Almost 1/4 Done

(Perhaps you can see in the bottom image how wire holds the unstable bits in place.)

I’m so close to being finished the front lower quarter of my dress. But jeez, I’m only a quarter done and my hands are aching from the strain of pushing the kinfe. However, I’ve learned a lot and have better tools now so the remaining three quarters should progress quicker and more easily. I had no idea what I was getting into when I started this dress.

Dress #10 has a bucket of water with it as well as cigarette burns. It just has to be that way.

Building this dress has given me a fabulous idea for a “bit” in scene two. Tuesday I start re-writing it and had I not built this dress, I wouldn't have thought of the new bit that I love and that I think will add a great deal to the impact of my protagonist’s motivation.

I can’t stop working on this dress I love it so much. It’s all I do when I am at home. It’s going to take at least two more months more to complete. It’s the most time-consuming dress but worth the effort — or so think I.

Next will be the top front quarter so that I can have a photo of it for my Arts Club submission. It’s the most important dress in the show.

I think the best experience of my life was my time in France. It was the most stimulating time of my life because absolutely everything was new to me and I went alone to a city where I knew not a single soul. While there I learned a new language and how to eat.

Tied for second best was the year I built the theatre for the Municipality of North Vancouver and its Arts Council and what I’m doing now.

To get the job to build a public theatre facility (and found an art gallery) was truly an extraordinary opportunity, but I had a dreadful boss who fired me. Then he got fired and I got his job. What I am doing now, I do alone and for myself and its just as powerful an experience.

I’m really proud of this dress. It dress means as much to me as did my screenplay in terms of artistic achievement. I absolutely love experiencing it come out of me — it’s almost as though it’s not coming from an autonomous force and my conscious mind is just the editor. That’s exactly what it’s like.

I’m so moved to be learning, through experience, what it’s like to create objects with your hands. I’ve moved from the frivolous to the profound, I think.