Wild Wild West: The StoryBook Bolero in White Rabbit

Photography by Victor Ciccarelli  for Erynz.com

Wild West Indian Summer, Almost Fall!

Photography by jStemmerphotography.com

Portfolio Special: "The Fake Indian"

Bonanza: "The Fake Indian"

I felt like playing with fringe.

I'm sure you know the very same feeling, right?

On the old Western shows, they regularly had Indian characters pop up for storylines, whether it be a scary Native man that is erroneously accused of a crime, or an intoxicatingly attractive Indian squaw in need of saving and/or taming.  The thing is, the actors playing the "natives" all seemed to be caucasians simply wearing tan makeup, i.e. "Fake Indian!"

I acquired this tan loosely woven fabric a little bit ago.  It was most likely intended to be used for window coverings, but I liked the way it easily unraveled at the raw edges and makes a wonderful fringed dress with beaded trim.

I wanted to pair the dress with an 80's denim jacket to add a cowgirl touch.  If you look at the zoom, I used a fringe slashing and twisting treatment used way back pre-renaissance period to show a peekaboo lining and add interest.

Halloween Special: The Wild West Saloon Girl

For my next installment of re-imagining overused Halloween costumes, I choose "The Saloon/Can-Can Girl".

Can-Can chic never really got off the ground as some expected with the release of Moulin Rouge in the early 2000's, but people have been dressing as the Saloon Girl for ages before that on Halloween.  I can imagine the allure is surely the fun of wearing a LOT of makeup, feathers in your hair, and of course, the one socially acceptable excuse to lift your skirt over your head over and over again throughout the evening.

 

Trina is wearing a (perhaps unnecessarily full) double-plus circle skirt (I wanted to play with fold and waves, but it came out a little too wavy), with a halter top that gathers into the choker neckband with pleats, and a cropped faux double-breasted bolero with invisible shoulder pads.  See how complicated and impressive I made it sound?

Do notice as well that each flower was pressed onto the cloth individually.  I don't know how many flowers there are on there, but undoubtedly this would have been a very expensive project just because of that if those flowers weren't a surprise find at the bottom of a box of fabric that I bought from a garage sale.  I think I still I have around 250 to 300 of them left!

Gunsmoke: Miss Kitty's Got a Fabulous!

I have never watched Gunsmoke.  The only reason why I thought of it was because it airs right after Hogan's Heroes, so I very often catch the opening credits to the show at the tail end of the recording on my DVR.  What's interesing, though, is that even people like me who have never seen an episode of Gunsmoke know exactly who Miss Kitty is.  She's frisky, she's fabulous, and she's in charge of not only herself, but a lot of the people around her.

 
Gunsmoke had a ton of memorably named characters that I just find hilarious.  I mean, where else are you going to see people not only named, "Miss Kitty," but also, "Festus," "Newly," and ... Matt Dillon?  Well, maybe not all of the names are strange...

Anyway, I wanted to make this outfit look like an updated Saloon proprietress dress.  In a few quick screens that I saw with Miss Kitty, the costumer often employed the standard Leg-of-mutton sleeves typical of the Old West madam, and many times, I have seen Kitty wearing a tight corset-like vest over a white blouse.

So, since my signature is the "short-sleeves over long-sleeves" (a style that I am seeing popping up more and more each day, which is a good and bad thing at the same time), I wanted to make a modified Wild West vest with short puff-top sleeves that will make people think, "Is it a jacket?  Is it a vest?  Is it a Pony?  It's fabulous!"


The jacket's fabric, if you have a good enough memory, is the remnants of the material left over from my Foppish Horror RenFair outfit I made last year.  I used pretty much EVERY INCH of this expensive fabric, which is why the bottom of the piece is shorter than what is shown in the original sketch.  I am SO glad I didn't have enough material to make it longer.  I really like it this short.  I just really like the way it turned out, period.  I guess it goes to show you that using fabric NOT from the dollar bin sometimes makes all the difference in the world.

Moving down, you may also recognize the pants have been seen before.  They are the pants that I used for my Janet from Three's Company.  I originally made some jeans that were recycled from three pairs of men's jean shorts that I found on the sidewalk near a dumpster, (I washed them first), but the pants turned out looking LIKE they came from the dumpster, so I threw them away.  (I can almost hear my mom right yelling at the screen at how disgusted she is that I even TOUCHED some stranger's jean shorts.)  Anyway, I re-used these pants not only because the color is perfect, but they also are constructed to look a little like chaps.  Notice the button-up sides and curved seam mimicking the shape of the opening of a pair of chaps.  Perfect for a gunslinger.

Lastly, isn't it nice to see Trina playing a sexy role for a change, rather than the "Old One?"  She's happy, too!

Wild Wild West: Bridal Punk

So, I settled the argument between the two models by letting Raine play Angie, but making a dress for Leonora first.

I remember in the opening of "The Wild Wild West," the part where the cartoon saloon girl gets punched out by the cowboy.  Punching a woman?!  That's so wrong!  But for some reason it also tickled me seeing her fall on her ass each time.

The concept of this dress is crossing an Old West look with Punk.  Leonora was engaged to a cowboy, but he left her, so she cut up a pair of his jeans and one of his shirts and turned it into a brothel jacket, took his underwear and made a top out of it, and used the white bedsheets that she got as a shower gift and turned it into a billowy skirt.  Then, she went out drinking all night.

I kind of hoped I would end up liking this one a lot.  I'm not used to making dresses made out of huge amounts of draped and folded fabric, but I figured, what the hell, I'm up for trying something unfamiliar.  For the mock up, I ingeniously used a miniature dressform to figure out how to create a bustle skirt with a curved drape front out of one piece of material with a straight hem like they did back in the 1870's.  Once I figured it out, (it ends up looking kind of like a speed bump with spikes on the side) it was actually not as complicated as I thought it would be, but I sure am glad that I was able to make a few miniature versions first while perfecting the technique!

The jacket, I think it's a cool concept, but I could have made it look more, "dirty."  It's far too clean and finished to be punk.  Not finishing seams and being sloppy may sound easier to do in theory, but I guess not for me!  It was a good exercise in playing with sleeve cap volume, though.  I already have an idea on how to improve in this technique for a future avant garde outfit.




In the end, I think that this turned out to be a great excuse to discover a few new techniques in photoshop.  And my sexy-tough girl Nora plays a Fierce jilted bride, doesn't she?