Pretty Clothes and Crafting Woes

Using your fabric efficiently? Makes total sense. No objection to that.

But specifically designing patterns such that every single part of a length of fabric is consumed by it? You're setting people up to fail. For one, you can really only do this with patterns made mostly of rectangles and right triangles, which can only make a very narrow range of garments that simply do not play nice with many people's bodies (especially bodies with lots of curvature). For another, a zero-waste pattern is also a zero-error-tolerance pattern. One wrong cut or measurement and the whole thing's toast. The wiggle-room that a more standard pattern allows also allows you to fix problems when they occur.

If you make a zero-waste garment and never wear it because it looks bad on you? That's not actually zero-waste. If you start a zero-waste garment and can't complete it because you made one little mistake? That's not actually zero-waste.

But more importantly, the whole idea of 'zero-waste' as a desireable outcome is antithetical to the methods and traditions of sewing. It's a form of functionless, guilt-driven, aesthetics-first minimalism that has no place in actual sewing practice. The scraps of fabric left over from cutting a pattern are incredibly useful. Larger pieces can become parts of new projects. Smaller pieces can become patchwork. Even really tiny scraps can become stuffing or batting or kindling or any number of other things. Home sewing has always been about not wasting things, but the way to not waste things is not by piously making only garments that suck, it's by repurposing, reusing, and recycling everything you buy. Once that fabric reaches your house, 98% of its environmental impact has already happened.

I made the mistake of leaving my cross stitch book near Leon's favorite blankie pile and now it is his pillow

Amphigory was a very fun site that, in its prime, sold cosmetics, hair dye, incense, cool jewelry, and wigs. They did not manufacture their own wigs, and instead they were a distributor for several wig brands. They existed long before Arda and Epic Cosplay Wig were selling their own lines of custom-built wigs for cosplay, so a lot of cosplayers had to make existing costume wigs work for their cosplay.

The thing that set them apart was that they very thoroughly documented every wig that they sold. They would have pictures of the outside from all angles, the inside, and text about things like the size of the skin top, how easy it was to dye, and if there was crimped fiber in it.

Lacey Costume (also called Morris Costume as far as I can tell) is still around, so you can still purchase a lot of the wigs that you would have bought through Amphigory from other sellers. A lot of shops actually are selling Lacey Costume brand wigs at discounts or clearance. The problem is that most Lacey Costume wigs have a single stock photo, that may or may not be at a useful angle.

For example, this is their ONLY picture of this red ponytail extension.

A lot of the Lacey Costume wigs are available on sites like Amazon and Walmart.com, and it's not hard to search around and see if any of them are on clearance. I bought a pigtail wig for an upcoming costume for $9 and it arrived in less than 2 days.

Amphigory renamed their wigs to match their own line. I can't blame them, because you'll see how the manufacturer names are kind of terrible. I have wanted to match up Amphigory's detailed pictures with their manufacturer names, so that people buying these wigs from other sellers can know what they're buying. Even though they'd stopped selling wigs, I still didn't want to repost their content while they were still in operation, because I wanted to let them have a chance to bring this product line back. However, with the site fully closed, I don't feel so opposed to it anymore.

So, here's some of the classic Amphigory wigs and their equivalent names from their manufacturer.

Long and pic-heavy under the cut: