Vintage Sequins from Diana Ross' Dress

On an ordinary Tuesday, blue oblong sequins were discovered on a very ordinary shelf in an ordinary antique store.

That ordinary event resulted in this pinecone ornament. I didn't intend to make a pinecone, but it definitely looks like one, doesn't it?

Though these sequins are heavy and very scuffed up, I love 'em! I was trying to imagine how old they could be.

Of course I will never learn the history of these inanimate objects,  but I'd like to think that they were once sewn on one of dresses worn by Diana Ross & The Supremes. I believed they performed at the Duluth Armory back in the day. (I don't know if that's a fact, but someone painted their silhouette on the building so that's only logical, right?)  There would always be three dresses of a kind to keep track of.  Maybe someone miscounted or one was accidentally left on the hook on the back of their dressing room door. By the time they discovered it was missing from their costume rack, they had performed a long list of shows in various cities. Fortunately a stage hand at the Armory discovered it, but he couldn't tell which of the Supremes it rightly belonged to. He tried to contact their manager, but to no avail.  Having no need for a glittering, midnight blue evening gown, the stage hand threw it into his trunk--out of site, and equally out of mind. Weeks later, when he saw Diana Ross & The Supremes perform on The Ed Sullivan Show while eating his cheap TV dinner, he remembered the neglected dress in his car. He thought, "This dress could actually be worth something, if these girls are on Ed Sullivan." He popped open the trunk and held the dress in his wind chapped hands. It had been sitting in a grease splotch and had started to unravel from the hem, making the sequins rapidly drop onto the icy drive way. He thought, "Who would want such a delapidated gown anymore?" Still he kept it just in case. In the 1987 one of his grand children  finally cut it into pieces, conceding that they could salvage the metal tear drops at least. They poured the sequins into a Maxwell House coffee tin for safe keeping. After the estate sale, the coffee tin made its way to the antique store on Superior Street where I bought them for only two dollars.

Who's to say that is totally unlikely? It could have happened.

 After the pinecone ornament, it felt only right to add them to this frame which I picked up at a rummage sale for a quarter this summer. The frame was orignally gold. I peacocked it. Yes. I just made that noun a verb. Trust me, it will never catch on.

What do you think? I even painted a piece of resin wallpaper behind the frame to create a shadow box effect and added some green velvet ribbon and a peacock feather. Next I want to try to make a mermaid tail of some sort with these sequins. They're just too beautiful to sit in a coffee tin for another 30 years.

my love affair with teal and green

The Ambiance of the Renaissance

Yesterday my mom and I ventured into the Renaissance Festival. I was enthralled by the entire display. Granted this was my inaugural visit, so every sign and building was viewed as artwork that must be admired. I took a lot of photographs and was even repremanded for doing so by one particular store owner. Everyone else seemed excited to pose for the camera and understood that I was not mocking their efforts nor intending to steal their design. The whole time I felt like Belle in the village of Beauty & the Beast. I kept waiting to hear the townspeople break into the song, "Look there she goes, that girl is strange no question...a most peculiar mademoiselle, such a pity & a sin, she doesn't quite fit in..." Because we definitely stood out by not wearing garmets from the 1600's and mainly because people were pushing around carts in what resembled a marketplace. Here are a few of my favourite images captured yesterday.