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“MeMadeMay (2020), day 10. It’s a super lazy Sunday, and I’m not going out today (rain. So much rain.) so I didn’t bother ever putting on real clothes. So I’ll show off my stack of Me-made hats. (This isn’t all of them.)

I took a millinery class at Columbia College Chicago a few years ago, which is where the headdress and pillbox come from. (The headdress is a knockoff of one worn by Myrna Loy.) The apple hats are from a Simplicity pattern from the 70’s. (Simplicity 9644 from 1971, in point of fact.)”

The photo of the stack of hats on my head may or may not be a direct reference to the children’s book Caps for Sale. (This is the affiliate link, y’all. I am more than happy to shill for delightful children’s literature.)

There are certain days when MeMadeMay gets really difficult for me, and it’s really any day that I can’t go outside, for whatever reason. This always strikes me as a little funny, because there are a LOT of participants who shoot every outfit against the same wall in their house, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it just doesn’t interest me. (To do. I follow plenty of creators who do this, and that doesn’t bother me, it’s just not who I am as a person.) …It probably doesn’t help that I don’t actually have a single inch of bare space in my apartment. I have taken photos in the apartment over the years, but I really, really hate doing it and it feels like I’m failing somehow.

That said, it’s always fun to have what I call a “contingency day”. You’ll end up seeing it happen exactly once every couple of years. I’ll pull out all my hats, or all my socks, or all my identical copies of… whatever, and just take really dumb photos. And it really helps break up the monotony if, for example, the weather is just wretched the whole month (half of my makes are shorts, as it turns out).

And how many times do you get to see someone who’s made a bunch of hats? I really love millinery, and the class I took when I was in school was fabulous. (I don’t miss having band-aids on literally every finger from stabbing myself with the curved needles though.) It’s not a skill I’ve kept up with very well (though I did make at least one headdress for a friend when I was still doing burlesque), but I suppose that’s the problem with having 87 million interests. And I really don’t wear hats very often anymore, with the exception of those apple hats. I do have a really extensive collection of vintage hats, and I used to wear them frequently, but my current lifestyle doesn’t lend itself so well to swanning around.

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“MeMadeMay (2020), day 9. Blouse 2 from my favorite blouse pattern (Simplicity 2759), with and without optional 70’s cop show variant (I think I look like a 70’s cop in this outfit plus leather jacket.)

Bonus: These pants are vintage US Navy trousers. I found a US Navy uniform in an antique store and the pants were the perfect size for me. They’re super comfy, and very sharp!”

…They’re very sharp if you don’t mind needing to spend 6 solid minutes unbuttoning them to use the bathroom, lol. Also, those pants themselves probably only fit me for about 6 solid minutes, thanks to having to live indoors and the imminent cessation of my dancing career. Such is life.

I love taking pictures outside Kenneth’s mother’s garage. This perplexes… pretty much everybody, because it’s a faded little box in a sun-bleached alley, but there’s something about really peely paint that I just love. If it were truly possible to do, I really think that my peak aesthetic is a state of arrested decay. Unfortunately decay really doesn’t stop just because you want it to, and anything you do to mitigate it really just makes it disappear in the process.

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“MeMadeMay (2020) day 8. SPACEDRESS, because it’s freezing outside and I only have so many matching pairs of Sock Dreams‘ Very Tall Socks.

I’m having a super crap self-image day, I hate how round and flat and stupid my face looks when my hair isn’t done. I feel like the ugliest person on the planet today, so… the fact that I’m even posting these photos is kind of a miracle.

On the other hand, I think it’s very interesting how differently my dresses fit when I actually choose to wear foundation garments under them, even though they’re made to my unaltered measurements. Food for thought.”

You know, I never thought that I spent all that much time or energy thinking or talking about my appearance. And then I started transcribing my MMMay posts. And I really don’t know what to do with that information. It’s kind of disturbing, actually.

Getting down to brass tacks: One: I look like Little Edie, lol. Two: I never wear foundation garments anymore. I won’t say *never*, never. I’ve been known to whip out a girdle now and again. But I never wear corsets anymore. Truthfully, most of my dresses fit better without them, and I’ve opted for the much more low-maintenance option of just… wearing a vintage Playtex Cross Your Heart bra. It’s legitimately shocking how much just that will do. Three: girl, your face will look one thousand percent less like the goddamn moon if you just put on some makeup. That’s it. That’s the solution.

SPACEDRESS is New York 1057, which is apparently not on the Vintage Pattern Wiki. Brb, fixing that.

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“MeMadeMay (2020) day 7. It’s been a week already? I’m finding it substantially easier to dress myself this year, lol. This lil’ tunic came from a 60’s pattern and more Mood fabric. I want to love it, but I need to take the whole thing apart and fix it. I made it in a rush last year, in the hopes that I wouldn’t have to repeat all my outfits 6 times, and it came out too big and boxy. I added French darts tot the front to take in the excess there, but left the back and made some *ahem* interesting choices when it came time to hem. So, it’s super cute, but quite problematic in its current state.

Cameo by Kenneth, with his “no mask, no problem” solution to standing in lines.”

Is there anything left to say about the Ugly Snowflake Tank that I haven’t already said? It’s still Simplicity 8246. Every time I have to link it to the Vintage Pattern Wiki (and therefore see the envelope illustration), I think to myself maybe it would be worth the trouble to try that pattern again. After all, 99% of the issue was that I was bad at math. On the other hand… I actually like this one, with its million extra darts to fix the fit, much better than the original version with just bust darts.

And… as a completely unrelated note, can I just say that typing these posts into WordPress ENRAGES me, because every single one ends up having a terrible “readability score”, which really just means that the words I use are too big. Or that my sentences are too long. Which, fair. I write exactly the same way that I speak, rambling and full of side quests. I know it doesn’t actually mean anything. But I want to Win at Blogging, which is both reasonable to want and possible to achieve. /s

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“MeMadeMay (2020) day 6. Rifle Paper Co. blouse number 2: the one I made incorrectly and therefore never quite fit. Well, the good news is that it fits as well as it ever has, so here we are. Also featuring my favorite Voodoo Vixen trousers. Today’s laundry day, so I’m enjoying the briefest respite from my tiny apartment and getting some dance rehearsal time. It feels so nice to have space to move!”

Ahh, those halcyon days at the beginning (relatively speaking) of the pandemic. When we thought that everything would be back to normal any day now. When Vaudezilla was still around, and they still had their studio space on Irving Park, I would go there to do laundry because my building charges $2 to wash and $2 to dry, and our dryers at the time… basically didn’t work. The V! studio was originally built out to be a live/work space, and had in-unit laundry (read: FREE) in the basement. Kenneth and I would pick up coffee from Beans and Bagels, schlep our clothes and my costumes (and frequently my camera and tripod) to the studio so I could rehearse and record video for the Zoom shows we were all still trying to do. And it was nice because Kenneth had finally moved in with me full-time in March, and we wouldn’t actually be any further than 10 feet apart for the next… almost three years.

That blouse is Simplicity 4238, from 1953. Mistakes were made (which I’m sure I detailed the last time I posted it), but the one thing I remember that I don’t think I’ve said before is that one of the things I had to do to compensate for it’s unfortunate size issues was work the buttonholes as close to the center front edge as possible. They were really kind of harrowing. This might have been the last time I wore it, actually.

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“MeMadeMay (2020) day 5. A twofer, also an all-accessories day. I made the hat ages ago, and the belt in about an hour, two days ago. I feel like, I definitely love making vintage dresses and embracing my glamorous side, but on the days that I just want to be comfortable and casual, my first love has always been the slightly funky corner of the 70’s.”

Oh boy, do I remember this day. I really can’t remember all the circumstances, but this was still pretty early into the time when Kenneth was helping me take my photos for MMMay, and this was one of those days where he had a lot of suggestions and I just… didn’t want any of them, and it was really frustrating me. So I ended up wandering into the square, in the rain, and doing photos myself. And if you’re looking at the pictures, you can’t even tell, so that’s nice. The hat is, perpetually, Simplicity 9644 and the belt is Butterick 4497.

This also feels like one of the first times that I was really trying to find some kind of words to describe my personal style. I had a lot of self-consciousness for awhile about my style, mostly because you see a lot of really successful vintage style accounts on social media, but at the time when I was really getting into making my own clothes, they were primarily 40’s/50’s leaning. I really had difficulty coming to terms with the fact that I really wasn’t going to be the kind of girl who was going to set her hair every night and wear dresses all the time, because it was just such a beautiful fantasy. And because I always sort of felt like there was some kind of invisible roadblock that kept me from being as accepted and appreciated as I felt like maybe I should have been, and my inability to just fully capitulate to that style felt like part of that failure.

I don’t, for the record, feel that way now. I still embrace a variety of styles, and I have fun with whatever I feel like wearing on any given day. Sometimes I feel a little guilty when certain things I’ve made languish in my closet (because I go through phases in what I’m wearing), but I usually come back to most things, and if I don’t, I let them move on to someone else.

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“MeMadeMay (2020), Day 4: You’ll recognize the return of last season’s classic A Very Hamilton Christmas Dress, this time with matching mask made from the scraps. Fabric is cotton sateen from Mood.”

A Very Hamilton Christmas Dress is Simplicity 4673. It is only now occurring to me that a lot of my clothes have names. If you were to ask me straight out, I’d probably have said that only SPACEDRESS has a name, but clearly that isn’t the case because AVHCD obviously has one, and in Friday’s post, Accidentally Laura Petrie also has a name. There… are probably others as well, but since I’m not immediately confronted with them, I can’t really think of what they would be. (Oh. The Rainbow Tank and the Road Case Tee. Those have names. But you’re not gonna see them in my MMMay grid for a looooooong time.)

Also holy flashback to the days when we had to make our own masks. I remember at the time, I had a friend (“friend”) with whom my relationship had mostly already run its course. Long story short, he was a photographer I would work with when I was still doing burlesque, and we became friends, but after a while, I started to feel a little… exploited? Like, not in an unsafe way, just in an “I am putting more effort into this than what I’m getting out of it” kind of way. …Anyway, said friend had another model that worked with him who was also in the medical field, and this was at the time when PPE was hard to come by, even for them. And so he basically railroaded me into making a bunch of masks for this person I’d never met, which would have been fine except that he had taken the liberty of getting all the supplies for them and… it was basically useless. They would have been almost impossible to actually breathe through (like, there was a layer of plastic in there somewhere. Completely impermeable.) But there was nothing for me to replace it with, and I really sort of felt like I had to do something, so I ended up doing it, and then I think I literally never spoke to him again.

Apropos of nothing, I probably still have my pretty, pretty floral mask around here somewhere, in case we need to go, like, protest or something. I’m sure the facial recognition software would *love* this.

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“MeMadeMay (2020), day 3: My newest finished project, this cute 60’s top made from the remnants of a piece of fabric given to me for a client project. Mustard isn’t really my color, but when I saw this fabric, I knew I was gonna cut my client’s project SUPER carefully to try to squeeze out enough leftover for myself. Pattern is Simplicity 6138.”

ACCIDENTAL LAURA PETRIE! Accidental Laura Petrie is always in sort of a weird limbo in my wardrobe. If you can’t tell, the fabric is actually upholstery fabric, which means it’s made out of plastic, and not in the way that 60’s/70’s double knit polyester is made out of plastic. By which, I mean that double knit polyester has literal holes in the surface, so that your sweat can (in theory) evaporate. Upholstery fabric doesn’t have that, because it’s not supposed to be on your body. She is, of course, named thusly because I didn’t really realize until I put her on that I was going to remind myself of Mary Tyler Moore on the Dick van Dyke show.

Also, just for the record, I did have permission from my client to do this. When she was showing me her fabric choices, I LOST MY MIND over this, because finding real vintage double knit polyester isn’t… it’s not something you come across every day, and this was the first thing I ever saw that approximated the weight and drape extremely well. Would I make clothes out of a sofa again? Probably not. But then, it’s now 2025, and I have a huge stack of actual double knit polyester hanging out in my stash from literally one estate sale. (I bought two Menards’ bags full of fabric… and like 8 pieces of actual vintage clothing, and it’s the only sale I’ve ever woken up to get to at the opening on the first day. …I also did the set up for the sale, so that was probably cheating and frowned upon, but I’m not a morning person, so it would have to be unusually spectacular for me to do it again.)

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“MeMadeMay (2020) day 2. My favorite shorts, because Monterrey dragged me out to play frisbee at an ungodly hour. At least they still fit, because last May was freezing until the end and I had extra time to shed my winter fluff.”

…Is it weird that, looking back on my old MMMay posts, all I can think is that I spend way too much time talking about my relative size? Especially because I never really think of myself as someone who puts all that much thought or energy into that. I mean, I guess it was a little different when I was still performing because, like it or not, having a… shall we say “culturally acceptable” size and/or figure did affect whether or not certain people would book you to work.

But also, buckle up, past me, because you’re gonna spend a couple of years being really frustrated as far as that’s concerned.

Shorts are, of course, Simplicity 6946.

P.S. these were also those weird early-Pandemic days where the police kept trying to keep people out of the parks, but they would basically just zip tie the gates closed, and someone would cut them open again literally every single day because we were all desperate to be able to be outside.

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“MeMadeMay (2020) day 1: It’s here again already! This is kind of a soft open for me, because I made the (boring) skirt, but I got this blouse with abalone buttons and the biggest shoulder pads I’ve ever owned from the thrashed threads Facebook group, and haven’t had a chance to wear it out yet. Hair was an experimental wet set, which turned out… just ok. I look like a foot. Photos by Monterrey Jacques.”

Ahh, what is there to say about 2020? There was nowhere to go. The only places we ever went were to Beans and Bagels, to talk to other humans through a hole in the door that was blocked by a crate, and to Vaudezilla’s studio, to take advantage of free laundry, and to delude ourselves that I needed to keep practicing my acts, as if I’d ever return to the stage.

MMMay 2020 was a weird one for a lot of reasons. Mostly because the world was in a very weird place. But the upside to having nowhere to go and nothing in particular to do to fill up the days was that I tried a lot of different things. Like my attempt at hair.

Skirt is the bottom half of Anne Adams 4526. Also of note, the lipstick I’m wearing in these photos was Makeup Monsters (later Menagerie Cosmetics) matte liquid lipstick, in the colorway Mermaid Avenue. I’m mentioning this entirely because I’ve only ever referred to it as “Natty Ave.” which is, not-at-all-coincidentally, also how I constantly refer to John Lodge’s 1977 solo album, Natural Avenue. (Yes, I’ve absolutely been this weird for… decades at this point.)

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