Page 87 of The Big Easy & Other Lies
“Those are the magic words. You’re in the club.” I laid my Rococo Punk sketchbook next to it. “Somehow I have to figure out which three of these looks to do and make them as good as those.”
She leafed through the designs again. After a few minutes, I caught her glancing back and forth between the Urban Renewal stuff and the sketches.
“I’m not going to pull this off, am I?” I asked when her brow furrowed.
“Oh, I think you can do this,” she said. “In fact, I don’t think you even have to work from scratch.” She pointed to Broken Dreams, the airy skirt and shredded shirt. “What if you used this top with these?” she asked, tapping a sketch of some black cigarette pants I had drawn with a frock coat.
“Not punk rock enough,” I said.
“Yet,” she said. She picked up my sewing scissors. “These could make all the difference. What would happen if you turned them loose on the pants?”
I studied the sketch. “I could slash it and put a cool fabric underneath.” I scanned the stacks. “Maybe this one.” I tugged a loud plaid from the middle of a pile.
A slow smile spread over her face. “Yeah. That one. It’s hideous and perfect. That’s the good news.”
“What’s the bad news?”
She flipped to the last dress I had sketched as the showpiece of the whole collection. The intricate construction, with a corseted bodice and a voluminous, ragged-tiered skirt, suggested something unfinished and far too wild for the solid colored silks prevalent in the eighteenth century, but I had no real idea of what I wanted to use for the design. Chloe tapped it. “This dress gets you into SoHo.” She said it with total confidence. “The bad news is that you’re going to have to make it from the ground up.”
I stared at it, at the tiers and the pickups and bodice work. I swallowed. And then I dropped my head to the top of the nearest fabric stack. “It will kill me.”
“Probably. Let’s check the stash,” she said. And we tackled the piles.
Livvie’s first text came forty-five minutes later, when we were on the last stack and nearly out of hope. None of the salvaged fabrics were right for the dress. “Livvie’s got shoes,” I said, tapping the screen to check out her picture. A pair of antique-style buttonhook boots in electric blue popped up.
One swing, homerun. Amazing, I texted back.
Thirteendollars.
I thought I would faint with joy when I saw the price. I couldn’t tap out a reply fast enough.I have never loved anyone as much as I love you right now. Get them!
Her instantaneous reply made me grin.Already making change. Do I know you or what?
“Yes!” I whooped. “Despite going through six piles of useless crap, progress has been made today!” I showed Chloe the picture.
“Yeah. You need those.” She waved a black and white striped bolt at me. “This? Not so much.” She rubbed her neck. “What if you use the plaid for the dress instead of for the peekaboo on the pants?”
She handed it to me, and I considered its blue and yellow glory. “I think it would look too forced, like I was trying too hard to be funky. You know, like ‘It’s bright plaid, therefore it’s rock and roll.’ But something patterned is a cool idea.” I returned to one of the first stacks I’d checked. “Something like this, maybe.” I pulled out the black on white damask and showed it to her. “I know it’s a home decorating fabric but using it for an over-the-top dress could work. Something about the figure in the material reminds me of Rococo excess.”
She took it from me and looked at it. “I get what you’re saying.” She rubbed the material between her fingers. “I love the idea, but this would look seriously costume-y if you tried to do a corset with it.”
I dropped the damask. “Gah. This is making my head hurt. I’ll just hope that the boys will turn up something amazing and make the pattern with my fingers crossed.”
“You’ll figure it out.” She glanced at the Urban Renewal pieces. “I can’t believe how much more amazing this is than my lame designs. I had an entire fabric store to work with and you only had your aunt’s stash.”
“It’s kind of the same thing,” I said, and she laughed.
“Maybe. But you only have cotton weaves, and I can’t believe that your stuff is still so good.” She shook her head. “You’re like Jamal Green, except with fashion.”
I snorted. Jamal was a chess prodigy from school. He’d played Russian grandmasters already, and he was only a junior. “If I were a prodigy, I’d already have this fabric problem figured out. In fact, I’d probably have already dyed my own—”
“Dyed your own what?” Chloe asked, when I broke off.
I looked at her with huge eyes. “Ombre. That’s what this needs. A solid-colored bodice and ombre.”
“Ombre?” she repeated. “Are you sure?”
I understood her hesitation. Ombre was a dye technique that people normally used to create gradient color, fading from dark to light in one direction. It was a vintage look, maybe verging on homemade, but it would be the perfect contrast for the highly constructed nature of the dress. The tingle I got when I knew I had nailed a design perfectly, the tingle that came only every great once in a while, shot down my spine and made the small hairs on the nape of my neck stand on end.
