Dollar Store Showgirl

--> Is there any part of this country yet left untouched by the magic of the dollar store? Be it the national Dollar Tree chain, the Crazy Dollar Daze! aisle of your local Legitimate Shopping Concern, or (my personal favorite) the random-mix-of-objects-involving-a-stunning-variety-of-languages-on-the-labels emporia that make up fully 89% of all retail establishments here in Brooklyn, these off-price-wonderlands are truly the costumer’s best friend.
  
Falling firmly as I do on the “It only has to look expensive” side of the fancy-ass-stripper debate,* I make frequent use of the dollar stores in my local habitat when crafting even the most classic costumes. Not to say that I don’t haunt the Garment District like a colorblind, bling-obsessed ghoul; but there are few projects wherein I fail to make use of something purchased for $1.08-with-tax, and more than a few that have been entirely created exclusively from an eyebrow-raising collection of off-price objects. 

Being such a frequent visitor to the half a dozen or so of the dollar stores of which I am most fond - The One With The Red Awning, The One Where The Radio Is Always Too Loud, The One That Doesn’t Have Votive Candles, The New One**, the DII (actual name) and The Other One – I’ve found that there are certain objects that I pick up over and over again, to wit:

The Most Useful Items The Dollar Store Has To Offer To The Professional Striptease Artist

• Sun Visors: No longer the exclusive property of old ladies in Florida grocery stores, the classic sun visor when inverted is the perfect base for most showgirl headdresses: lightweight, sturdy, comfortable, cut-able, glue-able, and often padded for comfort in just the right place, these seasonal buggers are worth their weight in Swarovskis. Since they disappear in the fall I snap them up by the dozen in the summer months. (As an added bonus, many visors now feature Engrish slogans and delightfully nonsensical illustrations!)

Actual visor slogans: "Sweet Day", "Say hello to the snow" and "Seeing you makes me h-" (rest of word hidden by feline Martin Scorsese.) (But I think we all know what it is.)

• Those Lacy Elastic Headbands You Put On Baby Girls Before They Have Enough Hair For Actual Barrettes And Stuff: Coincidentally, these innocent objects look a hell of a lot like garters – but at a much lower price than the average costume shop/stripper store/bridal salon charges for ten inches of frilly elastic, if the bachelorette party in the third row doesn’t give it back after the show it’s not the end of the world. Actually, I deliberately use these a lot as toss-into-the-audience pieces … whether or not you choose to remove the occasional pink teddy bear decoration first is a matter of personal taste.

And while we’re on the subject of stuff you don’t have to worry about getting back from the audience … 

• Cheap-Ass Pantyhose: Personally I like a good stocking peel during a floor show, though I’m crap at keeping track of where the damn things end up. Just snip the legs off these babies (leave about half an inch of control-top to keep the tops from rolling) and you have single-use, disposable stockings. 

It's a tropical wonderland.

• Fake-Ass Flowers: I love fake flowers; I always have. If I could, I’d cover my living room with the them, floor-to-ceiling - but since living in a shared space makes that less than ideal I’ve settled for covering costumes with them. There is certainly a time and a place for well-made, super-realistic blooms (Amber Ray’s gorgeous hair accessories, for example), but sometimes it’s a matter of quantity over quality and you just need a shit-ton of inexpensive plastic flowers to glue to stuff. When you snip off the stems the petals tend to come apart, but as long as you sew or glue all the layers together, dollar store flora are perfect for huge impactful splashes of color.

• Curtains: Although I’ve done it as a deliberate challenge***, I wouldn’t recommend using discount-store curtains as the base for sewing projects: they’re itchy, they’re stiff, they tend to unravel at seams, and usually they smell funny. But occasionally they’re just the right amount of gaudy, fringey or translucent to be incredibly useful as trains, veils or drapes.

Holy crap so much shiny.

• Holiday Decorations: Obviously, the dollar store is one of your first stops when putting together holiday-specific acts; but in the last few years my local Bastions of Cheapness have started featuring holiday ornaments and decorations in colors and degrees of blinginess that make for fabulous costume pieces any time of year. We’ve just entered the season of Glittery Things In Aqua, Turquoise, Hot Pink & Lime and I’m already stocking up on random ornaments, bows, stars and birdies to accessorize with in coming months. The Christmas and Easter seasons are great for bright colors and shiny or feathery things; New Years is lousy with glitter; Thanksgiving is perfect for stockpiling fake fruits and leaves; and Halloween – apart from the obvious creepy-themed items – is the time to bulk-purchase crappy boas (cut them up and use them as trim), cheap gloves, and light-up decorations that can be stripped for parts.

What are these even supposed to be? An awesome goddamned costume, that's what.

• Hula Hoops: Virtually useless for actual hooping (or so I’ve been told by those that hoop), cheapo hula hoops are perfect for building lightweight ‘skeletons’ for fabric structures, and can be used for hoop skirts and panniers in a pinch (or when steel boning isn’t available).

Dollar-store sewing challenge #1. Ingredients: Curtains, tablecloths, lace runners, hula hoops, bedsheets (bloomers), craft ribbon, party-favor beads, curtain tie-back tassels.

Behind every good headdress is a great visor.

• The Craft Supply, Jewelry, Hair Ornament, and (depending on where you live) Quinceañera-Favor Aisles: Although many of the items in these aisles aren’t useful on their own, they can provide great pieces for the base of projects: Styrofoam balls, clips and clasps, foam sheets, googly eyes galore, random bows and glittery things. 

• Party Tablecloths (Not technically a costume piece, but the single dollar-store item I purchase most frequently): The responsible stripper brings a tarp to cover the stage when making a wet, oily, painty or glittery mess; the fashionable, responsible stripper picks up a tablecloth from the dollar store party aisle in a color or pattern that compliments her or his costume. Bam.

Dollar-store sewing challenge #2: One more visor-based headdress, plus a curtain gown. (Bonus: attaching the two is a "flapper chain," aka the thing that makes your toilet flush. Hardware stores are just as much fun as dollar stores.) Photo by Francine Daveta

Ingredients: visor, flowers, sheer curtain. Photo: Emerson Vinyl

Several cautionary notes:

• While dollar-store nail polish is an excellent craft item, use it (and all discount cosmetics) advisedly on skin, hair and nails: that shit can burn, stain, or worse.

• Many items obtained at the Palace Of Low Prices retain a corresponding odor, something reminiscent of sugared petroleum. It's advisable to air such items out for a while before using them, and don't store them in closed bags or containers.

• Three tenths of the balloons in any given bag purchased in the Hey Ain't It Cheap! store will have factory-installed holes. This is to keep you on your toes. Plan ahead and buy an extra bag or two.

• Though fine for use as props, never never never eat anything from the dollar store.

•••••

* With frequent forays into the “let the costume serve the number” and “a two-thousand-dollar costume doesn’t automatically make a great act” camps, plus a permanent alliance with the House Of Not Every Costume Needs To Look Exactly Like Everyone Else’s.

** It’s been there for 8 years now.

Photo: Francine Daveta

*** I tend to craft as a grief-management mechanism; following the death of a close friend recently I found myself in desperate need of a project but with practically no materials at hand, and with no chance of getting to the Garment District before everything closed for the weekend. After a walk to the neighborhood discount store, $25 in curtains, cheap underwear and craft trim (plus some scraps from the studio fabric bin), and 10 hours of Dr. Dre on Spotify, this was born. (Ironically, the hair flower is one of Amber's actual legit pieces of art.)

Part I: Unbridled Enthusiasm or, Things I Liked A Lot In 2012

--> Last night kind of sucked, for reasons that are none of your damn business. And so, as is my wont, in my consequent insomniac state I managed to transfer that suckiness to every aspect of my life, work, art and career, such that by 4:30 this morning I had retired from showbusiness, dyed my hair brown, adopted three cats, moved back to New England and gotten a job at a strip-mall Circuit City. And then I realized several things:

One, Circuit City went bankrupt years ago;

Two, I really, really dislike cats; and

Three, It’s up to me to choose to end this year on a positive note.

Complaining is easier than praise: that’s why the bad Yelp reviews run to sixteen paragraphs of ungrammatical vitriol, while the good ones are three words long (“That was awesome!!!”). And while we all love a good razor-sharp Dorothy Parker-style evisceration*, today - for once - before that magical transformation that happens at the stroke of midnight apparently, I choose to defy that instinct and talk about a few of the things that impressed, delighted and inspired me this past year.

In no particular order, and without anyone having had to solicit website votes to be included, here are Some Things I Liked A Lot This Year:

• Penny Wren’s ‘Horny Penguin’ act (Brooklyn)

I’ve seen a lot of stupid stuff in my time, and this might just be one of the most brilliantly stupidest: a spheniscid** striptease that combines the pathos of the lonely penguin traversing the arctic wastes (to Morgan Freeman’s March Of The Penguins narration) with some very happy tapdancing feet, all mixed with flirtatious and exuberant breakdance moves (I defy you to watch footage of penguins belly-sliding on the ice and not see a Deadman Float) to 2 Live Crew’s immortal classic, “Me So Horny.” This act was everything I love: silly, surprising, technically stunning, completely joyous, and utterly idiotic. ***

Photos: Mo Pitz

Also I don’t know if Penny already owned the full-body penguin suit before she created this act, and I don’t want to know. 

• Flirty Sanchez’s performance at rePRODUCTION (Seattle)

I don’t know if this act has a title, and I’m hesitant to attempt to describe it in detail as I don’t think I can do it any justice. It is an incredibly, almost devastatingly personal piece that to me (I can’t and won’t attempt to speak to whatever inspired Flirty to create the act, or what statement she might personally intend it to make) is a meditation on the physical and emotional effects of abuse, and the possibility of transcending those effects. Conceptually it was incredible, and beautifully executed: there was a tremendous strength and an almost deceptive calm to the performance that seemed exactly right to me. It pushed the boundaries of “burlesque” in an absolutely inspiring way - the word “stunning” applies all over the place in relation to this act.

Also I had to perform myself shortly after watching it … which meant completely re-doing my sobbed-off makeup on the fly. Thanks a lot, Sanchez.

• Bathtub Gin (Manhattan)

I’ve had the privilege of performing regularly at Bathtub Gin with Wasabassco for almost exactly a year now, and it has become one of my absolute favorite venues of, like, ever. Not a performance space per se, it’s rather an intimate, immaculately-decorated back-room speakeasy. (The entrance is through a coffee shop so deceptively perfect that it’s easy to miss the venue entirely.) (And the coffee is damn good, too.) The fancy-ass cocktails are delicious, there are big squooshy couches, you can order s’mores for dessert, and yes, there’s a bathtub - all of which is fantastic for the audience. From the performers’ and producer’s point of view, it has been an utter delight to work in such a lovely space with a staff that is across the board pleasant, thoughtful, and eager to work with us to create the best evening of entertainment possible.

And the fancy-ass cocktails are delicious.

• Mr. Gorgeous (NYC)

Another of the great joys of this past year was getting to perform more often with Mr. Gorgeous, who has become one of my absolute favorite people both to work with and to watch. His acts are splendid, from concept (often ‘masculinizing’ traditional elements of burlesque in wonderfully effective ways) to execution (he’s a fantastic prop- and costume-builder) to performance (not only a skilled acrobat, he also acts the hell out of every character he performs).

Also he’s lovely to share a backstage with and has an idiotic streak a mile wide. ***

Photo: Edgar Delacroix

• St. Stella & James and The Giant Pasty’s ‘Statue’ act (Toronto)

St. Stella is a delightfully dreamy art student and James is a (well-cast) Classical sculpture whose worlds collide … this act is smart, loving, wry, visually beautiful, and again tremendously joyous (as much as utter idiocy, I am eternally inspired and energized by performers who take the stage with such a radiant joy). I’ve seen James and St. Stella perform together and individually, I’ve shared several backstages (and, for a weekend, their lovely apartment) with these folks, and I can’t wait for more.

(… And while I’m on the subject, a brief bit of sloppy love to Boylesque T.O. and the Toronto burlesque scene in general. Holy crap is there some fabulous stuff happening up there.)

• Amanda Whip (NYC)

It is difficult to describe Amanda Whip without resorting to inarticulate drool … but it is a drool based on extreme professional respect, I assure you. To say that she is a fantastic “stage manager” or “stage kitten” doesn’t do justice to her amazing ability to pull just enough order from the surrounding chaos to make a show run smoothly, while still leaving room for the unexpected to happen. She is utterly fearless, truly gorgeous yet always willing to look like a complete idiot ***, amazingly bendy, and one of the most utterly warped and depraved souls I have ever met in such a deceptively sweet and innocent body.

Also she lets me bite her pasties off in a professional capacity on a monthly basis.

Also and in brief:

• I first met photographer Ben Trivett when I woke up to find him asleep on the floor of my Orlando hotel room a few years ago, but I didn’t get a chance to shoot with him until this summer. He’s incredible. Seriously: interweb-stalk him. 

• Lannie’s Clocktower Cabaret made me want to move to Denver (and share a clubhouse with, among other people, Midnite Martini and Naughty Pierre). Rarely have I experienced such tremendous architectural envy.

• Polesque 's yearly pole-dancing-burlesque-hybrid competition is one of the most literally jaw-dropping shows I have ever seen. I look forward to the next one.

... I’m leaving it there, even though (happily) the list keeps expanding even as I write it. But I invite everyone to reflect on the people, performances, places (and other p-words) that inspired, surprised or delighted you this year – whether or not you choose to share it somewhere (and I hope you do), it’s helpful to take a minute at the end of what has been for many of us a professionally vexatious season and head into the next year with the good stuff close behind us.

* While forgetting that for all her vermouth-soaked snark, Dorothy Parker was both a genius and a skilled and thoughtful critic. Your average FaceTube comment-troll is neither.

** Look it up.

*** This is, for the record, pretty much my highest term of praise.

I Wish You'd Told Me That

--> 15 things appertaining to my job that I wish someone had told me years ago or, if they did tell me, I clearly wasn’t listening, but in a few cases I figured it out myself so now I’m telling you. 

In no particular order and to varying degrees of urgency and usefulness:

• Paint the bottoms of your stage shoes - or at least make sure there aren’t big stupid labels on them. The first time you see a giant “Jessica Simpson for K-Mart” sole logo in a photo of yourself you’re going to wish you’d grabbed the spray paint before you left home.

• It’s Okay To Say No. It’s okay to turn down gigs that seem sketchy, or that don’t pay, or that you simply don’t want to do. It’s okay to turn down projects that ask for a huge amount of your time, skill and effort and offer little or nothing in return. It's okay to say you’re not comfortable with a photographer in the dressing room. It’s okay to say that you don’t have time to ‘help out’ with costumes, or choreography, or poster design, or stripper wrangling, or that you really can’t ‘bring a few extra numbers to the show in case we need them,’ or come up with an elaborate theme-specific act at the last minute based on an obscure 1970’s Dutch cartoon you’ve never heard of. If you decline politely and honestly and when you’re asked (rather than an hour before the shoot, meeting or show) then no one is going to be mad or hate you or never book you again … and if they do, you probably don’t want to work with them anyhow.

• Unless it’s a deliberate character note, don’t hand-write signs or labels on props: it looks like crap. If you can’t get something computer-printed in time for the show, save the number until you can do it right.

• Your most elaborate or complicated number isn’t necessarily your best number, especially where first impressions are concerned. If you really want to make a good impression on a producer the first time you work with her, think long and hard before putting together a sixteen-minute-long aerial epic with working mayonnaise-filled waterslide and a shower of live fruitbats. (Or anything with a ton of baby powder.) If it’s a solid act you’ve had down for years, go for it; but adding bells and whistles to impress a producer can backfire spectacularly. Often it’s far easier to stun her with a simple act flawlessly executed.

• “Oh, please. We take our clothes off in bars.”*

• Pre-setting the tape on your pasties at home while you’re packing for the show saves a shit-ton of time backstage.

• You don’t have to like everyone you work with, and you don’t have to be everyone’s best friend. Just being in the same business isn’t a guaranteed automatic soul connection (I’m pretty sure that every nurse isn’t a spit sibling with every single other nurse on the planet). The only requirement is that you treat everyone with respect and professionalism - backstage, online, or at the diner after the show.

• Glitter isn’t the herpes of burlesque. Herpes is the herpes of burlesque.

• Rehearsing in large, tall, new or otherwise potentially disastrous wigs can save a lot of exposed-wig-cap-onstage-heartache - something that didn’t occur to me until I found myself pinned by the head to a paper parasol with dangling flowers attached by fishing line, from which there was absolutely no graceful extraction. (All extant copies of the photos have been burned, by the way, so don’t bother asking.)

• Okay, sure: no one is ever going to launder costumes with any regularity (assuming that any of our made-of-curtains-and-covered-in-feathers shit even can be washed). But do yourself the supreme favor and open up the gig bag when you get home and hang wet stuff up to dry. If you go-go’d for three hours in that bra and wig, for the love of all that is glittery do not leave them in a Ziploc bag all night. While it’s a fascinating practical experiment in bacterial cultures, it will destroy your costumes as surely as a pie fight at curtain call.

• Try everything. Never let the fact that you’ve only ever done rock-and-roll acts keep you from performing a classic fan dance if you really want to. Rehearse and prepare for it as fully as you would for any other act** and remember that if it doesn’t work, you can toss it out.

• Keep records. It can be as anal-retentive as a multi-page spreadsheet document listing the date, venue, acts you performed and what you were paid for every show you’ve ever done (ahem) or as casual as scribbling your schedule in a pocket calendar, but I guarantee that at some point you’ll need that information for remembering how long you’ve been doing a particular act, disproving income-tax fraud, or settling a bar bet.

• Nine times out of ten, your photo-in-a-frame prop is completely indistinguishable from a few rows back in the house … and half the time even the audience members who can see it have no idea who it’s supposed to be a picture of anyway.

• No One Cares About Your Shit As Much As You Do. Your web designer is never going to care as much as you do about updating your site calendar. That guy the producer got to video the show is never going to care about getting you that footage. Time Out is never going to care that they mis-spelled your stage name, got the time wrong, and used a photo of someone else in the listing for your show. The audience is never going to care that you have black gloves tonight instead of blue, or that you lost an earring in the middle of your act, or that you have 643,291 rhinestones on your corset instead of 623,712. Everyone else in the dressing room is too busy caring about their own tampon string showing to worry about yours. Producers, your performers care more about their own acts than they do about promoting your show. Just do your work, don’t freak out over missing gloves (and visible tampon strings), help out each other when you can, and try not to take everything personally.

Also:

• Try Not To Take Everything Personally. In general, I fail spectacularly at this – but we all must have something for which to strive, mustn’t we? Every distracted look backstage, every passive-aggressive archly-veiled Tweet, every random innocent statement in passing isn’t necessarily a venomous attack at your particular art or person. Likewise every performer with a pink dress isn’t ripping off your pink dress act and everyone who has ever used a champagne glass as a prop isn’t automatically plagiarizing your champagne-glass number. Advocate for yourself when you need to – no one else is going to (see above) – but take a moment first to decide if you in fact do need to speak up, or if you’re just reacting personally to someone else’s bad day.

••••••

* Someone actually did tell me this a long damn time ago, and for once I actually was listening, and it has stood me well many times and in many circumstances in the intervening years. I will be forever grateful to you for that, Veronika.

** As with any number, maybe don’t spend ten thousand dollars on the costume right off the bat … you can always add to it later if it’s something you want to keep in the rotation.

In My Atelier

The 15 Most Useful Items In My Very Swanky & Very Well-Appointed Atelier

--> In addition to the ecydiastical* enterprises, I'm a professional seamstress & costumer and a lifelong crafter - and consequently, I've found that some tools and items are simply indispensable to me. You can spend a lot of money on the 'professional' version of pretty much anything (and there are some things that, ultimately, you do just have to pony up and pay for); but there are a lot of things I use constantly that cost little to nothing (especially to anyone with a frugal New England background and/or mild hoarding tendencies). Here's my list of the 15 most useful super-cheap costuming supplies I use every day:

• Disposable Chinese-takeout chopsticks - I hoard these like the treasure that they are. Useful for most gluing projects (wet or hot**), a lot of painting and mixing, stirring dye baths, propping up things while they dry and - in a pinch - as the stick for various commemorative pennants.

And since I live in New York and we get a lot of takeout ...

• Disposable Chinese-takeout containers -The sad loss of those fetching little folded takeout boxes of my childhood did result in one good thing: cheap storage for a variety of odds and ends in the form of plastic takeout containers. (They're also terribly useful as easily-cuttable bases for hats, headdresses, and various other construction projects.)

• Alcohol prep pads - At under $5 a box, these little babies are totally worth having on hand. I use them chiefly for cleaning stray glue off of tweezers during large-scale crystalling projects, or for getting the goo off of any tool (or body part) when it becomes, well, gooey.

• Every single Ziploc baggie of every size and description that enters my life - The tiny ones are great for separating out a couple of buttons or half a dozen googly eyes; the large ones make a handy rain hat or temporary shelter. Seriously, though, pretty much every object in my studio (and costume storage room) gets sorted into its own baggie at some point; with so many things around all the time I find it's the only way to keep everything (relatively) neat and - most importantly - quickly findable.

• Spare comic book backing boards - For some reason I ended up with a butt-ton of these. They're a convenient size to store and a great balance of flexible/cutable but also sturdy. I use them for catching drips from my elderly glue gun, stiffening headdresses, packing up pasties for shipping, and - well, all my small-piece-of-cardboard needs. (Which are legion.)

• Clear nailpolish - Just the cheapest 99-cent version will keep the cut ends of cords and fringes from unraveling; seal in paint or glitter in small areas and keep it from chipping; make things a little shinier and protect the backs of kinda-scratchy things from catching on fabrics and trims.

• Black nailpolish - I actually raid the nailpolish drawer a lot for craft projects, but I find black is the color I use the most. Is that silver snap, magnet, zipper pull or fastener glaringly bright and hideously non-matching? Hit it with some appropriately-colored nail polish (a thin coat won't affect the grabability of most snaps or magnets) and it disappears. (This is also a great way to get rid of printed-on logos and labels on the bottoms of shoes.)

While we're raiding the beauty supplies ...

• Emery boards - Which is what my grandmother always called nail files. There are times when you need a big he-man-sized piece of actual sandpaper, but more often than not (shaping the ends pf plastic boning***, for example) just a cheap nail file will do.

• Darice gems - Living where I do I can't always find these chain-craft-store acrylic crystals, but when I do come across them I stock up quite literally by the bushel. Personally I use just acrylics on a lot of my costumes, but even if you're of the Swarovski-or-Nothing School of Bling it's worth having a bag of multicolored, multi-sized acrylics on hand for quick projects. I adore Darice: the colors are super bright and they're the shiniest acrylics I've ever found (and the silver backing tends to bubble less than other brands when in contact with the more toxic glues and epoxies). Plus they're, like, $12 a pound. A POUND - at that price, you could fill up the bathtub just for the hell of it.

• The silver straight pins that men's shirts are packaged with - Okay, this might be where my own personal Crazy starts to show, but I actually prefer these pins to any that I've ever bought in a sewing-supply store. They're longer, sharper and they don't bend as much ... and salvaging them from The Man's shirt purchases before he throws them out makes me feel delightfully Dickensian. (Yeah, I'm probably crazy.)

• Dollar-store electrical tape - But specifically the cheap-ass dollar-store version, which is sticky enough to stick, but not so actually effective as to stick forever. I keep a couple of spare rolls on hand specifically for wrapping my fingertips while I'm batching pasties: hot-gluing 200 pairs at once tends to burn the crap out of your hands (and ruin your manicure), no matter how careful you are (and I'm not very careful), but gloves either melt (latex) or make you too clumsy (rubber). I wrap up my fingertips in crappy electrical tape, and if they get too covered in glue I just peel off the tape and re-wrap.

• Måla kids' drawing paper roll from Ikea - This shit is the the bomb, yo. It's way cheaper than the exact same thing in an Expensive Fancy-Ass Art Store (only $5 a roll), it's sturdy enough to draft durable sewing pattern pieces (I tend to not like actual 'pattern paper;' I also tend to re-use patterns until they disintegrate) and it's decent enough paper for actual sketching.

• Clamp lights galore - My personal combination of weird apartment ceiling lights and insomnia means that I work a lot in the middle of the night in very bad lighting. These lamps are around $6 each at every damn hardware store in the world and they're great for general lighting or for focusing on a small area for close work.

Speaking of hardware stores (which, by the way, I adore) ...

• Aluminum drywall t-square - Because sometimes you need to draw 4-foot-long straight lines and right angles. Seriously.

• LED Headlamp - Did I mention the bad apartment lighting? This is genius for really close-up work: strap this fucker to your head and you get an instant spotlight on whatever you point your face at. (The added bonus is that you look like a total idiot: The Man once caught me sitting on the living room floor in the middle of the night, wearing sweatpants and my headlamp, watching Futurama and gluing crystals with disposable chopsticks, and immediately dubbed me 'The Next Dita.' Glamour!)
 

... Like I said, there are plenty of times when cheaping out costs you more money in the long run (If you sew a lot, get a decent ironing board and invest in a good pair of scissors) or when you really do need the actual tool actually created for the job. But over the years I've thrown out enough optimistically-purchased items in favor of A Folded Up Piece Of Paper to have learned that ultimately, you just need to use whatever damn thing works best for you.


* Look it up.
** That's what she said.
*** Heh. "Boning."