Snowy day!

I woke up this morning to snowy skies (so much for "forty percent chance of snow"), so this outfit seemed appropriate. My favorite black turtleneck plus a plaid wool skirt that I thrifted a few weeks ago and since have worn quite a few times. It's actually nearish floor-length (though you can't quite tell from the pictures), so I'd originally gotten it with the intention to hem it to just above the knee. However, that may have to wait for this spring or probably next fall...right now it does quite well as a warm long winter skirt! (Also, it's quite a nice skirt, and nicely lined, so I'd have to be very careful with the hem. Maybe I can find another brown plaid skirt to make my shorter skirt?)



I started out this outfit with a bright blue belt over the turtleneck to help define the waist. However, it ended up being a bit too uncomfortable (little too tight of a belt) and not the best color for this palette. If I had a brown belt, that might be better.



The necklace is something that I had gotten for free off the campus-wide mailing list for things people are trying to get rid of. It seemed a bit much of a statement piece for me, but it's worth trying when it's free! However, I didn't wear it for a number of months...so here it is making its first public appearance.

Anyway. Spent much of my day in class (first day of classes today!) and meetings. Technically, I'm not supposed to take classes due to this being a thesis semester, but I'll be a listener (non-graded student who doesn't have to do assignments) on a pretty cool class on new textiles. Most of the class meetings are labs where we make things during class anyway, so I hopefully will get a lot out of it without being a full student in the class. And my rehearsal went quite well this evening, even if I didn't have any technology in it today. (perhaps especially because I didn't have any technology in it today!) We made a lot of progress on defining the arc and story for this particular duet, which was quite satisfying. Always a challenge to figure out how to add the technology in such a way that it is necessary and beneficial for the story, when I can tell a story in a satisfying way using just the movement and words...

An attempt at mixing patterns...

Today's outfit was centered around the polka-dot top and leopard-print belt combination. I'd been wanting to try this for a while, and finally got up the nerve to wear the belt out in public. (One might notice that I don't wear leopard/animal prints often.) I just wore it to the lab and rehearsal, though.



I have to figure out a good way of taking pictures so it's not the end of the day and dark (though I'm still at the lab) and requiring me to either find a place I can put the camera on a timer or convince coworker friends to take a couple of snapshots. At home, all of the appropriate height surfaces I could leave a camera on are in front of messy shelves or other things that don't make good photo backdrops. Maybe I should get a cheap tripod at some point? I can't wait until it's spring and I could take some of these outside without freezing to death!



I've been wearing this necklace a lot lately. It's one of the handful of things that have so far come out of my getting a bunch of old jewelry on Ebay and trying to reconstruct pieces into new jewelry creations.

Might this start being a "style" blog?

Thanks to Wardrobe Refashion, I've started to follow a wide range of blogs...first just sewing/craft blogs, but now actually fashion/style blogs (particularly vintage-inspired style blogs). It's been very interesting and inspiring to see so many people putting their own style experiments on blogs and describing their process...sharing their outfits and lives with a larger community.

So, I guess I'm interested in joining that movement. Or, at the very least, in documenting my attempts to pay more attention to how I dress. I've become very aware, being at a technologically-focused graduate school, that there's not too much attention being paid to "style." Paradoxically, that is making me want to be even more conscious of my own clothing choices...especially because the number of female grad students isn't too high, and I suppose I want to stand out a bit as a woman (girl?) in the program. I suspect this is a major reason why my personal style has been heading in a particularly vintage-inspired/feminine/dressy direction.

And with that...the first outfit post! It's not a particularly special outfit, but today I started finally taking pictures. This is what I wore to work today (and to a rehearsal for a dance piece I'm currently choreographing...choreographers can get away with a skirt at rehearsal, sometimes!) The main piece is a black BCBG Generations dress that I got from my favorite dollar-a-pound store yesterday and couldn't wait to add in. It's layered over a black long-sleeve shirt, an old slip (also from yesterday's thrifting run), and tights.



I threw this together last night, put it in my gym bag in the morning, then changed at the gym to find that the skirt on the dress was a good four inches shorter than I remembered it being. Luckily I'd packed the slip as well...so I ended up with a decorative slip detail. (I've been getting very interested in slips lately, perhaps because of the lingerie-inspired looks that have been hitting the runways all over this season?) So...I'm not sure I was terribly comfortable with the hemline here. With the tights, it's perfectly decent, but I'm still playing with what I'm comfortable wearing to the lab.



And a close-up of the shoes. These did get comments from a lab-mate.

So, we'll see how often these posts happen. I'd like to try to record some fun outfits at least a couple of times a week...

Updating

Hmm, did I say "more regular posting"? Perhaps I underestimated how busy I might be as I start working on my master's thesis. I'm doing the thesis about how to make it easier to use gestures and movement to control various media in performance. See, lots of performance artists have "gestures" trigger sound effects, shape video projections, or affect music; however, the actual code for these systems generally looks at really low-level things about movement, like "What's the voltage value on the bend sensor for the left elbow?" rather than something potentially more meaningful like "How much is the arm extended?" As an example (and this is something I did for my Sponsor Week project this year), if I gave someone a glove and said, "When you wear this glove, the system can recognize if you're flicking your hand, how hard you flick your hand, if you're squeezing, how tightly you're squeezing, if you're waving, if you're tilting your hand to the side, if you're shaking your hand back and forth... so how do you want those gestures to control sound or visuals?" they'll immediately be thinking of very different interactions than if I gave them a glove and said, "This glove has a bend sensor on the index finger and an accelerometer on the back of the hand. How do you want to control sound or visuals?" So in order to really experiment intuitively in rehearsal/performance with using gestures, I think you have to have a higher-level representation of gesture and movement qualities.

On the less techno-babble side of things, most recent refashion/construction: Halloween costume for the boyfriend, who wanted to be an elf (Lord of the Rings style). We'd made the long hooded cloak from a pattern last year, and this year added a quick elf tunic (refashioned from a green sheet), collared shirt (a reject of my brother's), a belt (really just a long strip of felt), and some pants from the dollar-a-pound clothing store. Didn't have the time to make or find a bow and arrows, unfortunately. (I went as a 1920's flapper, which pretty much meant: red velvet dress that I had gotten on sale for $9 a couple of years ago, a $2 red feather for my hair, stockings, and the character shoes I've had for a good number of years.)

So. Hopefully more jewelry refashioning soon. Also, I have a couple of easy (I hope) 1960's dress patterns that are waiting for a free evening and some stash fabric...

Back to more regular posting

So after a well-intentioned spurt of posting around the time I signed up for Wardrobe Refashion, summer hit...and I was working on designing and helping to make costumes for a show (Bat Boy, The Musical), doing my regular job/research work, and preparing for an opera workshop that my group is doing next week...wait, actually it starts the day after tomorrow with a performance next week. I'm not singing or anything like that, just doing tech and programming/visuals/robotics help.

But in any case, I got a bit distracted from the whole crafting/refashioning thing. I'm going to get back to more regular posting and making. Most of my refashioning energy now is going into making one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces from old, broken, and/or vintage jewelry and buttons. I even set back up the Etsy shop that I had opened a year or so ago and then never really did anything with. I've also developed a slightly worrisome Ebay habit, resulting in a number of beautiful vintage patterns, vintage trims, and random bunches of junk jewelry coming my way. However, that's stopped now. I have to now make some wonderful stuff with my stash! And then put it on Etsy and try to share it... I can only wear so many pieces of jewelry, after all.

For fun, a couple of pictures of some of the costumes I designed for Bat Boy (credit Jax Kirtley):

Jeans to jean skirt

This weekend's quick project involved a pair of jeans that I couldn't wear anymore due to fairly significant tearing/wear in the inner thighs. (I can't tell if this is because of how I walk or because the pants were too tight to begin with, or a combination of both.) I've been able to patch other pairs of jeans this has happened to, but this pair was really lightweight denim -- a fancy brand that I'd won a pair of in a Lucky Magazine giveaway. So pants I'd gotten for free, but also nice enough that I didn't want to toss them due to irreparable crotch problems. So, I decided to make them into a skirt, with inspiration from this tutorial.

I ripped the seams up the inner legs all the way up, then cut off the legs partway up. I then cut out the extra fabric in the inner thighs that had been torn and worn. The fabric from the lower legs got used to fill the triangular gaps in the middle.

Here's the work in progress. You can see the folds on the bottom of the leg piece from where I'd hemmed up (and not cut) the jeans when I first got them! The detail I particularly like here is how I was able to match the seam down the middle of the lower leg piece (which used to be the the outside of the leg) with the seam down the middle of the back. (I did this on the front as well). I top-stitched everything using a thread that decently matched the stitching already present on the jeans.


And here's the finished, hemmed piece! A little bit wrinkled in odd places... you can slightly tell that these used to be jeans, especially as there's no triangular panels on the sides. (I saw some tutorials that did that, but those looked more complicated than I wanted to bother with for this skirt.) But it's a really comfortable skirt, especially because the denim is fairly light and soft, and I'll definitely get some more use out of it this way.


Here it is again from the side. All the nice cut and complicated details of jeans in the waist and hips, with the comfort of a skirt.

Quick refashion

So this quick refashion came from me going through my closet and pulling out some stuff that I really haven't worn in ages. The Wardrobe Refashion challenge has officially begun, so time to get some refashioning in before I travel most of next week.

This started out as a long velvet skirt given to me years ago by a friend cleaning out her closet who thought of me because of the fabric. (I'm a big fan of velvet.) I loved the color and the fabric, and wore the skirt a few times, but found that the skirt was pretty unflattering. It's a little too tight on me, has slits so far up both sides that I'm a bit uncomfortable, and drapes in such a way as to make me look pregnant (which I'm certainly not).























I realized I hadn't worn the skirt in a few years, but still loved the fabric. And thus...time to make it into a quick stretch velvet top! I used another stretch shirt for the pattern, then just cut into the skirt, matching hems so that I wouldn't have to hem the bottom of the shirt. This is what was left of the skirt afterwards...






















I sewed up the sides, left the neckline and sleeves unfinished because the knit velvet isn't unraveling (I call it a slightly deconstructed look; maybe it really just is lazy), and called it a new shirt.






















And you know what? It just so happens to match a skirt that I'd made a couple of days ago out of a bit of the fabric I picked up from the Gilbert and Sullivan players.






















So... skirt I didn't wear to shirt I hopefully will! (maybe not till it hits fall again, though.)