“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 (2019) day 16. Flowery dress for blooming spring trees. It’s going to rain any second now, and the trees are all going to drop their blooms, so I took my photos a little early! This dress is so stupidly comfortable, I regret every moment of being afraid that the print was too much.”

A Very Hamilton Christmas Dress makes its return. Once again, Simplicity 4673, from 1954.

…Can I admit that I keep looking at all my selfies and asking myself how, in 2019, I was still wandering around with mostly invisible eyebrows? It’s really because I think I was still doing them with powder instead of an eyebrow pencil, and so I was pretty limited on what I could do there. I do think it is highly amusing that it really wasn’t until I retired from burlesque that my everyday face became substantially more dramatic.

Also, it’s difficult to think of anything else to say when you’re looking at a dress that you’ve already talked about, and there’s really not much different about your styling. Like, I know that this doesn’t have to be the whole Lord of the Rings Extended Edition complete with actor commentary and 17 bonus documentaries or anything, but I really like having extra stuff to say after all these years.

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“MeMadeMay (2019) day 8. Took a ‘lil excursion to Logan Square to sub for Red Hot Annie at a Women Belong meeting. Dressed extra cute for the occasion. These are the first full-length, adequately fit photos of my Very Hamilton Christmas Dress. Fabric is Mood Fabrics exclusive cotton sateen and feels so lovely.”

Hoo boy is this an unintentionally loaded post.

To serve as an extreme summary, Annie was my burlesque boss. For a while, she was part of the Logan Square circle of Women Belong, a women-focused small business networking group. On the occasions when she wasn’t available to make their monthly meetings, I was her designated stand-in.

On one hand, I appreciate what she was trying to do by including me, because I was also (sort of) a small-business at the time. I had been an on-and-off photographer for awhile at that point (I still take photos! Just not of people. They’re on my other website, Singing Raven Photography)

On the other hand, I was majorly a fish out of water, especially in a networking group populated mostly by real estate agents, other marketing professionals, and a not-small number of health and wellness-focused businesses. None of these are bad things! It’s just an odd group to be in as someone who mostly makes hard-sell esoteric art. (I told Kenneth not long ago that my elevator pitch only makes sense if you understand that the elevator is in freefall, crashing.)

Also, my entire experience and association with burlesque ended… in the most comedically traumatic way one could possibly imagine. Like, it’s been 5 years and for the first three I literally could not talk about it at all.

ANYWAY. The dress is Simplicity 4673, from 1954. I refer to it usually by its government name, A Very Hamilton Christmas Dress, because at the time I made it (for the holidays, of course), the initial fit was A MESS. The waist was too long and the darts were in a strange place and the skirt gathered sort of funny and it looked like an escapee from the costume shop of the Ottumwa, Iowa High School production of Hamilton Jr.

So I took it back apart, cut (I think) a quarter inch off the bodice waist and a quarter inch off the top of the skirt, moved the darts to where they were supposed to be in the first place, and put the whole thing back together. And it’s fantastic now. No complaints. It’s two different colorways of Mood’s print ‘The Passing of Adonis’ in stretch cotton sateen, which has held up quite nicely over the years.

My only issue with it nowadays is that I turned the neckline points a little funky, so they have a tendency to sort of warp if I don’t press it before every wear.

And in the last photo, we can see that I finally graduated to a smaller piece of spike tape holding my stupid fingers together. I definitely should have gotten stitches on that one, but you live and learn.

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