Rorschach shirts

Why yes, I still exist! Quick explanation: After reassesing my priorities this fall I've put "University work" (as in: the thing that determines the strongest how I'm gonna work and live in the future) in its rightful first place - with all the consequences. So while I'm amazed at a) my newfound love for my chosen subject of study and b) how interesting lectures tend to become once you actually follow them, there isn't a lot of procrastination by sewing going on right now. There is (and will be) plain old planned sewing further on, but not yet anything blogworthy.
Instead, looking back and looking forward.

Looking back:
I don't have any pictures of my finished Halloween costume, since we were running out of the door to catch the bus the minute I finished everyone's make up. I do, however, have some in progress-photos:

I had bought a box of rubber spiders and sewed some onto the white shirt I made the week before. As you can see, I started off by pushing the needle through the soft body and then backstitched over each of the legs where they joined the body. Unless you look very closely (like, with a magnifying glass) you can't see how they're attached. yay :)

This was (besides curling and putting up my hair) the most uncomfortable and time-consuming part. I had bought artificial spiderwebs (maybe 2€, I was surprised at how cheap it came) and just pulled them apart and put the pieces on different places on my body, then sewed on the corners while wearing my clothes. That meant 20 to 30 times tying a knot, sewing four or five stitches in the same place, make another stitch where your needle comes out a couple of centimeters away from your stitches, cut off close tho the surface, repeat. All this while balancing and turning in the strangest positions, because my body is kind of three-dimensional and I didn't want the cobwebs to only be in the front. (I admit I had help for the shirt back as this was just not doable with my level of flexibility, but that was only three corners). Btw: I made sure not to fix any of the upper-body-cobwebs to my pants and vice-versa as I still wanted to be able to go to the bathroom.

Since "something with spiders" is mostly not an accepted costume-description and I wanted to be able to shout* something short and easy when people ask me what I'm supposed to be, I went with "ghost". To make it easier for people to recognize (and because my family had seemed very sceptical when I showed them the unfinished prototype) I went with some facepaint. On this cheat-sheet I tried out different approaches: bangs pinned up or down, partly or entirely skeletized, coulours etc. I eventually went with the option on the bottom left and even had time to do some makeup for my two companions (a zombie and a... dead confederate soldier...?)


*clubs are loud, remember? Not the best places for long conversations about complicated costumes

As I said, that was when we had to run in order to catch the bus. So the only picture I have of my makeup is from after a night of dancing and drinking (through a straw, but which nonetheless messed up my makeup a little). It must have been kind of impressive, though, because when I went to get a drink from the bar the person in front of me gave a real jump upon turning around and seeing my face. I told them that that was the best compliment I could have received for my makeup ;)

Aaand that's it. The spider shirt is still in the wash (I had a lot of drinks spilled on me, plus some fake blood) and sewing on all that cobweb was just too time consuming to put on again for a photoshoot, not to mention the makeup. I'll post a picture of the shirt with the spiders and then you'll just have to put everything together in your heads ;)
I any case, I had a lot of fun. How was your Halloween? Did you go out? Did you wear a costume? What was it?! The comment section is all yours ;)

Looking forward:
This thursday, there's a big party by the psychology department of my university. The motto is "Bad Taste", but I have some issues with that. The problem with dressing for bad-taste parties is that you either take the motto to heart, arrive badly dressed and look terrible all night. Call me vain, but I don't like looking terrible. The other option is to honour the motto by using items that yould be described as being "bad taste" but putting them together in your style and to your liking, thereby looking good (by your own standarts). I did that last year, putting on a whole lot of pink and neon colours into a fun and colourfull outfit, and had people complaining that by making myself look good I hadn't understood the meaning of "bad taste". So this year, instead of going into a whole discussion on how I feel that bad taste parties allow us to wear and combine items more over-the-top than what we usually wear, thus not necessarily forcing us to look bad, just different, I decided to do something completely different. Enter the Rorschach shirts!
For those of you who only know the comic book character of the name, Rorschach Tests are projective tests claiming to find out something about you personality by analyzing what you see in different inkblots. I don't think many serious psychologists still use this test, still, there's a strong association in "the public's" mind between psychology and inkblots.
In any case, needing something to wear for the party was the perfect opportunity to try out this video:

(And yes, I have been watching threadbanger these five years and still watch any new videos they make. I think you could consider me a fan...)
So on saturday my roommate and I bust out the t-shirts, cardboard and acrylic paint and made our own (more colourful) designs:

This is probably what I'm going to wear.

It was a very fun project with amazing results, so depending on how they behave in the wash I'll almost definitely do something like this again. The only annoying part was how looong the paint took to dry, but that's what happens when you put it on so thickly.

Oh, and because the psychologist in me can't resist asking this question: What do you see in these three pictures? Please leave a comment! I'll even start:
1. The green and purple one: I see a Lion's head.*
2. The black and green one: A goblin with very short arms and very long legs
3. The colourfull one: A South-american poison-dart-frog.

*My brothers said they see a naked woman. Now I can't unsee it.