needle and thread

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: needle.

The Great Port Townsend Kinetic Sculpture Race takes place every fall. The costumes and the sculptures, human powered, on land, in the water, through mud, are amazing and fabulous. I think the racers are mechanics, seamstresses, engineers, divinely silly, skilled in wheels, gears, needle and thread, glitter glue, duct tape and teddy bear placement. The costumes are amazing and the mobile sculpture transports are even more amazing.

Costume

My sister loved to dress up in costume. She died four years ago next Tuesday and her birth day is tomorrow.

The photograph is me and her daughter, in costume, at Lake Matinenda in Ontario, Canada, in 2009. I brought a rather demented flower fairy costume. The gloves are my mother’s: crocheted, uncomfortable, romantic and impractical. The whole outfit was entirely silly and impractical for the woods. My sister would bring long ball gowns up to the woods. We played dress up at my grandmothers with our cousins, in my mother’s 1950s prom dresses, in the middle 1970s. We thought her dresses were ridiculous. So were ours, of course.

I am not sure exactly what my niece is dressed as: a boy, I think, and maybe she was being a rapper.

At any rate, it is fun to dress in costume…. miss you, sisty.