Whew! WOW! Wonderful!

What a wild past several days - and it's been AWESOME!

I spent all of last week totally focused on my first ksyardbird Art Show - Artist Alley.   I shared a booth with my favorite Celebrating Home person, Missy, (remember her Taco Soup in the Celebrating Home Bean Pot recipe?)and we had a lot of traffic!

There's J-girl behind the mirror, with Yours Truly 'in' the mirror. 

 

Here's Missy with her nifty fall set up. She was having a drawing for the cute scarecrow.

Looking good Missy! 
 
Notice that 'mannequin' sewing form in the front of my pic?  I acquired that from my skilled seamstress Granny Tootsie quite a few years ago.  

 It used to be covered in this black stretching icky thing that had sparkly thread run through it. . . parts of it were loose, while others were glued to the form itself.  It most definitely had lived its life to the fullest having covered this heavy-duty cardboard (not sure exactly what to call it) form.  I worked and worked and managed to finally get it all removed several months ago.  You can just see it in the far right corner of this photo (which was snapped before I got the last of the black fabric removed).

From that point, I was just unsure as to which direction to take it.  Paint it?  Create or buy a vintage dress to fit it?  Hmmmm. . . .

I wanted to use the form in my booth and had it set up in my trial arrangement here at home - but it looked, well. . . rough.  Not very classy.  Beyond vintage to just plain 'ick.'  I invited a friend (thank you Kathy for coming to my rescue!) over to brainstorm the best way to take this classy 1940's lady from ugly to beautiful.

It was decided that I should wrap the form with some kind of batting then cover that with some vintage silk (thanks Lizzy!) I've had in my stash for years and years.  I've used most of it for curtains - but still had some pretty fair-sized scraps. . .

I worked in sections, spraying her with glue, then pressing the batting onto the form.  I clipped and filled as necessary to make the form smooth with no more of those ugly industrial rivets popping through.  When that was done, I repeated the process with my silk.

As the silk piece was the right size to *just * cover her, I opted to fold it in half, cut a whole to slip it over the neck then let it drape while I worked it onto the form.  The side edges were folded onto themselves and glued flat.

Once I had her wrapped, I couldn't figure out what to do with the raw edges around the neck.  Well. . . I had this great vintage lace that I cut and glued to resemble a sort of collar. 

That looked so great, I went ahead and wrapped the remaining stretch of it around the bottom and loosely tying it on one side. 

Pretty gorgeous - would you say?  I topped the pretty 'girl' off with a hat I received from my Great-Grandmother Clara many years ago - that I just so happened to have adorned with some of the lace I used on the form and an old bow and ribbon from a hat of my other Great-Grandmother, Emma.

Maybe I should find a more prominent place for her instead of tucked away in the corner - she deserves it:-)

I was a bit disappointed with some of the wrinkling and creasing, but, really, overall, for an afternoon's work, she's Simply Gorgeous!  I am Pretty Pleased - pun intended.

Have a Silky kind of day ~

Robin Z