Acid Wash Denim, and New Art Project: L's Blue Oyster Cult Jacket

Another week closer to the end of my closet season, and a reminder to drop a comment with your request for "Last Call." What's that? It's something in my spring/summer wardrobe that you'd like to see again. It can be a specific garment, a colour, or even an accessory (or pair of shoes). I'll pick and choose and wear the suggestions over the next two weeks, until I do my closet swap-over.

For today's outfit, I'm squeezing in a wearing of my vintage 80s acid wash denim dress.

I thought I'd wear it in the early "shoulder season" (aka March), but here we are in the other shoulder season (aka September). 

• Dress - Santana, vintage 80s, consignment; last worn here (2nd outfit) in February for a long-weekend gathering
• Boots - Donald J. Pliner, vintage 00s, consignment, Sidney; last seen here in June for a birthday lunch and shopping spree

My Purolator guy was mightily impressed with this (we're around the same age).

He remembered his own high-waisted acid was jeans from the 80s! 

This dress is a lot of fun, totally the best for waggling my massive shoulder pads at coworkers.

It's also a pain to wear all day, as every time I used the washroom...

...I had to take the whole thing off. 

That's a snug pencil skirt! My grad ceremony dress had a similarly long and skinny pencil bottom, and they are not meant for striding about. 

Masked up. 

Turquoise for the match! 

Incognito.

I got a lot of side-eye on the walk home. Maybe people are not quite ready for this much acid wash? 

Accoutrements: 

Didn't need the scarf, but I wore it anyway. 

• Scarf - Fluevog
• Mask - Lazy Susan's

The stuff: 

I love these boots, but may pack them away for the wet season. That burlap fabric is not waterproof. 

Turquoise bling: 

All the turquoise! 

• Belt - Brave Belts, thrifted
• Bronze/turquoise/pearl cuff - Myka, consignment
• Steel cuff - consignment, Powell River
• Pendant - Karen's
• Turquoise ring - Karen's
• Pivot ring - consignment
• Earrings - consignment, Powell River

I was sufficiently armoured up! 

Art Project: L's Blue Oyster Cult Jacket

My brain's been in a snarl lately, which usually means it's time for me to do some art. L's been watching me do all these projects and giving them away (most recently, the Mica Bag and Eternally Autumn Jacket), and has been hankering for one of his own. 

I suggested that we keep an eye out for a light-coloured leather jacket for me to create a Blue Oyster Cult jacket for him...and we found one here in June for $249.00 on consignment at House of Savoy. It's by former Canadian chain The Leather Ranch, which I remember from every mall when I was a teen (you could smell the leather) - I couldn't afford anything in that store, but I wistfully eyed all the beautiful jackets.

Blue Oyster Cult is a band, by the way (Wiki link here). You've probably heard "Don't Fear the Reaper", "Godzilla" or "Burnin' For You" - if you check any of those songs on YouTube, you'll immediately recognize them. 

This is a lovely slate blue colour and it's likely early 80s, before jackets became oversized and shoulder-padded. It fits L perfectly.

It's light enough for black ink and some colours to show up on it, and L really wants something completely badass...

So I plan on covering this with BOC stuff! 

I asked L to put together lyrics, either full songs or snippets that have meaning for him, and then I went through them and highlighted lines I thought would be easy/cool to illustrate. 

Then I mapped out all the areas of the jacket - the collar (showing and hiding), the top of the back, the "back-patch", the sleeves, the pockets and flaps, the front areas and even the cuffs. Planning is essential - I would never start working on a piece without all the planning.

The tricky part is finding motifs I can actually draw (or use clip-art images for copying/inspiration) and matching them to the lyrics. 

As the lyrics are important to L, I want to be able to include them all over the jacket. I had to trim them down a lot as I worked through each section, and I'm sure I'll have to adjust things as I go.

I did all that a month or so ago, when I needed a rest from Mica's Bag, and also took pictures of all of L's BOC albums (i.e. all of them) for art/images I could include. 

This past Sunday, I put all my pens together (having already tested them on an inside piece of the jacket), along with the printed images and my "maps" of where everything's going to go. I also grabbed a ruler as I used to free-hand a lot of signs at my old retail job in the 90s and I wanted to make sure that my words are fairly even. 

Materials: Black "S" fine-point permanent Staedtler markers, "M" medium-point permanent black Staedtler markers, Tombow alcohol-based ink "paint" pens.

The Q-Tips and bowl of water are for removing the sketching pen marks, but I quickly discovered that the pen I'm using to sketch with disappears as the ink dries!

I had drawn in "Blue Oyster..." to match the font I'd printed and got up to grab a drink and when I came back, it had all disappeared! 

Well, CRAP. I was going to have to do it one letter at a time! No pressure! This ink cannot be erased - it's permanent.

Okay, this is not too bad...phew. I did guidelines for the top and bottom of the biggest letters, plus a midway guideline for the lower case letters. 

The first time I touch that black pen to the leather is the absolute worst. "Don't f**k it up!" my head screams. 

Fortunately, I'm fairly confident in my Old English fonts. I did the single outline of each letter, then gave each one an extra outline to make it more substantial. The BOC symbol at the bottom will be all over the jacket - it's very much identifiable with the band. 

All the outlines done - it's looking pretty cool! 

But this is the "back-patch" so it really has to stand out. More work is needed! 

When I tested my blues, I wrote down all the colours that went together (they look very different on leather than they do on paper), so that I would remember them.  

Creating depth with two shades of blue.

Then I used another shade of blue on the letters to create "shine".

All done - I used one of my pastel pens to blur the edges of the "shine" and make it look more like polished steel. 

Vizzini helped. 

"Feed me or I'll chew your pens."

In the above image, I used one of my medium-point black pens to outline all of the letters again, to really make them pop. I've done up to the "C" in "Cult."

Here's the back-patch all done. L was happy with this, but having my "customer" watching everything I do is intimidating! I might have to hide this from him until I'm done. 

I will probably leave this section as is, so that it really has an impact.

I couldn't resist adding to the upper back and playing with some scroll-y tattoo font.

"Veteran of a Thousand Psychic Wars" is a BOC song. I might include some sort of design around this - it looks a little bare to me - so we'll consider this section unfinished for now. 

That was about 2.5 hours of work in the sun...and my brain is feeling so much better today!