Tassel Lesson

It’s odd but it’s great.

The marble dress was one of the most demanding. I was thrilled with the concept when I began and the realization is as I envisioned it would be, but as it developed I had trouble being enthusiastic about it. It looked fine; I never doubted that I could use it, but the actual dress didn’t thrill me as much as the idea did. Still, I persevered because, as I say, it was good enough for my collection.

Yesterday I went to the craft store to look for yellow tassels to use. They had none so I thought today I would go to Dressew. They would most definitely have some. But last night I tried unraveling some of the cheap plastic rope I was using for cording and I liked what happened so I made the four tassels I needed. I glued them to pieces of rope and added them to the dress and voila, I loved the dress.

My point is this: Making useless things (my paper dresses) is new to me. Giving full vent to my creativity like this is new to me and part of the fun is parsing the process. And last night I was relieved and truly amazed to find myself really pleased with a dress that had failed to engage me. It was entirely attributable to the silly and not very pretty tassels.

Why? Because the tassels on the real bags were kind of lame too. They were stringy and feeble and I might have used bought fine ones. That was my (Lazy) intent, but instead I have ones I made and I love them. Their tackiness is perfect. It’s ideal, in fact, and that has taught me something: Always make it.

Now … on to the last task: The logo. It’s going to be very challenging but I can hardly wait to post a photo of the finished dress — with my perfect tassels!