Outfits from Outer Space #1

Good evening! Today I'm starting a new feature where I'll introduce some wacky items from my closet. Because, well, why the hell not?

The Bone Dress

I made this for a competition last summer, in Tuva, Eastern Siberia. How I got into that crazy situation in the first place is a long story, but I found myself competing in a talent show in the Valleys of the most remote place on Earth. The one rule: we had to make our costume. Now, bear in mind that, being on a remote campsite in Tuva, a two-hour drive away from the nearest town, our choice of materials was rather...limited. Luckily I happen to have a passion for bone jewellery bones in general, and I'd been collecting nice pieces and jawbones all month.

The jawbones are cows'; my belt is made of squares of tree bark (cutting bark from a log into wearable symmetrical pieces is not an easy task...) with a vertebra buckle (sheep or goat), and the headdress is sheep's vertebra and untreated sheep's wool (literally just fluff I picked off a fence...)

I couldn't tell you what the earrings are made of if I wanted to, they're some tiny fruits that were growing near the campsite.

Oh, and the horn appears to have been from a ridiculously big sheep. It was a get-well-soon gift from a friend; she brought it to our tent warning me that "it was leaking". Leaking what, I'd rather not know.

So much to work with, so little time!

The idea for the dress started with the jawbone collar and sort of just developed from there. I knew I wanted treebark accessories and a look that wasn't too soft... Basically something along the lines of the Forsworn armours in Skyrim :P

Skyrim's Fornsworn, whose armours were my main inspiration

I was wearing a water-polished tree bark pendant, too!

That horn makes a surprisingly good 50s-style hat...

My slaves friends hard at work... I can't sew to save my life,
so I'm grateful, really!

I can't sew to save my life, so my wonderful friends did it for me following my design, attaching bits of bones, leaves and bark to an old Primark dress I just so happened to have at the bottom of my suitcase (no, really, I swear!). We only had a couple of hours, so some of the heavier stuff had to go. I argued that we keep the jawbone collar though!

In the end, the collar had to be sewn on me because it was too heavy for the strapless dress to support... Originally it was intended to be a v-shape, like in the picture above, but the weight of it made it sag.

And don't even get me started about getting OUT of that dress... Well worth it, though.

Souslik (rodent) skull... I wish I'd managed to make it into a necklace
but I didn't have the right tools

Thanks to Triin Tanilas for the beautiful portraits <3