Although her dress, her coiffure, and all the preparations for the ball had cost Kitty great trouble and consideration, at this moment she walked into the ballroom in her elaborate tulle dress over a pink slip as easily and simply as though all the rosettes and lace, all the minute details of her attire, had not cost her or her family a moment's attention, as though she had been born in that tulle and lace, with her hair done up high on her head, and a rose and two leaves on the top of it.

(from Anna Karenina)

This is one of my favorite passages in the book so far. (I'm not reading the Oprah edition; I'm reading it in discrete chunks from Daily Lit, which is a tremendous boon to mankind: get books through your email and look like you're working!)

… as though she had been born in that tulle and lace: this, to me, is the ideal of clothes. Your clothes, no matter what trouble you took with them beforehand, should in the moment of wearing appear as natural to you as your birthday suit. They should be part of you, not something slapped on as an afterthought. In fact, what you wear should look so much like YOU that if someone else put it on, it would look like a YOU costume.

Of course, I'm a little farther ahead in the book at this point and I realize that being perfectly dressed didn't really help Kitty at that ball. So I'm not saying that if you manage to perfectly integrate your inside and your outside that you will lead a charmed life; I'm just saying you won't be tugging at and uncomfortable in and much too conscious of your clothes. And every little bit helps.

Michelle over at OldPatterns.com has this listed for sale — click on the image to visit the page — and I really, really, really wish I had an excuse to buy and make this dress. I'd need a great excuse, as it's B30 and $75, but I'm looking … anyone want to invite me to a White House dinner? (Okay, maybe I'd like to wait until January '09 for that one, but I'd be up for some embassy shindig.)

I love that this pattern is described as an "informal dinner dress". Obviously, this dates before the rise of the drive-in, never mind the drive-through!

This dress makes me long for the days when people took dresses seriously. This is a life-and-death dress, a dress of consequence. This dress stands for something, and takes no guff. Can your poly-cotton jersey number from Forever21 say the same?

Friend-of-the-blog Nora is doing a little pattern divestiture on eBay — you can check out her listings here.

Now you all know I have nothing but love for the professional pattern-sellers, but I have to admit that my heart quickens when someone tells me that they're selling off some of their "collection". I think it's because, rightly or wrongly, I figure that they are selling off things regretfully, only because they need some space, and that regret is because what they're selling is freakin' awesome. (Which seems to be true in Nora's case — nice pattern up above, what?)

This belief of mine is carried to a ridiculous extreme when I think about estate sales — I mean, c'mon, this is stuff people DIED holding on to! It must be incredibly great! And no matter how many times I go to a sale that consists only of wash-and-wear polyester 1970s housedresses, archival issues of TV Guide ("Who's the Boss?" always seems to feature prominently), and ABSOLUTELY NO FABRIC OR PATTERNS even though "sewing machine" is listed in the ad, I keep believing.

[Of course, I am SO EVIL — so evil, that if I ask about patterns and the estate sale runner is dumb enough to tell me that they threw them out, so sorry, I always say "Oh, that's too bad — you know, some of those patterns go for $30 each, or more!" Even if I *know* they probably tossed a box of 80s-puff sleeved monstrosities. Such cavalier behavior on their part must be *punished*.)

But back to this pattern. Boy, I love that yoke! I'd make this in a charcoal gray with red buttons and wear it with a red belt (but not red shoes). So cute!

Has everyone seen this dress, from the PatternReview Vintage Sewing contest?

Isn't it lovely? Shinta did such a great job — and she calls herself a beginner! Which just goes to show you: if you love a dress enough and take your time, even a beginner can make something exquisite. Don't settle for a ho-hum project; choose something that takes your breath away, then just concentrate. Slow and steady makes the dress.

Here's the original pattern envelope, just so you can see exactly how well Shinta realized the ideal:

I think that even if this is the only dress Shinta ever makes, she can call herself a seamstress for the rest of her life. Seamstress First Class, even!

Check out this stunner from Dorothea's Closet on eBay. I love the way the straps attach to the bust.

I know the weather is about to change soon (it's been unseasonably warm here in Chicago these last two weeks) as I have had one last gasp of mooning over summer dresses, especially sundresses.

This is completely unreasonable, as I am not a sundress person. Dresses, yes, sundresses, no. I think the last sundress I was completely happy with was a cherry-print number with a ruffled hem and spaghetti straps. (It also had an elastic-smocked bodice, because I was ten.)

This dress might convert me to sundress-person mode — especially the one made up in a border print. I'd love to try this in stripes, too! Or gingham. Or (it goes without saying) polka dots.

If you want to get a jump on next summer, you could do worse than buying this pattern. In fact, I think looking at this might be nearly as effective as those lightboxes in treating seasonal affective disorder.

Check out this work from artist Robin Barcus: "Collecting Kisses". She put up three dress outlines in a gallery and had people leave lipstick kisses on them. Participatory art, yay!

Robin's also doing a series of location-specific dresses for every state in the US, *and* making a movie about it, which is about as cool as you can get without resorting to the illegal use of Freon.

Here's one of her state-specific dresses (for Maine, naturally):

She also did a leaf dress that's worth seeing — click on either of the images above to visit her blog.

I had a whole list of art-dress projects to post about before my hard drive decided to become an ossified, non-spinny lump … a list I don't really want to recreate by hand, because I'm lazy. So if you emailed me an art-dress link sometime in the last month, and feel strongly about it, would you email me again? Or at least leave a link in the comments?

Looks like the condom dress is an attention-getter that just doesn't quit. Since the last time I posted about them there's been an entire condom-clothing fashion show in China, to commemorate World Population Day (and to publicize the 4th China Reproductive Health New Technologies & Products Expo, held in Beijing back in July).

What I want to know is, why don't I ever see any MEN'S clothing made out of condoms? Aren't they the ones who are supposed to be doing the covering up? Where are the three.jpgece condom business suits? I guess it's just another instance of that old, tired story of birth control being seen as entirely the woman's responsibility.

That said, this little number is kinda cute. I'd love to see a re-interpretation of the condom dress where all the condoms were actually ersatz condoms made of silk organza. (It would certainly be more comfortable to wear!)

If you click through on the picture you'll see the original post featuring the story, with all the stuff-made-from-condoms you could ever wish to see. But be careful, some of the pictures there look as if they might at any time become Not Safe For Work. And oh, lord, I can't wait to see what kind of ads Adsense serves up to this post!

Have you all visited alittlegoodness's Etsy site yet? I desperately need this fabric. (If by 'desperately', you mean 'after sewing up the 15 yards I desperately needed *last* week.')

Included in that 15 yards was a good chunk of this fabric, which I posted about yonks ago, and which is now back in stock at Fashion Fabrics Club:

I also bought (no pictures … yet) a soft, heavy loden green fabric that is possibly a cotton/wool blend, some lightweight teal denim, and a really nice Liz Claiborne browny-gray ombre-ish stripe. Very somber; I'm thinking I'll try another version of the Why Not Plaid dress with that last fabric. You know, Real Soon Now.

I have come to a sort of détente with my fabric stash: I have an enormous amount of fabric, and yet never seem to have anything I can actually sew with. The fabric I want to sew with has to hit that sweet spot: it has to be something I want to wear, yet not so incredibly gorgeous that I am too cowed to cut into it. (Have you ever tried shopping for "good enough" fabric? It's very difficult.*) So my arrangement is this: I simply buy gorgeous fabric and then wait for OTHER gorgeous fabric to arrive and push slightly-less gorgeous fabrics down the ladder of gorgeousness until they are at a low enough rung to be cut into. Some fabrics, it is sad to say, fall rather rapidly; others have maintained an immunity to scissors and pins for years. The worst is when fabric goes from too-gorgeous to too-NOT-gorgeous and misses the scissor-able stage altogether.

*This may be a business model: a site that only sells mediocre-plus fabrics. "Perfect for semi-wearable muslins!" would be its tagline. Or maybe "Fabrics you'll be 'in like' with!"

I've had this site, OurThreads.com, open in my browser for a week, trying to decide whether to blog about it.

The pros:

• it's a site that promotes swapping of clothes as well as buying/selling
• it lets users donate the money they make from their closets to the charitable cause of their choice
• the interface looks pretty nice

The cons:

• sites like this are only as good as their user base, and their user base right now (although they all seem like very nice people!) isn't very large
• it's only slightly less trouble to take pictures and list items on a site like this as it is for eBay, and eBay would probably net you more money
• there were only 19 dresses listed when I last checked.

Anyway, I'm not sold yet. I think what would really make this site work is a something like Amazon's "Resell Your Books" feature. Sign up a few big online clothing retailers (GAP.com, Amazon, Bluefly, Overstock.com, Zappos, etc.), and get them to let OurThreads.com users upload their purchase histories. Match people who have similar sizes/purchase histories, and then alert them to each other and see if they want to trade.

They could also let you (with a widget/bookmarklet) "shop" on other, non-partner sites and mark things you've bought, which would add that thing automatically to your "closet".

For every person who says "eeeew … used clothes?" there will be two who will buy that extra sweater if they know they can sell or swap it in a few months for something new-to-them.

Having people upload their own stuff is so old-web, and too much work. Make it passive, or nearly passive, and you're more than halfway there. A really useful site would know/figure out (with my permission) what I've already bought, and then would ping me when people who have similar tastes mark the stuff THEY already bought with a "willing to trade/sell" marker.

So I pose the questions to you, my dear readers. Would you use a site like OurThreads.com, as it is now? Would you take pictures of your stuff, describe it, put it up on this site, and then field requests to trade a pair of barely-worn GAP grass-green ballet flats for your barely-worn grass-green cardigan? (Not that I have a pair of shoes like that gathering dust in MY closet …) I'm not sure I would. But I'd sign up for a passive, automatic-info-gathering clothing-swap site in a heartbeat …

(And while I'm talking about advances in shopping tech — someone has finally implemented my dream of a shop-by-color application. It's here at Yahoo! Shopping. Of course, in my dream it was by Pantone, but hey. You take what you can get. Now do you see why my pitch for a shopping-by-color service got third place in the Web 1.0 pitch contest at Wikimania 2006? Vindication is suh-weet.)

This dress (from the eBay store The Lyoness's Den) has got a center front zipper closing, which is a feature I always enjoy on purchased vintage dresses, but not something I've ever sewn myself.

I love looking at the design trajectory of center zippers: it seems to me (and I haven't done any real research on this, so be sure to read the comments where it is entirely likely I will be contradicted by someone who has Real Knowledge of this subject) that early on in the days of 'zip fasteners' they were exotic, interesting, expensive … and thus they were featured prominently in designs — front and center as it were. (I have a late 1930s-early 1940s black crepe dress which would have been very expensive, new, that has a center front zipper.) As zippers became more widespread and ordinary, even quotidian, they moved from the front to the side and then the back — out of sight, out of mind — and visible zippers, front-closure zippers, became a sportif or even déclassé thing. Front zippers were for play clothes, coveralls, and housedresses, like this one.

(It's almost like what happened to Velcro: if you are as old as I am, you probably remember when Velcro sneakers had that early-adopter cool, before becoming at first dorky and then unremarkable. I am afraid I've always hated Velcro, though, because I can't stand that horrible noise it makes!)

Anyway, this dress, with its center front zipper, is $9.95 Buy-It-Now and a bust 38. It's advertised as a housedress that's pretty enough to wear out of the house (to the grocery store or whatnot). If I were going to make it, I'd make it in a gray-and-red geometric-print quilting cotton with a bright red, large-toothed, plastic zipper up the front. Fun!