Keeping In Touch

If you saw the news about the Apocalyptic! Torrential! Downpour! around here, don’t worry, we’re fine. The winds were pretty high* and there was rain and because that doesn’t happen very often here, some of the wimpier trees blew over. We don’t live in an isolated area (for this exact reason**) so really it was just another rainstorm for us.*** And as me mum always says, you don’t have to shovel rain.

I got the dress dummy finished over the weekend, using these instructions but I think I got the wrong kind of paper tape and the form ended up looking like a badly-interred mummy. So I put a layer of clear packing tape around it to hold down all the curling-up paper edges, and stuffed it with old bubble wrap and newspaper because the paper tape shell didn’t seem stiff enough. So it’s sort of a ghetto-meets-the-post office effort, but I figure it will do well enough for me to see if I really use the thing. I have to put it on a wider base and adjust the height slightly; right now it’s about a centimeter taller than I am.****

Here it is displaying my (finished! Yay!) Victorian polonaise.




I think I will take a few inches off the arms of the dummy; I wrapped my arms almost to the elbow (thinking that it would be easier to remove any excess later than to try and add extra) and I had my arms slightly out from my sides during the wrapping, and that rather distorts the clothes on it. I also may try to figure out some sort of cover for it, out of a thin jersey knit, just to hide the worst of the taping effort. There’s a 2” PVC pipe frame inside (made with a T-joint) for stability and the arms, neck and bottom are scrap cardboard. So it’s a pretty cheap effort but I think it will be useful for hemming if nothing else. And keeping in the hallway to startle people. Heh.

(title song lyrics are here, by the way. I couldn't find any lyrics about dummies in my head so I had to turn to Google.)

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* One bridge was closed completely, and a few more closed to heavy truck traffic, because the gusts were strong enough to push a semi around)

** A friend of ours who lives way up in the hills was stranded in his house by a landslide on the sole access road, which sucks for him but on the other hand, he’s chosen to live way up in the hills. What do you expect?

*** Though there was lightning and thunder! Yay!

**** And slightly too big in the waist and small in the bust; it was a bit of a relief to find out that I’m not quite as cylindrical as the form makes me look.