As Cute As A Button

Now that we're under shelter-in-place lockdown, due to the coronavirus, I have the perfect opportunity to revive my poor neglected blog.

Things sort of fell apart a few years back when I was completely overtaken by a horrible period of depression.  It took quite some time to get back on track, and since then I've been incredibly busy and it has been hard to figure how to deal with the backlog of things I want to write about.

But hey!  There's no time like the present, right?

So what have we been up to?

Oh not much, just sewing a patio dress from a couple of vintage patterns.

The term "patio dress" is actually a bit of a misnomer, since these are actually separates, comprised of a skirt and matching blouse.  I used two different vintage patterns, because I wanted a blouse with sleeves.

The hem of my skirt has a circumference of eighteen feet.  Remember that number.


Robb and I subscribe to the motto that anything worth doing is worth overdoing, so the dress was just the starting point.  We had been invited to join a group of our friends who were making pearly costumes for the Edwardian Ball in San Francisco.

Which meant that we had to embellish our outfits with mother of pearl buttons.

Robb hand-sewed around twenty six hundred vintage mother-of-pearl buttons on his vintage tuxedo.

And I reckon we sewed on around around twenty one hundred buttons on my ensemble.  Those eighteen feet of hem required an astonishing number of buttons.

Robb did a a lot of calculations, factoring in the weight of buttons required to decorate a particular length and then determined that my outfit required fifteen gross of buttons.  This is what we had left over at the end of the project.

It seems like a lot of buttons, doesn't it?

And yet, I was the Plain Jane of my group. I looked downright minimalistic, compared to my compatriots.  How do I have such amazing friends?

The Edwardian Ball is an almost unimaginable costume event, inspired by the artwork of the great Edward Gorey.  So, we weren't merely pearlies, we were Gorey pearlies.  

Chris and Erin were both adorned with Gorey bats.

While Casey sported a Gorey cat.

And flowerpot on his trousers, which is a traditional pearly motif.

What can I say?  We take our frivolity very seriously around here.