Brave.

Have you seen it yet? It was not what I expected at all, in surprising and wonderful ways. I'll not spoil it for you by going on about it here -- other than to say I was eyeballing Merida and Elinor's dresses so much that my fingers were itching for a sketchpad.  Pixar does such an excellent job of making the fabrics look real -- I could feel the weight and hand of Elinor's green layered outfit, and the pale blue outfit they put on Merida for meeting her prospective suitors --- the one with the wide gold band with jewels?-- "Wowzers Mctavish!" as Greg Proops would say.

Now, you guys have been so nice to come check out my blog. I really appreciate your interest in my projects. So I have a little present for y'all. After you've seen Brave, and you are itching to make Merida's dress for yourself, you can scoot to this page and scroll about halfway down and there you will find -- TA-DAH! *cymbal crash*-- the actual pattern for the dress. It will need some adjustments to fit a real person -- you know, unless you have a skinny little waist, a super long torso, and a back porch to make Sir Mix-a-Lot sing-- but seriously: the fact that the Pixar people needed to make a pattern in order to computer-animate the dress to look right simply astounds me. And and and if you know a person who wonders what they can be when they grow up, you can always mention that Pixar needs seamstresses to help with their animated costume department -- and I know that sounds like I'm joking but I'm not.

Okay, there's your treat for the weekend. Now I gotta go. I need to go see if any of my thrift stores have a couple yards of heavy blue silk.