Just one more, from Sandritocat:

THE BEACH: A PLAY IN ONE ACT

Angela: Where is Helen? I keep thinking about Helen.

Francine: It always unnerves people at the beach if you turn around and stare inland, instead of out at the water. Try it sometime.

Margaret: I shall bestride the narrow earth like a Colossus! Oh, wait. I AM a Colossus. I shall bestride the narrow earth like me!

Doris: The stars! The stars in my pocket like grains of sand! Sand in my pocket like stars! Who eats paper? I ate some paper. My sunglasses are torpid. Also, pickles! Shiny, shiny pickles!

Helen (from offstage): No one even noticed that I left.

Today's story-pattern is brought to us by Patterns from the Past:

Plot synopsis: The fabulously wealthy Candace Verweehauken-Jones is not only the leader of New York's social scene; she's also #1 on the FBI's most-wanted list (for racketeering, mostly, and as a suspect in the death of husband #3, Cornelius Jones). To keep from being apprehended and arrested at the various charity galas she chairs, she is attended at all times by two top-of-the-line social-secretary/security bots (manufactured by Verweehauken Industries, small appliances division).

Orange dress apprises Mrs. CVJ of the names, net worths, and current social entanglements and aspirations of all approachers, via a wireless heads-up display accessed directly through Mrs. CVJ's retinas. Floral dress is tasked with threat assessment, CCTV monitoring (again, wirelessly), and champagne/canape procurement.

However, tonight—tonight all Mrs. CVJ's carefully-laid plans will go awry, as she will be captured, in more than one way, by a last-minute fill-in date for one of the Junior Social Chairs—one Special Agent Robert Kerrigidan. Fireworks and firepower both come into play, as their epic gun battle ends in an equally epic kiss in the ruins of the ballroom. Don't miss it!

Check out this pattern from What-I-Found Sewing Patterns:

Yellow Dress: These sleeves are the height of chic.

Gray Dress: I don't know who she thinks she's fooling with those sleeves.

Yellow and Gray are sisters (Yellow is the eldest, Gray is the cynical baby of the family). Yellow is looking to make a lucrative marriage to a wealthy industrialist in order to save the family's pencil-eraser business, which employs several hundred people in their town of Rasa, in upstate New York. Gray, on the other hand, has taken over the factory since the death of their father. Her plan for success is to branch out from plain pink erasers and start manufacturing novelty pencil toppers, too.

After several madcap misadventures (one involving an escaped goat who eats an entire day's output of novelty pencil toppers) Gray manages to land the wealthy industrialist — not as a husband, but as an investor! Yellow marries the local postman, whom she has always secretly loved. They have triplets. Gray is a huge success and becomes the first female pencil-eraser executive to make the cover of Forbes (and, for those of you who need all the stories to end with romance, she marries the factory foreman).

Today's story is from PatternStash:

BRIDE: TODAY is the HAPPIEST DAY OF MY LIFE.

BRIDESMAID #1: My feet hurt. But boy, Amy sure looks happy.

BRIDESMAID #2: This veil itches. But boy, Amy sure looks happy. Is that guy over there the groom's brother? Why didn't Amy tell me Paul had a cute brother?

BRIDE: My bridesmaids are beautiful. I am beautiful. Paul has spinach in his teeth, but I don't care. This is the happiest day of my life.

B#1: How come I had to wear gloves? And is that guy Paul's brother? He looks like Paul. Somebody should tell Paul he has spinach in his teeth. At MY wedding we won't have creamed spinach.

B#2: I wonder, would accidentally-on-purpose dropping this bouquet in front of Paul's brother be obvious, or "meeting cute"?

BRIDE: Only a hundred more pictures to go, then I can eat. For the first time in three months. Then there will be CAKE! This is the happiest day of my life.

Today's story comes to us courtesy of Out of the Ashes and this pattern:

Two editors from Mademoiselle have trapped a hapless, unknowing reader in a block of clear lucite, where they will subject her to countless literary and sartorial experiments (until the demise of the magazine in 2001).

You can tell the woman in beige is a senior editor because her eyes are completely dead. (Also because, look, beige!) The woman in red is a market editor. Also, the editor in beige is on the verge of tearing a button off her jacket and hurling it at the poor trapped reader. Just because she can.

So all this week I think I'll be posting pattern images that evoke (at least for me) elaborate and possibly impossible backstories. This one is from Your Pattern Shop — check it out:

Is it just me, or is Anjelica Huston about THIS CLOSE from punching out Joan Crawford in this picture? Or maybe she's hiding a gun behind her back? I think they are rivals in the same nail salon (thus the smocks), fighting for the affections of the head masseuse, Sven, who isn't away at the front because he's 4F. (Yes, I know that AH and JC aren't really contemporaries, but this is the World of Pattern Envelopes, where anything goes.)

Later, it turns out that Sven is NOT 4F, but a German spy! JC and AH band together to expose his perfidy (he was hypnotizing his subjects during massages to extract secrets VITAL TO THE WAR EFFORT) and they each get a medal.

They don't wear these dresses to the medal ceremony, just so we're clear.

What do you think is going on in this illustration?

So, Jen of MOMSPatterns is taking a trip from sunny Florida (VERY SUNNY, as she KEEPS REMINDING ME) to Indianapolis (STILL WARMER THAN CHICAGO) to meet up with Lisa of The Vintage Fashion Library & Miss Helene's Vintage Sewing Shoppe! This meeting of Sewing Pattern Divas is being celebrated by a sale at their sites. They're using coupon code 'watchoutworld' and you will save 15% off your orders starting right now, and it can be used through NEXT weekend. (Lisa can't do coupons up front at Miss Helene's, so just put the coupon code in your paypal payment, and you'll receive your 15% back as a refund.) Sale ends Midnight EST on Sunday, March 15, 2009. Also, Jen's poor hubby will be handling her orders and is running away for the weekend, so orders from MOMSPatterns will be processed Friday night, then not again until Monday afternoon.

Also: GREAT NEWS! The Antique Dollhouse of Patterns is OPEN AGAIN! Yay, Penny! I'm glad your site is back up!

PS: Lisa: have you told Jen she's going to need one of these?

Ang at Dorothea's Closet Vintage has this adorable kitten-print dress up for sale …

It's got a little hurt going on — it was part of a theater group's costume collection, so there are some repairs that wouldn't be visible from the opera circle but that would be if you wore it in "real life."

I used to have a problem with buying "hurt" dresses, especially at thrift stores. I would fall in love with them and want to fix them and make them all better, but what generally happened is that they fell into a laundry basket and gradually turned into vintage compost, because I hate mending.

So I will buy hurts now only on a few conditions — if I want to use the buttons for something else, for example, or if the fabric is so fantastic that I have grand plans of scanning it and reproducing it (perhaps with the help of our friends at Spoonflower). This dress doesn't have any buttons, but I do think someone might want to buy it just for the fabric. So cute!

While I'm thinking big, I wish we had some kind of international print registry, where manufacturers would list their designs with various licenses. I know (or think I know) that there are big trade shows where you can see prints, and that some prints are licensed exclusively to one designer, or to one designer who does childrenswear and another who does swimwear, or whatever, but wouldn't it be fantastic if you could get, online, a listing of all giant artichoke prints (for example), available to download and have printed yourself for a small fee? I would gladly pay $10 (on top of whatever it cost me to print the fabric) for the right to print some yardage of some prints from years ago, and it's not like the manufacturers are making any $$ off those prints now!

Maybe I should go talk to Kathleen about this idea. 🙂

Anyway, if you love cats, dresses, and don't mind a few small mends here and there, this is the dress for you. (Click on the image above to visit bigger pictures on Ang's site, then hit the "back" button on that page to get the listing information.)

Do you guys remember this dress?

I made it with some of the fabric I got in Japan, and (iirc) a lot of you REALLY liked that fabric.

Well, I got an update from SuperBuzzy this weekend, and they have this fabric! In the orange, and in this very nice blue:

It's pretty expensive (almost $17/yard) but a LOT cheaper than a trip to Japan, so, really, when you think of it that way, it's like you're SAVING money.

Oh, and thanks for all the kind words about the Crossword Puzzle Tournament — I actually did much better this year than last year, despite having been a puzzle slacker AND despite staying up super-late Saturday night at a TMBG concert. (They played ALL of Flood. It was AWESOME.) Of course, for me, "much better" means "In the bottom 200, instead of the bottom 100," but still, better! If I jump fifty places a year, in only ten or eleven years I will win the whole shebang, right?

One more thing: the Duro column is up at the Boston Globe. I'm getting a lot of flack (mostly in email) for using the word "sewist" instead of "sewer," so feel free to leave a comment with your opinion … (Mary Beth, I'm looking at you!) There are also comments from people who think that if a particular combination of letters exists in ANY language, you can't say it's a "new" word in English. Sigh. Why don't we teach linguistics in high school, again?

Crossword puzzle stunt dress time!

Yep, today's the ACPT tournament, and I'll be wearing this:

I haven't sewn down the facings yet in this picture, so they're a little lumpy. Can you see what else is wrong with it? No?

How about now?

Yep. I cut the ENTIRE THING OUT UPSIDE DOWN. (Insert forehead-slap here.) When I figured this out I was hopping mad for about ten minutes, but I didn't have enough time OR fabric for a do-over, so then I just laughed. It's funnier this way, and of course, from MY perspective (that of the WEARER), looking down at the dress, it's right-side-up! So that's how I'm going to think about it, anyway.

It's a Duro Junior (Simplicity 3875), which I think of more as a summer-type dress, but I'm just going to wear it with a black tee underneath it and tights and just hope it's not as cold as the weatherfolk say it's supposed to be. I'll be inside, solving (or, in my case, often NOT-solving) puzzles most of the day anyway.

I found this last stash of Michael Miller crossword fabric at Britex months and months ago — for next year's dress I think I'm going to get some custom fabric made up at Spoonflower. Probably an easy NYT Monday puzzle solved in red ink and tiled to fill the yardage, or maybe even as a scatter print. What do y'all think?

Oh, and tomorrow — check out my last column filling in for Jan Freeman in the Boston Globe; I'm writing about my inadvertent coining of the word "Duro" (and how cool you all were to use it, making it "real").