Showing posts with label cosplay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cosplay. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 8, 2022

Cover Designs! #25: In West Mills

 


Cover Designs is a feature in which I try to match up the outfit on a book cover with a dress pattern and sometimes even potential fabric matches as well. Today's book is a tale of community and friendship, set in an African American community in North Carolina, ranging from 1941 to 1987.

As the publisher shares:

Azalea “Knot” Centre is determined to live life as she pleases. Let the people of West Mills say what they will; the neighbors’ gossip won’t keep Knot from what she loves best: cheap moonshine, nineteenth-century literature, and the company of men. And yet, Knot is starting to learn that her freedom comes at a high price... Otis Lee is eager to help. A lifelong fixer, Otis Lee is determined to steer his friends and family away from decisions that will cause them heartache and ridicule.  In West Mills is a magnificent, big-hearted small-town story about family, friendship, storytelling, and the redemptive power of love.


This glorious yellow dress could inspire a couple of different makes, depending on what you focus on. A great fit for this design might be Butterick 6055, a vintage reprint. 


This one is quite similar -- just add a tie to the collar, and leave off the pockets and you've found a very close match. Contrasting collar and sleeve trim are easily added as well. If you're not such a fan of yellow it also looks lovely in other springy shades, like the one on this model. 


However, if you're more intrigued by how the collar appears to be a traditional sailor collar, you might want to go for this Square Sailor Collar dress -- it's by AliceInCosplayLand, so the pattern images are a bit unusual, but the dress is a close match, if you reshape that front collar a bit and use the short sleeve view. 


Of course another option might be to just use a favourite short sleeve V-neck dress that you already have a pattern for, and just add on a removable sailor collar -- there are lots of patterns for these standalone collars in cosplay world, and this one by SandraVee Cosplay has just the right shape to match our cover image here. That way you can also change up the look of your dress and get more wear out of it, too!


To get the right sunny summer tone of this cover image, though, you could go for a clear yellow cotton-linen like this one from Spool of Thread.


Or if you felt like fancying it up a bit, you could even go for a swishy, luxurious 4-ply silk from B&J Fabrics. 


Just pick up some bronzey toned contrast fabric for the collar and trim and you'll be walking off the front of this book! 


Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Chaotic Good: A Book Review




Chaotic Good / Whitney Gardner
New York: Knopf, c2018.
256 p.

I picked this one up solely on the strength of that cover. Just look at it! So much fun. Who wouldn't want to dress up like a paper doll? I wish they'd sold this with it's own Cameron paper doll, including that marvellous donut print dress :)

Main character Cameron is a cosplayer and sewist who dreams of getting into CalTech with her costume portfolio. After a recent win for her costume at a ComicCon, however, she's being harassed online by male comic fans who don't think she's an authentic comic fan (quelle surprise).

Alongside this harassment, which she doesn't share with her family, she's just moved from Portland to Eugene, so now has a summer without friends nearby either. So her focus is just to sew up a storm.

However, she encounters sexism in real life as she heads into the new-to-her local comic shop and is mansplained by the guy working there. She vows not to go back, but since she shortly after gets an online order for a costume, she needs to return to do some research. On her twin brother Cooper's suggestion she dresses up like a boy to head back, and magically everything is now peachy keen. She begins to get drawn into the comic shop's world when they begin a D&D game, and she's accepted as one of the boys.

There's romance, humour, ambition, family dynamics, and lots of sewing in this book, all reasons I really enjoyed it. The story is fast paced, creative and super entertaining for anyone with geeky interests like comics, D&D, or sewing! I am so clueless about D&D that I had no idea the title referred to the game until halfway through the book. So it was definitely more the sewing aspect that appealed to me at the start - obviously!

There were a few things about the book that I questioned upon reflection. Cameron is very conveniently given a non-gendered name to work with, and is not very girly -- she has no bosom to speak of and can easily disguise herself as a boy -- gender is very binary here. Also, she is supposed to be dedicated to sewing her portfolio for the CalTech application, but ends up sewing mostly when she's upset and overtired (and as any sewist knows that's usually a recipe for disaster but Cameron always ends up with a triumph, I don't know how she does it!). She's too distracted by comics and D&D and Lincoln, one of the other players, to sew terribly often.

But otherwise, there was a great mix of diverse characters in this book, some wonderful older characters (like Lincoln's gran), and lots to think about in the storyline. This would make a great group read for teens, but I also just really enjoyed it as a sewing themed read.