Birka 2016

It all started with a garb challenge.

This year's Birka Queen's challenge was Pixar inspired.  I immediately glommed onto it as one of the ways I like to challenge myself when I'm idling thinking about garb is to convert characters into culturally appropriate inspiration.  I may be a nerd, but I'm a multifaceted and creative one.

As a Household, we decided to go with Toy Story as our main inspiration. A bunch of us participated in the challenge -- we had Jesse and Buzz, Etch-a-Sketch, Bo Peep, the Claw Machine Aliens and Partysaurus Rex.

I did this guy:

I thought the colors were nice and in the range of what I like to wear generally, I had an idea as to what I could do for the slinky part and, additionally, I had an idea of what I wanted to do for headgear (spoiler: that was a miserable failure and I think I interpreted the entire hat incorrectly).

But, first, let's see what I did come up with, and was wearable, shall we?

There I am!  All strutting my stuff down the runway at the fashion show.

Here is a less elegant photo of me so you can see the pattern better.

I'll start with that pattern as it seems, on first glance, to be the most obtrusively modern part of the whole thing.  It actually isn't.

I chose Slinky Dog because I had thought of an example of a Mongol on horseback from the Shahnama (book of Kings) credited to Abu'l Qasim Firdausi at the Met:

The print I found didn't exactly match, but it was close enough to pull the inspiration.  You also may have noticed I did some alterations from what's discretely pictured in the source material.

My persona was not yet part of the nobility, haven't had received my AoA at that point in time.  From what I've been able to tell, the long-under-short seems to indicate someone of relative wealth and importance, the first step on the ladder up.  To accommodate for that, I ditched the specific under deel and went with the the weave pattern of the over deel.  Acting above your station was punishable by death to the Mongols at the time and, I take to heart making sure you think with your persona in creating your looks.

Another detail I want to point out is that the sleeves are lined with an embellishment.  I've seen this often enough that I typically do it for all my deel.  It adds a splash of additional interest and I, frankly, enjoy it.

Pulling back to how I applied these to the challenge and the way everything relates together, I'm going to refresh your eyes.


 The chain link pattern on the main overcoat is the slinky part of the dog. Additionally, the brown is to reference the body, both front and hind, of the toy.  My favorite detail I included at the last minute was to add the little bit of brown at the end of the belt.  If you look at Slink, you can see that he has a spring for a tail that is capped in the brown plastic.  I wanted to keep that to further drive home the inspiration as, on its face, the deel is a bit abstract.

The hat, on the other hand, was an unmitigated disaster from start to finish and I'm taking it as a huge learning opportunity, but for construction and methodology fails.

Obviously Slink is based on a daschund, with his big floppy ears and low profile. It made me think of this hat:

There are several things about this image that are misleading, not least of which is that it looks like a droopy set of dog's ears.

The true problems I had were with fit (too small!) and understanding exactly how the hat was worn (the image is angled).  It was a big ol' fail and I've since figure out how to correct it, finding other examples.  That would need to be a different post as it's not exactly related.

For good measure to end, here's a photo of most of us in the household.