Playing with a cool idea

A while ago ,I found a really interesting link on this blog. Julian Roberts, that is Julian, not Julia had an incredibly cool way to create visually complex yet easy to sew dresses. Julian is clearly a quirky guy. His website was open only two days a week so it wasn’t always easy to track his method down and try it. The other day I saw that the Julian Roberts book is now available as a PDF. I downloaded the book. It’s a space hog but completely fascinating.

Some of Julian's ideas are really easy to assimilate, others feel like trying to master advanced mathematics when you have trouble with simple arithmetic. But on one foot, his method starts with a long pillow case of fabric. You sort of randomly decide where the front and back bodices go, cut then out and then twist, and turn those bodices and stitch the dress together.

Here you see stage 1.

Here are two views of the finished dress. it can be worn front to back or inside out for various looks.

It actually looks somewhat better and more interesting on my actual body.

So what do I think about this dress construction method??? It’s a great way to create the sort of dress you need if you are suddenly invited to the very chic opening of a chic art gallery and need to make something in under an hour.

It’s the good beginning of a cool dress. The dress despite the appendages, is actually more flattering than one would expect. It’s easy enough to use the dress as a first draft and then stand in front of a mirror and adjust, pin and sew all of the hanging bits into something that is pretty wonderful, a sort of instant Charles James inspired dress.

The dress might be of rather limited utility, but it’s a nice idea to have in my quiver of quick dress ideas. It’s a little like a really nifty party trick. You wouldn’t want an entire evening of party tricks but once in a while, a cool party trick is nice a nice change of pace.

If I am ever invited to a party where all of the guests are too cool for words, and terrify me with their downtown fabulousness, I will definitely make this dress.

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born, Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...

Two funerals and a birthday

I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today. Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things. When we were at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...

sarah in nyc

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