Preview of New Etsy Crap

New Etsy Crap coming up at Perfidious Beadworks! Everyone needs New Crap so come buy some, yo. Said New Etsy Crap will most likely make its appearance Sunday, December 6th, if I can haul my carcass away from the television long enough to upload the photos and write amusing bios of the poor unfortunates on the pins. The writing and filling out all the technical Etsy stuff (shipping, tags, etc.) takes forever and I've been putting it off for about a week. I was kind of hoping brownies would take pity on me and type it up while I slept, but I suspect they've merely been raiding my fridge and leaving footprints on the cheese and drinking my beer. Tiny little bastards.

But once I get New Etsy Crap posted I can redraw a couple of corset patterns and sew up something new. I'm drowning in thrift store fabrics and there are a pile of patterns from Francis Grimble's Fashions of the Gilded Age I've been wanting to draft up and do something horrendously weird and industrial to. There is a draped overskirt in particular that I can not live without. Really. Can't do it. I'm trying not to die before I can sew the fool thing up.

These are mourning pins, beaded with Victorian-era "French jet" beads (black glass beads made to look like Whitby jet) and contain the usual grim visages of dead people in my photo collection. Look! I've even made a teeny Dirt Nap Guy. Awwwwww. Yes, I am quite aware that all my other pins are French-jet-beaded-with-dead-people-pins but these are totally different. See? Diff. Er. Ent. Instead of using those crummy amber-colored glass globs I rummaged around in the scrap glass at work, found some 1/4" thick glue-chip glass and cut up a pile of tiny rectangles that I hand-ground bevels onto while the boss wasn't looking, so they wind up looking a lot like the half-assed beveling you sometimes see on cheap 19th-century jewelry. These look ten times more authentic than the ones I've been doing plus I had no intention of going into the accursed scrapbooking section of Craft Hell and paying real money for beveled glass doodads I could make for free. Scrapbooking makes me angry. Grr.

Here's one in progress. You can barely tell by this vile image (cheap-ass eBay digital camera) that I've woven a lock of hair into what's called a "mourning knot" and stuck it under the "In Memory Of" thingy. Yes, all my pins look that bad in their embryonic state, but after a troublesome childhood they tend to eventually turn out pretty nice. Or as nice as a brooch with a dead guy in a casket can look. This one is having an especially rough adolescence and may require some severe redesigning, sort of like putting iron leg braces on a little kid who has pigeon toes.

I've also been learning a little Victorian hairwork, so expect some bracelets and such woven out of fake hair, horsehair, or silk thread. I mean, what else does one do with a set of old ponyfalls that have already been around the clubs and back if one doesn't wish to make them into dreads? I've already got a wide cuff with a buckle made of old pocketwatch parts sketched out that may make it out in the world if I can set up my weaving stand without having a damnably fat spotted cat hanging off everything.

Ooh, burgundy and white and black hair maybe... *scampers away*