.)

Any ideas for what I should do next year?

O Tannen-what?

This is up at Yoox today, NOT in the sale, mind you, even though Christmas is but a cold and distant memory. This is a charity dress, made by Agatha Ruiz de la Prada, with all proceeds (and at $250/per, that's some proceedings) going to Greenpeace.

It's wool. I'm assuming felt, from the way it hangs. Here's the back:




I even almost like this dress. I think with the right joie de vivre, and the right audience (say, a class of third-graders on a pre-holiday sugar high) you could pull this off. I wish the hearts were stars, though, because you could then also wear a big star on your head. (Our house is an angel-tree-topper house, much to my son's chagrin; he's a big star-topper proponent.) Or star deelyboppers! And of course, dangly Christmas-tree earrings. Preferably ones that require batteries.

Of course, every time I come up with excuses for dresses like this I am afraid I am one step closer to being their target audience. I can already be tempted much too easily into stunt dressing ...

If you're tempted by this dress, click on either image to be taken to the Yoox page. And good luck!

Isn't It Madness?

This may come as a shock to some of you, but I'm not a big person for musicals -- for theater in general, actually. I enjoy it when I am put in the way of seeing any, but my first impulse when seeking entertainment is to reach for a book, and my second is to reach for a long, arc-y, plotty TV show (like The Wire -- the hotness of Dominic West will go a long way towards warming up January here in Chicago), and my third is to watch national icons blow up in spectacular and original ways while eating popcorn. So: not so much with the musicals.

But now I think that it would be hilarious to wear something like this to an opening night for Chess, wouldn't it? Sure, I'd be flamboyantly overdressed, but I would have made an effort.

A $650, lose-ten-pounds-first kind of effort, but it would probably be worth it.

If it's worth it to you, this is up at Shrimpton Couture. I'm not sure exactly how to navigate to it, sadly. The site doesn't have individual linkable pages for each dress. But you probably won't mind browsing around, as there's a lot of other eye candy there, too, and the pictures are good!

4 Across: Prepare for Roasting

I am not a puzzle expert. People are sometimes disappointed to learn this, because, obviously, as a lexicographer, I should be good at everything to do with words, including crosswords, Scrabble, and handwriting. (Note: I am not good at any of the preceding.)

I enjoy crosswords, but I'm not competitive, and if it's a choice between spending two hours hurting myself with the Sunday puzzle, and making a new skirt, I usually go for "make a new skirt."

So why am I wearing this dress (RIGHT NOW, I'm wearing this dress) at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament?

Well, it's complicated, but it boils down to "I'm working for some folks making a words documentary and they got me to talk puzzle-guy-extraordinaire Francis into making a crossword with a bunch of underused words in it for me, and they're filming people solving it tonight."

Of course, once I knew I would be attending, the important question was "what will I wear?" Then I saw this fabric and, well, I *never* turn down a chance to make a stunt dress.

This is roughly the same pattern as this dress, which I made last year, but I couldn't find the skirt pattern pieces, which I think I had reassigned to another pattern last summer. So I Frankensteined it up with a different skirt pattern with has a scalloped bottom. (Which: never again! I had to HAND-SEW the edge binding on it! The skirt sure looks cute, though, so I'm sure I will eventually forget what a pain in the ass it was to do and try and make it again someday. Although you can't really see the scallops in the picture.)

Anyway, since I'm here, I thought I may as well compete, and thus give a whole lot of people the joy of beating a real, live dictionary editor in a crossword puzzle contest. Perhaps next year I will extend my altruism to the Scrabble tournament, where I would also be roundly shellacked.

Here's a closeup of the bodice (which is not exactly perfect, just like my puzzle-solving ability!):


The piping's a bit uneven (again, like my puzzle ... you get the idea).

I'm having a great time here so far, though! Although that's probably because the contest hasn't actually started. I expect to be tearing my hair out and groaning within the hour.