I've been watching the progress of this blouse for some time. Years, in fact. I blogged about it back in 2016, but at that time Buffalo had already been working on it for three years. It is finished at last, and it is glorious. Behold, the Mermaid Fashion Blouse. The slideshow below includes closeups of the individual elements that make up the blouse.
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For Buffalo (and Followers of Buffalo) there are three major holidays:
Hey Buffalo Hats fans,
Christina Buffalo was recently selected for a piece on fiber art on the Arts Business Institute website. Carolyn, the blogger, asked for eight representative pics of Buffalo's art, which she narrowed down to five for the post. Be sure to scroll down to the bottom; she's the last artist featured. It's one of those "one of these things is not like the others" kind of deals. ;-) Larger images of all the pieces represented can be found on the Buffalo Hats website. Again with the mermaids! If you've been following Buffalo for any length of time, you may have noticed her mermaid fetish. Raffia mermaids, needlelace mermaids, stumpwork mermaids, painted mermaids adorn a lot of her work. She has even crafted mermaid dolls out of Fimo dough. For a long while, she has been working on a massive needlelace mermaid project. I'm not sure what the end result will be (a blouse? a veil?) but the pieces are adorable. The photos above show finished lace pieces. Below are some pieces in various stages of progress.
Buffalo is giving a presentation this weekend on how to make needlelace at the Pacific Beach Library on Cass Street (4275 Cass St San Diego 92109). Saturday, May 14 from noon - 12:45pm in Cass Plaza. This is a new thing they are doing at the San Diego Public Library. If you are in the neighborhood, come on by!
More information on the How-To Festival here. Southern RenFaire opens this coming weekend, y'all, but if you were planning on going, consider the weekend of April 16-17. That's when Buffalo will be there. It is also:
Buffalo is planning on bringing everything she has in stock to the faire. That includes all the hats and masks in the store here and on Etsy. You can check out all the fabulousness in person if you are in the LA area next weekend. She's got some new stuff too, which we are not listing on Etsy until after the faire. It's been a while since Buffalo had any masks for sale. She recently made three new needlelace masks plus several painted fabric masks. The three needlelace masks are available for sale on Etsy. She is still tinkering with the fabric masks and may add more doodads before putting them up for sale (my favorite is the Godzilla mask ;-) I finally got the slide attachment to work with my scanner and scanned a bunch of old slides of Buffalo's work. These pieces date back decades. There were so many needlelace headpieces that I started a whole new gallery: headpieces. I also created a needlelace blouse gallery and parsed the remaining lace work into two more galleries: veils and other, which is mostly stuff from the original lace gallery. All of these plus masks can be found on gallery sub-menus under lace.
Hey folks. Lisa here. We still haven't launched the online store, but I have photographed dozens of Buffalo art objects and scanned many old photographs over the past few weeks. It will take a while to sort, crop and upload all of these photos.
One area that's a little lean in the gallery is the wearables page. This is because we need a model or a mannequin to display clothing. Last weekend we attempted to photograph some things on a 2-dimensional wire dress frame from IKEA. It worked okay for the Hawaiian shirts and cowgirl jackets, but the gossamer-like dresses with lace bodices tend to droop so you can't see the delicate lacework. This is not a problem when a real woman with breasts wears these dresses. We jury rigged it by sticking a hanger inside the dress at chest level. I created several new galleries, such as masks for Buffalo's trademark needlelace masks. These need their own page separate from the lace page. The faires, etc. page is a collection of photos from Renaissance Faires, Music Camps and other events where Buffalo set up a booth and sold her stuff. Some great vintage photos here of renfaires in the 80s. We discussed setting up a works-in-progress page, but I think Buffalo wants to write a blog entry on the process: from initial sketches to mocking up a pattern to creating the piece. Watch this space for that, if I can get Buffalo over her fear of blogging. Buffalo's sketchbook is fascinating in its own right, but I don't know if she wants to go public with that. That's all for now. Next time you hear from me, I hope it's to announce the grand opening of the Buffalo Hats webstore. |
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September 2021
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