Dress is done.

I am more pleased with it than I expected to be, though knowing that the owner of Costumer’s Guide will be there makes me want to put a sign that says “I Know It’s Not Historically Accurate, I’m Sorry” on my back. I mean, it’s so inaccurate I don’t have proper sleeves. My chemise is just some tulle.

The dress weighs close to ten pounds, according to my scale.

A snapshot from when the dress was almost finished; if you can ignore the vertigo, you get a nice look at the overall effect of the back, and of the suitcase that’s been sitting in my hallway for eight hundred years.

The prom saga continues!

My senior year in high school hadn’t been the horror show that middle school had been. When a group of friends mentioned going to the prom in a large, self-protecting clump, like a tiny flock of nerdy ducks in a sea of over-tanned State Championship cheerleaders, I could understand why they wanted to go. I didn’t want to go, but I understood why they wanted to.

“You should come!” they said.

“I’m all counterculture and stuff,” I said. “I have to go watch a bunch of silent films now while I sew up the holes in the elbows of my vintage black coat that I wear every day on top of guy’s jeans.”

I was really into exposition back then. Oh, and also, being a total pretentious nerdwad.

But they did not give up on me. “We’ve got a limo!” they said. I didn’t listen. “We’re going to dinner as a group!” they said. I paid no mind. “We’re going dress shopping!” they said. I stuck to my guns.

Then one of them, particularly devious, said, “You could make your dress, you know.”

Well, obviously I was going to prom, then.

The pattern I chose?

Anyone who can’t see this disaster coming has never seen a dress before.
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Earlier this week, Mary Robinette Kowal invited me to her apartment so I could poke her Campbell dress for a while. And I took pictures!

The best of these pictures got hacked up in Photoshop, since the dress (a soft pure gold in person) showed up as alternately chartreuse and acid yellow. My monitor, sadly vague when it comes to yellows, was of little use. I desaturated the detail shots and crossed my fingers for the rest. (It’s not much. My oohing and aahing skills far outweigh my photo editing skills.)

An abbreviated photo essay is below; for more pictures, check out the Flickr set.

Who wants to see a dress yanked inside out?
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Okay, so, the next part of Project Prom is research. And by “research” I mean “look on Flickr”. Apparently no one on Flickr posted pictures of my prom dress (bunch of lazy jerks!), so I’ll have to just link to pictures of their prom dresses instead.

Ye Olde Promme! N’awww.

Sure, you’ll hate yourself for clicking, but come on. You have to see this.
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Inspired by the really horrible dress Wendy Watson wears in the Middleman’s Titanic episode, I decided I wanted to write about my prom here. (I went to prom, can you believe it? You can’t, can you. I understand.)

“Just a quick post,” I thought, clearly high off my neighbor’s paint fumes. “A couple of pictures, some anecdotes, and we’ll be all set! It’ll be fun.”

Then I realized I had no prom pictures within a 300-mile radius. No problem! Hit up a friend!

The friend had no pictures. Then the friend mentioned two or three things about our prom, none of which I remembered.

So what was a short post is going to turn into a journey, as I try to piece together what the hell happened at my high school prom and how someone who doesn’t drink could have blacked out on so much stuff.

(No joke, I’m not even sure we had a limo; all I remember is that I didn’t drive, because I remember looking out a passenger window of some kind after 40 minutes of driving and thinking, “This person is going to pull over into the woods and murder us all.” For this reason, I’m really hoping that it was a limo driver and not, say, one of my friends’ parents.)

So! The journey of a prom, about ten years later. There will be intermittent posts about this until I can actually get my hands on photographs and remember what the hell went on.

First of all, I made my dress, which meant I missed out on buying prom magazines, which are more interesting than I could ever have imagined, judging by the ladypose in this ad:

Now, the ad is for a dress, but, uh, you could have fooled me.

P.S. Though I suspect I’ll have a post where I do nothing but ask this, I’m asking it now and will do so every time I post about prom: what about YOU? Did you go? Did you spill pig’s blood on Carrie? Did you, like one of the kids in my class, go to Paris instead? (Damn you, smart kid!)

ETA: If you did not attend an American prom, but some other sort of fancy dance evening for which people dress up and act like assholes, you should still answer this question!