Thursday, December 27, 2012

Praxilla-- but no pear tree

I'm working on my own 12 days of Christmas as I scramble to finish my dress and gifts for 12th Night.  Yesterday was focused on beading the billiments for the dress.

Yes, I know billiments and oodles of bling is more English than Italian, but it actually isn't unheard of.  I was just going to do a total fantasy as I used up some questionable things in the stash, but then I found this Tinteretto over at Starlight Masquerade (thanks Angela-- again.)
As you can see, there are ouches on the partlet and a heavily jeweled billiment type band across the top.  The dress is also a greenish brocade, which fell in with my plans perfectly.  My colors are a tiny bit less pastel, but a pretty good match.  How fortuitous!  I love it when my crazy ideas turn out to be documentable.

So yesterday was consumed with wiring 28 pearl ouches and stitching on the 15 red jewels (they're buttons) and 14 large black rhinestones. The gold trim underneath is lined in red linen to give a bit of contrast. It also happens to be the same trim I have on my chopines, so I'm considering wearing them to 12th Night.

2 comments:

  1. You never noticed that portrait over at my website? It's been one of my favourites for ages. Oh, and I think it's actually shadows and possibly that it needs a cleaning that makes it look greenish - I think it's actually gold on white.

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  2. I'm sure I'd seen it on RoV, but you know how you don't see stuff in the same way when you aren't looking for a specific thing? It helped that there are so many of the late period black and white sketches surrounding the Tinteretto too. Putting the 3 or 4 similar dresses from portraits: pink brocade, the white with gold stripes,this one, and bunches of engravings of brocade dresses with jeweled partlets made it easy to see that I wasn't totally wacko with my idea for this dress. I keep staring at the ruffs in those engravings and paintings too. They look so much more like whisks than full open ruffs with a supportasse. That's today's/tomorrow's project: a rebato

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