I Jump In It... I Feel Like A Bear

Last night I hung out at Kanka's until late in the night taking photographs of the dress. The photos turned out great. We shoot everything on a blue seamless from multiple angels in many different lighting situations. We shoot 360° straight on and from above, as well as countless detail shoots. Here is the dress in 360°... unfortuantly it's only an animated GIF so the quality on the blog is not the greatest. When the main site launches I'll have a very clean version of the animation done in Flash.

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Kanka in his studio getting his photo on.

The Duchess Brings 50 Dresses

Feeling very low today... skewed and depressed. I hate feeling like this. — Need to do some work.



Most days I wake up and wish I could live just like Ray did... those were different times.

They Pinned The Crime On Him

The photos just keep rolling in... here's some shoots from Kanka. Thanks J — This first shot is awesome

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Another picture from the show.

You'll Speak In Tongues

Happy Halloween!!

It's time to make the buttons... finally got my box of 1,000 1" buttons this morning. That means tonight I'll be messing around with buttons, buttons and more buttons. I'm sure I'll have a couple of drinks as well.
I'm wondering if I'll get any trick-or-treat'rs this evening... i have a bit of candy to give out, but the fewer that show up the better of my own stash will become. So all you little tricksters need to stay away... the candy is mine!! All mine!!! Maybe I'll give you a button instead of candy... ha ha ha ha!!!
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Here are some more pictures from the Fashion Show... these were taken by the professinal photographer they hired.... hmmmm. Not that interesting, but worth posting... I stole them off his site hense the PROOF label on them all. I'm sure Kanka shoot way better photos than these.

The End Is Here...

Backstage after the show... it was at this point that I realized I didn't have to go home and cut paper anymore.



Steph walks the runway.


The final parade of paper fashions.


Drinks after the show at Joey D's and the infamous Onion Brick seen at the center of our table... it was delicious.

Final Evening

DRESS COUNTDOWN: 1 DAY
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This is it... the final day before the show. The outfit is 95% complete... there are just a few minor pieces I need to finish in the morning. Kanka stopped by to have a drink and he snapped a few picture of the final piece.

Shortage Of Modern Artwork

DRESS COUNTDOWN: 2 DAYS
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Still doing nothing but the dress... final days. I'm finishing up the jacket finally... time is running out. It'll be another late night.

Remove Dash Between These Two Words

DRESS COUNTDOWN: 5 DAYS
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Today is a moving day... not much happening... a whole lot moving. I have so much to do on the dress... there is just no time. Will be up late into the night working on it I'm sure.

Living With A...

First Mailings From 59 Golden Pine Road
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DRESS COUNTDOWN: 7 DAYS
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Alright... Alright... Standing On Teeth... Alright...

DRESS COUNTDOWN: 12 DAYS
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OFFICIAL CLOSING COUNTDOWN: 4 DAYS
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Cutting and more cutting today... lots of little flowers... ohh flower power and all that crap. More later —


MAILING TRANSFERRAL
OCTOBER 15, 2005
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BARKER - Ohh Boy (postcard)
BLACKMON - Ohh Boy (postcard)
BURNS - Ohh Boy (postcard)
BUTTREY - Ohh Boy (postcard)
DROZD - Ohh Boy (postcard)
JANSSEN - Ohh Boy (postcard)
KANKA - Ohh Boy (postcard)
KANKOVA - Ohh Boy (postcard)
KUTZBACH - Ohh Boy (postcard)
LINTON - Ohh Boy (postcard)
LUDWIG - Ohh Boy (postcard)
NEWMAN - Ohh Boy (postcard)
NEWTON & GEIER - Ohh Boy (postcard)
NOBLE - Ohh Boy (postcard)
PEARSON - Ohh Boy (postcard)
STATTS - Ohh Boy (postcard)
STOUT - Ohh Boy (postcard)
SYLVESTER - Ohh Boy (postcard)
VINSON - Ohh Boy (postcard)
WEISS - Ohh Boy (postcard)
YORK - Ohh Boy (postcard)

May Inadvertently Become Lodged In Throat.

DRESS COUNTDOWN: 14 DAYS
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OFFICIAL CLOSING COUNTDOWN: 6 DAYS
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Last night on THE DRESS
X-acto blades were abused and tossed aside. Thousands of intricate cuts drive a small town crazy.



White paper has shown it's face and finally this dress is starting to take form. The brown paper won't do anymore... have to move to the real stuff. Really happy with the shape the outer section of the dress bloomed into. Just like I planed. These are the 5 piece that have the floral pattern on them. There is still a lot of detailed die-cutting on these 5 badies, but I wanted to get them onto the dress form tonight to make sure they popped like I thought they would. Each of the outer 5 dress petals is only 2 pieces. Tomorrow afternoon and evening I'll tackle the inner layer of the dress as well as the other parts.
At this point though I'm starting to feel really good about the dress portion. It seems to be coming together as planned. This weekend I'll cut the jacket and fit it. That'll be the real test. Now that In have the main dress parts attached I've noticed that I will be taking the bottom of the jacket up another 2 inches. Thats about a foot off the entire length of the original patterned coat. Going to take the jacket in around the armpits. The sleeves are something that I'm still waiting on. I might not go full sleeve. I'll see how it goes.
As with any work of art this one is evolving as I go, while sticking to its foundational drawings. I'm getting really excited. Today marks the 2 week point... let's rock!

MAILING TRANSFERRAL
OCTOBER 13, 2005
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BARKER - Good Pat (postcard)
BLACKMON - Good Pat (postcard)
BURNS - Good Pat (postcard)
BUTTREY - Good Pat (postcard)
DROZD - Good Pat (postcard)
JANSSEN - Good Pat (postcard)
KANKA - Good Pat (postcard)
KANKOVA - Good Pat (postcard)
KUTZBACH - Good Pat (postcard)
LINTON - Good Pat (postcard)
LUDWIG - Good Pat (postcard)
NEWMAN - Good Pat (postcard)
NEWTON & GEIER - Good Pat (postcard)
NOBLE - Good Pat (postcard)
PEARSON - Good Pat (postcard)
STATTS - Good Pat (postcard)
STOUT - Good Pat (postcard)
SYLVESTER - Good Pat (postcard)
VINSON - Good Pat (postcard)
WEISS - Good Pat (postcard)
YORK - Good Pat (postcard)

Ghetto For Me. Ghetto For You. Ghetto. One. Two. Three.

DRESS COUNTDOWN: 15 DAYS
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OFFICIAL CLOSING COUNTDOWN: 7 DAYS
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Completed 7 sets of postcards last night. That should keep me held over untill the day I move in. That will keep focus on the dress up until that point in time. I'll probably develope another set of cards for that period between now and that time, but now the main focus is this dress.
Here is the sketch for the jacket and other portions of the dress that weren't the main pieces. I still need to work out the head pieces... time is slipping!!!



Dress Pieces - actual cut pieces (these need die cuts now)

INNER:
12
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4 main - trigram die-cuts / 4 seasons / patterning
8 woven - patterning

OUTER:
15
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5 main - floral patterns / trigrams / ying-yang / patterning
10 woven - atterning


Dress Form - ruff paper dummy

The dress has these 9 pieces that are themselves interconnected with each other in sets of 3. There are a total of 27 main pieces. The 4 inner pieces (the longer of the 9) are going to have the 4 seasons on them. The outer will be floral patterns and trigrams. All of the 9 pieces have a ying-yang on them at the circle base. The 4 inner are the crest version. Each piece will have a pattern cut into it so as to resemble lace or intricate weaves. These patterns will be based in large areas, but used sparingly as they will take some time to cut out.
There are 3 other frontal pieces. 2 long drapes that flag the left and right legs as well as an intricate center piece. There will be long thinly sliced paper on the inner most section of the dress.

MAILING TRANSFERRAL
OCTOBER 12, 2005
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BARKER - Joe Jack Talcum (postcard)
BLACKMON - Joe Jack Talcum (postcard)
JANSSEN - Joe Jack Talcum (postcard)
KANKA - Joe Jack Talcum (postcard)
KUTZBACH - Joe Jack Talcum (postcard)
LINTON - Joe Jack Talcum (postcard)
LUDWIG - Joe Jack Talcum (postcard)
NEWMAN - Joe Jack Talcum (postcard)
NEWTON & GEIER - Joe Jack Talcum (postcard)
NOBLE - Joe Jack Talcum (postcard)
PEARSON - Joe Jack Talcum (postcard)
STATTS - Joe Jack Talcum (postcard)
STOUT - Joe Jack Talcum (postcard)
VINSON - Joe Jack Talcum (postcard)
WEISS - Joe Jack Talcum (postcard)
YORK - Joe Jack Talcum (postcard)

Momma Played Guitar

DRESS COUNTDOWN: 24 DAYS
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OFFICIAL CLOSING COUNTDOWN: 16 DAYS
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So I finished the basic structure for the coat this evening. In this state, it's as the 1950's pattern was meant to be (a long coat). It's inside out in this picture. Now I'm going to alter it. First removing 6" from the entire circumfrance of the bottom portion — this will make it closer to the length and cut I did in my drawings. Most of the bottom of the jacket is going to have detailed die cut in it so the weave of the dress will be seen thru that as well. Time to take this apart and start cutting away at it. After I get this alteration done I'll put it all back together and attach the sleeves, which I already cut this evening. Then I'm going to do a fitting with Steph and move on to the final alterations. Then take it all apart again and cut it out of the real paper.



This is my friend for this project. I bought this big sucker a few years back... not knowing exactly why I would need so much. It must have been on sale.




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Found this old photograph of my mother on the internet today. She's the one on the right with the Martin guitar. It's titled Student Entertainers - 1967. Entertaining a capacity audience of the members of the school board and faculty after their annual January dinner in the Grand Island Jr.-Sr. High School in 1967 were (left) Reg Schopp, Denise Blackmore, Gayle Gaston, Deborah Carr, Kevin Carr and Daryl Kutzbach.



This is a picture of the street I grew up on back in upstate New York. This is Sunset Drive way before my time... 1952. My father grew up in one of the little white houses on the right hand side of the street in the back. The river feeds Niagra Falls and has a swift current.



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Kanka has a new toy that he was showing me last evening... it's a crazy powerful remote mobile flash kit... man that thing is bright. We hung around his place last night before we went to the CC Throwdown. I'll post pictures and video from that event tomorrow, after I go thru it all and edit it.


MAILING TRANSFERRAL
OCTOBER 3, 2005
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BARKER - H5N1 (postcard)
BLACKMON - H5N1 (postcard)
JANSSEN - H5N1 (postcard)
KANKA - H5N1 (postcard)
KUTZBACH - H5N1 (postcard)
LINTON - H5N1 (postcard)
LUDWIG - H5N1 (postcard)
NEWMAN - H5N1 (postcard)
NEWTON & GEIER - H5N1 (postcard)
NOBLE - H5N1 (postcard)
PEARSON - H5N1 (postcard)
STATTS - H5N1 (postcard)
STOUT - H5N1 (postcard)
VINSON - H5N1 (postcard)
WEISS - H5N1 (postcard)
YORK - H5N1 (postcard)

Epitome Of Cool Inscribed On The Back Of Ray Johnson Head

DRESS COUNTDOWN: 25 DAYS
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OFFICIAL CLOSING COUNTDOWN: 17 DAYS
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I've been telling myself this fact for weeks, but today I finally saw it come to fruition — 'Paper is nothing like fabric and can not be treated in the same manner'. I'm building the jacket based on a pattern from 1950. It will work out fine and save me a lot of time in terms of how to interconnect the different pieces... the difficulty comes when you have to get paper to round corners and flow around things like fabric does. The simple matter of fact is that paper is paper and will do as paper wants to do. I'm probably going to have to add more darting to certain portions of the jacket to allow the paper to react to the body like fabric would. Only I'll probably leave it as open-darting vs. closed-darting. Of course none of these sewing terms are being correctly used, but I'm working with paper and I'm going to evolve/twist/interpret terms (like darting) to mean what I want them to mean. So when I say open-darting I mean darts ( a tapered tuck stitched into a garment in order to shape it) that are simple inward folds without stitching or in this case glue.
I cut the butcher paper material this afternoon, to connect the body portion of the jacket. The sleeves will be next and will need serious non-fabric based alterations to work in the paper world. The pattern for the collar is going to have to be totally redesigned to match the North Korean military look. Pockets from this pattern are also out the window, as the don't match what North is doing. The basic structure for the jacket is all I really needed.
The only thing I'm going to have to begin to assemble, not knowing whether I'll really want it is the jackets 'front facing' and 'front interfacing' pieces... again these may be things that make more sense for fabric, but may become useless and redundant when building out of paper.


FRONT pieces


BACK & SIDE BACK pieces


BACK & SIDE BACK pinned together

An important thing to remember when working with paper and attempting to shape and fold it to the body, is the power of scoring the paper with a razor-blade. Just enough to allow the paper to fold over accurately with out creating a false fold line and thus an unremovable crease (ruining the paper). The score is your greatest ally... especially when darting the paper.
The other important thing is the bone folder... if you want sharp folds, you have to have it. I used my bone folder religiously when I was constructing experimental and hand-made books back in 98'. I still have it and it's a god-send for this project.

DO NOT FORGET JIM ROSENQUISTS PAPER SUIT FROM 1966.