“A fox’s teeth are very sharp.” (2013-2019) Silk filament on silk-hemp blend with hand-dyed silk chiffon scarf. Text is Sandman: The Dream Hunters by @neil-gaiman, design inspired by illustrations of Yoshitaka Amano. Dress by L.L.K. Photo credit to Kenneth Williams.
Six years ago, my unbelievably talented wife decided to undertake a ridiculously long and complicated project: to embroider a story onto a dress.
We live in a very casual college town where no one ever dresses up for anything, so we began a tradition of throwing formal New Year’s Eve parties, and L being L, she made a dress every year. In 2013, she decided to take it a step further: she would create a dress inspired by Neil Gaiman and Yoshitaka Amano’s Sandman: The Dream Hunters and then embroider the entire story onto the dress. The dress itself was the work of a few weeks and looked beautiful on her at the party, and then the real work began: planning, mapping, embroidering and embroidering and embroidering. She estimated it would take approximately ten years of doing needlework an hour or two each evening, leaving plenty of time to take nights or even months off. She finished in under six.
I can’t summon words to describe how proud of her I am right now. I mean, I am always proud of her, as she is an exceptionally kind and caring human being as well as a polymath (seamstress, carpenter, baker, programmer, naturalist, and tenured professor of biology), but she has created a true work of art and I hope it ends up in a museum somewhere to immortalize her talent, skill, and patience.
She’s currently trying to figure out her next project.
I wish I could find the words to say how remarkable and touching and glorious this is for me. I’m still proud of the story and so honoured to see it made into a dress…
Safe to say that the creator of the dress has gotten a better Christmas present than I could have ever purchased for her.
I’m still going to try to find her a good bandsaw, though. Now that she’s done constructing an exactingly measured scale replica of our house and yard, complete with slope, out of craft foam board and card stock, she’s been talking about getting back into woodworking… as soon as she’s finished with her *other* fabric project, v. 4 of her replica of the Fortuny Delphos gown, a form-fitting dress where the elasticity of the fabric comes entirely from micro-pleating the silk (painstakingly, by hand, which is apparently the only way she does things). The technique was lost when Fortuny died in 1949, but L has managed to recreate it. (To be fair, she adds, Fortuny’s company has also managed to replicate the technique.) And both the Delphos gown and the Dream Hunters dress should be on display at the Tompkins County Public Library in Ithaca, NY sometime in 2020 as part of an exhibit on folktales and mythology.
Unsurprisingly, the exhibit was delayed by the pandemic, but it's up now!
The exhibit is called Fit For a Goddess, and is all mythology/fairytale-inspired textile art.
The Fortuny dress is dyed with pomegranate that's been saddened (mordanted with iron), and so she called it Persephone's Tears.
I'm so proud of her!
