Thursday, July 9, 2009

I wasn't kidding...

when I said I had made a LOT of these skirts...







So, now the issue becomes how to display them at a show. I had some ideas right away as I was making them, and now it's time to show you just how ridiculously yankee we get around here. By yankee I mean cheap of course...

My husband is an engineer, and he had the best idea almost immediately, but no, no, I couldn't just go with it. I had to "devise some kind of system" to put these on display. My first thought was wire hangars. If I could bend them into some kind of spoke system, and somehow twist them together and nail them into a dowel, and, and, and...you guessed it. Total disaster.



My next thought was to use wire. It'd be easier, right?? So the thought process here was to get some metal rings which would slide over a dowel, and make a spoke system that would then attach to a ring below. Here is how far I got on this idea before total abandonment...





The problem was that the wire kept sliding around the ring, making it impossible to support the skirt in any kind of meaningful way. And I can just see myself futzing with the display every time someone wanted to look at the skirt. Unacceptable.



We then thought that something rigid might work. We have some foam laying around, and thought that by pushing the wire up through the foam and down the other side, we could create, you guessed it, a spoke system for support. This may have worked other than that the foam kept sliding down the dowel, and the spokes weren't perfectly symmetric. Which leads me back to my engineer husband who suggested a modified umbrella.





Oh, I wish I had just started with this idea in the first place...I couldn't find any children's umbrellas at my local drug store (our town's version of a five and dime), but I did come up with these trusty large ones. I took off the fabric, saved the plastic doo-gigs on the end so that no one gets hurt, cut off about 6 inches of frame, and voila...





Eventually, there will be two holes in the base; one to hold the umbrella handle, and one right next to it to hold a larger dowel with a cross-piece for a top. I anticipate adventures in applique later today. The larger dowel will fit through the spokes of the umbrella so that when the top comes down, it'll cover up the top piece.

Oh sure, I could have purchased some dress forms that would accomplish the same thing a whole lot quicker, but they're expensive, heavy, and that's just not the "yankee" way.

Note to self: listen to your engineer husband more often.

6 comments:

icicle said...

Oh I like this Yankee way! Does it spin? That would be fun...

Melissa said...

I'm giggling.

Deborah Raymond said...

so brilliant! I could use something like this.

wilma said...

What a lovely skirts you make!
I love them!

bey,Wilma( from the netherlands)

Mary Zoom said...

Okay - I just read this post. My husband is an engineer, too, and I have learned that it saves me lots of time and grief if I just listen to him! We didn't spend big bucks on his education for nothing! Great idea and post. Thanks!

saffiertje said...

LOVE this idea!!!! Great way to take pictures on an umbrella!!!!