correspondence, and other things

i get quite a lot of correspondence
which
although it lacks the romance of yesteryear [stamps, drawings on the envelope etc]
is very entertaining

i respond to the students who politely enquire whether i will answer a series of questions to help them in their work.
i ignore the ones who boldly demand i send "photos other than what i have available on my website together with descriptions of how the objects are made and dyed". one person recently even suggested i should send "quite a lot, as there are three of us"

i also ignore the emails that tell me "_______[insert name] wants to skype with you". my friends know i have a reluctance to use the telephone, let alone sit there with the camera on my macbook pointing up my not insubstantial nose. eww.

someone just the other day hoped i could send a pattern for the garments that were featured in a magazine recently. i couldn't. not because i had anything to hide, simply because i hadn't used a pattern.

as i wrote to my correspondent, i use the sewing machine as a kind of 3D drawing tool. i attack the cloth with scissors and thread and hope for the best. of late i have been borrowing a little from Julian Roberts' sub-cutting technique, but adapting it to my own way of working. Julian is the master of the "tunnel" - i like to work from an open piece of cloth and give shape by taking chomps out of the skirt with the delicious terror of the slice-and-dice overlocker [serger] that cuts as it stitches. fun. and then re-inserting the cut aways in other places so there's almost zero wastage

and i still prefer to work in white and add colour at the end, that way no pretty bits are lost to the scissors

but while we're on the subject of patterns
here are a few links that may be of interest
Mary Huang talks about computational couture here
and links to a lot of fun here

you might like to check out Holly McQuillan too

and the image? much to my amusement i spotted a camouflage-printed dress at a store in Adelaide yesterday...the funny thing was that i was wearing something that was similarly coloured and patterned, except that my version was coloured by mother nature