My Dear Hard Drive

You know when sometimes the sticky tape end or start, which ever way you want to look at it, is completely invisible, you can’t feel it, and you frantically roll the thing first one way, then the other way and back again trying to find the cut? You might be even picking on the wrong spot for a while before you realise there’s no cut there. You feel like you’re wasting your time doing that, but if you didn’t you wouldn’t find the cut, right? Well, I think with my business I found the cut this week. A lot of good things happened, I got another client, I got a finalization to a previous order and got some valuable help from two different people.

Now it starts getting a bit scary, too. You know, the reality is catching up with the dream. Now you’re actually going to have to take yourself and what you’re doing seriously. You have to become the person you want to be, and that is horrifyingly scary. People are approaching me expecting me to be the person, a bridal fashion designer, and you’re not quite sure how you’re supposed to be that person. The good thing is, that I’m not exactly living in a fashion hub, so probably people haven’t met too many of them so they can’t have much to compare me to. That is also the bad thing. People, like myself, can have quite a lot of preconceptions about those designer types. How stylish they are, and if not stylish, then at least flamboyant, and what they’re going to get, is this plain old me wearing K-Mart fashion and rocking a bad hair cut. My design drawings are nothing like the ones I’ve seen on television, the kind of grandiose works of art that you can’t really tell what that frill is made out of or anything. My designs look more like the type of drawings of Disney Princesses, where you can see every detail such as the seams. It’s not a far stretch either, as I learned my first drawing trick tracing a Walt Disney drawing of Cinderella, just after the fairy god mother had given her the white dress. You know how the dress folds? I learned to draw those folds tracing a Disney story book at quite young age.

I have also been having conversations about my career choice with my mom. Needles to say she’s not happy. I don’t think any mom has ever been exactly thrilled to see their child go into arts, unless they’re artists themselves – and if they are, maybe they’re even more against it. Anyway, my mom isn’t thrilled either. She is scared for me, and I understand. She would much rather see me doing something safe, working for a weekly salary at McDonald’s rather than trying to get into fashion. The funny thing is, I’m not quite sure if I’m thrilled about the idea either, but I just feel like this is what I’m good at, and you have to do what you’re good at. And I do enjoy it, when the dress takes form, there’s nothing that compares to the sense of achievement and thrill of it. When you make something you’ve never ever made before and it still turns out great. The finalised order I mentioned, it’s for a type of dress I’ve never made in my life, and I can’t wait to get started. I love the challenge of it, and that is why I would never work in every day wear (and why I wear K-Mart) because I really don’t care about fashion trends at all. I  love fashion, hate trends, so here I am, hey? as my first bride would say.