Recently, I submitted an entry into a sewing contest. For it, I motivated myself to finally learn how to make an ao dai (ow-yai, meaning long garment), the national garment of Viet Nam, my country of origin. I used a pattern for a base, Folkwear 139. However, I customized it to fit a 5’10” friend who was my sewing model. I also fixed how the shoulders were done because sewing it as instructed left a very jagged shoulder “dart”, which was essentially what I was doing more than sewing it together as a seam. Then I extended the neck line from the body up so it didn’t leave such a big collar. Finally, on my real garment, I redrafted the front and back pieces to remove the vertical darts so as not to disturb the beautiful big print, and took out a dart on the sleeve.
Vexillology
HULK Tennis Cosplay Shorts
Anybody wanna cosplay tennis with me?
That’s what I’ve been asking people ever since I came up with an idea for tennis wear version of cosplays when I saw some “abs” T-shirts at Walmart, like this one of the Incredible Hulk’s upper body. When I saw those short sleeve T-shirts that obviously can’t be part of a cosplay since they don’t cover the entire arm, I immediately thought of making shorts that would function in the same way. That is, they’d be the truncated lower body portion of the cosplay, and should be suitable to wear to play tennis that I would wear them to.
BJORN Tennis Shorts
BJORN Tennis Shorts (front)
I finally got pictures of me taken in these shorts in the post linked here.
Last summer, a lady at St George’s tennis club gave me an old brown T-shirt with the Bjorn Borg kneeling victory celebration silhouette in white logo (see pic). I guess she thought I could fit it but it was too big for me, so I got this idea to use that logo and fabric in a pair of tennis shorts highlighting that logo. They’re be like long beach or basketball shorts except I’d use them for tennis given that Bjorn Borg tennis player logo. Like my trademark tennis shorts, they’d also only have one pocket opposite my serving side to hold balls, since the serving arm always has the racquet in hand.
CIVIL Outfit
This is my new fashion look for work and other business casual situations, along with general wear when I’m not preferring to be in athletic or other types of garments. It was inspired by McCall pattern 4745 of a historical Civil War look, with me doing my own pattern and adding the DIY wheeled or ring buttons that I came up with the idea for when the local fabric store didn’t have any buttons I liked and could use.
Fashion for the Disabled
Did you know that 1 in 5 people is disabled?
Well, that depends on your definition of disabled. However, the rates are generally about 1 in 7 (14%, Canada) to 1 in 5 (20%, Scotland, US), among the range of definitions of disabled. Regardless, it’s a lot of people when you multiply that rate by the tens or hundreds of millions of people in a population.
And what do you think they wear?
Digital Citizen 