Today I had Mike transform me into a plaster mummy, covering me with wet, rapidly-hardening plaster bandages until I was in a full-body cast from neck to mid-thigh.
No, I don’t have a plaster fetish. (Really.) Instead, we were preparing to cast a dress form using the instructions in the My Twin Dressform manual. First you make a plaster cast of your torso and let it dry. Then you fill the plaster cast with plastic resin foam, and presto! a Fantastic Plastic Person.
Since I was complaining recently that there needed to be three of me, I think I’m going to cast two Fantastic Plastic Tiens from the mold Mike and I just made. The first one can go to work, the second can work on the dress, and I’ll just kick back and weave. 🙂
No, seriously. I will need to display both coat and dress, so I’m making two dress forms. For display purposes, I’m going to cover them in black stretch velvet for maximum visual impact. After that, when they become “working” forms, I’ll cover them in something less dramatic, like a rib knit.
Other than that, it was a fairly uneventful day. I finished sewing down the back lace, and sewed down the pearls around the neck edge of the bodice. I had exactly as many pearls as were needed to complete the neck edge – good thing I didn’t lose any more of them! I will use the new pearls on the body of the sleeves, and on the back of the dress. I don’t think the difference will be noticeable there.
I also finished hemming both sleeves, and started clipping the too-tight stitches out of the hem. Tomorrow morning I’ll go at it in earnest, to see what can be saved. Redoing one row of stitches will cost me about three hours, which is about 2/3 of a weekday’s work – annoying, but not nearly as disastrous as I was thinking earlier. So hopefully I can get the hem fixed tomorrow. That will free me to work on the second lining the rest of the week.
I am also starting to design the wedding invitations. I had wanted to set them up with woven double-happiness symbols, but I’m running out of time for that (somehow time seems to be getting away from me lately!). The dress probably won’t be done until the beginning of April, precisely when the invitations should really go out. I could probably warp up the loom at lightspeed once the dress is done, and bang out the invitations, but I’m not sure I feel like working under any more time pressure! Once the dress is done, I plan to kick back and relax for at least a week. (OK, well, maybe just a couple of days. I’m not very good at doing nothing!)
At any rate, the rapid sweep of time means I need to start thinking about designing the invitations. I figure I can do that in my spare time, when I’m sick of working on the dress.
Tien,
Where did you order the foam? The MyTwin site doesn’t list a source. I have a mydouble dress form (the one where you make a tight fitting cover on yourself and then squish a foam body into it–but it’s over 25 years old and doesn’t exactly match me any more . . . .
Got the foam at Douglas and Sturgess. I’d recommend ordering the dressform manual from MyTwin and ordering plaster bandages, etc. from Douglas and Sturgess – saved me a chunk of money. Nice people, too, very helpful and informative. They told me how much foam I’d need, and gave me tips on casting the dress form.
made me recall a friend back in art school who was noted for leaping without looking and getting into some memorable scrapes. One of her best was trying to get ahead of the rest of her sculpture class on the “self-portrait” assignment and sneaked into the “sculpture shack” after hours to cast parts of her body before the instructor showed them how to do it safely. She coated her entire arm…bent, by the way…in plaster-of-paris then realized, after it was set, she had no idea how to get her arm OUT. Hysterical call back to our dorm produced me and another buddy who sneaked out at 2 am, with a six-pack and some saws, chisels and anything else we could use, to the “shack,” where we spent the rest of the night alternately crying and giggling (since we were terrified we’d injure her) cutting and chipping the cast off. Of course, had we all just admitted what happened, somebody could have obtained the proper tools from an orthopedic office. She was already in violation of campus rules, though, as were we all, with mega-trouble if we owned up. We finally got it off, along with pulling out a good deal of body-hair and leaving her with very red skin for a couple of days. Needless to say, the lesson on “how to” in the next sculpure class included the information that she should cast half her arm at a time, lengthwise, and use vaseline on her skin. I could go on for several pages of her antics, but won’t! (-;
D&S are online now! Coolio!
Having FantasticPlastic Tiens to properly display the dress and coat is a fabulous idea: detail, detail, detail, and perfect fit. Being interested in dress forms for sewing, this sounds like a solution Lise and I might be interested in.
Nancy, your art-school pal’s scrapes are hilarious (especially now that they’re safely in the past and the arm well-healed). Thanks for the laugh!