Steamy

The wondrous trails of the internet brought me to the concept of steampunk. I'm in love. I very much doubt that I will be making my own distressed leather corsets and green glassed goggles, but that's the beauty of having dolls. So I'm gathering the material and the ideas for a series of steampunk outfits, influenced by several blogs, artist galleries, and the fantastic Girl Genius.

Sometimes I love being a seamstress. It's become as satisfying a creative experience as writing, although in different ways, now that I'm practiced enough to sketch a design and manage to come out at the other side with a fair approximation of the sketch in three dimensional fabric. I don't write nearly as much as I used to, but I sew all the time. I sometimes wonder it I only wrote to get that rush when you look at something you made and feel slightly surprised that you had the talent and skills to create such awesomeness, and that any creative endeavor would fill that need.

That's sort of egotistical I suppose, but the flipside is the constant drive to get better, and of course the hindsight that informs you that all the things you thought were awesome were in fact sophomoric and trite and poorly topstitched. I can't believe I never used to line coats! And so on.

In the end, sewing performs all the functions that writing used to - public affirmation, personal challenge, and that feeling of intense satisfaction that you only get when you take a pattern of firing electrons in your brain and make it into a real thing in the world.

And, of course, I get paid to do it.