Tag Archives: bisexual art

Bi Pride Crown with holographic PVC!

Bisexual Pride crown by Suzanne Forbes March 2020Pretty things give me strength.

I made this crown early this month, thinking I could raffle it to raise money for marginalized folx in Berlin. But it quickly became clear that things like raffles and events where some proud Bi person could wear this are things for the future, not right now.

Bisexual Pride crown by Suzanne Forbes March 2020So I added some more details.

Bisexual Pride crown by Suzanne Forbes March 2020 detailYou know I love to add more details.  The main structure of this crown is the same as the Fairy Rainbow Unicorn crown from last month.

It’s a headband with curved fans of holographic vinyl wire and glued to it, and three iridescent plastic icicles left over from my Snow Queen projects in 2013.

Like that crown, it uses a product called “Angelina Fantasy Film.” Angelina Fantasy Film is a transparent, iridescent, heat sensitive film often used to make fairy wings for dolls, as I did here for Fearless Pink Gay Santa and his Jolly Ally Reindeer.

I posted a little video of me using a lighter to shape the Angelina Film here on my Instagram.

You can see an amazing video of brilliant corsetry materials innovator Joni Steinmann of Rainbow Curve Corsetry using a heat gun to shape laminated strips of bonded Worbla TranspArt and Angelina FIlm over Apoxie Sculpt forms here. And a bunch of cool Angelina Film projects on Instagram here. Here are some incredible projects on AmStamps.

Bisexual Pride crown by Suzanne Forbes March 2020 left detailI had a small sample pack of film I got from fab eBay dollmaker and materials specialist MorezMore for the Snow Queen projects.

However, I have now used up all my Angelina Fantasy Film, and I wanted to order more, back in the first week of this month. Back when I was still thinking of mail as something I could use sparingly rather than something that should be used only when necessary to save it for those who need essential supplies.

Obviously I do not want my craft supplies to add to the tremendous burden Amazon and DHL and GLS and other carriers’ workers are carrying for us all now. But back then, I looked for a UK/European seller of Angelina Fantasy Film.

Do you know how hard it is to google “Angelina Fantasy Film”?

Bisexual Pride crown by Suzanne Forbes March 2020 rt detailI did find a couple UK sellers, but decided not to order any.

The comments in the post by Joni Steinmann yielded a hot tip, that US art supplies site ArtGlitter.com sells Fantasy Film in 10″ wide strips, much bigger than other sources. Hopefully someday I’ll be able to order some. See her gorgeous finished project here!

For now and the near future, my art supplies and my mixed media art process consist of using what I have. Using everything I have. Getting everything I’ve made documented and accessible.

I am so grateful for the support of my Patrons, whose monthly subscriptions mean I can work safely at home.

Finished for Folsom Europe: Bi Pride Corset!

Bi Pride corset by Suzanne Forbes August 29 2018 front viewThis project took an entire year! About 200 hours of work! Dang!

Bi Pride corset by Suzanne Forbes August 29 2018I started this beaded corset project last fall when I got a great price on a used lilac 426 Standard mesh corset by Orchard Corset. It was always my intention to have it finished for the Motzstr. Festival, a special Pride event in Berlin in July.

But I wound up taking an entire year to finish it, and I think that’s good. Because I made it to affirm my fundamental identity as a queer woman, and I stitched that identity and pride and love into it thousands and thousands of times.

Last summer, while writing this post, I realized I’d developed a lot of internal biphobia over the last thirty years.

As a person who has been married to three men and who has almost only dated men in sobriety, I felt like a “retired” queer person. I stopped thinking of myself as bisexual.

And as a “retired” queer person, I felt so much safer.

Bi Pride corset by Suzanne Forbes August 29 2018It’s terrible to know that, to realize I took some comfort in the reduction of my vulnerability that living a straight life meant. Because I never for a minute stopped being aware of the consequences and dangers of living an out gay life.

I knew I couldn’t blame my cowardice on my upbringing. When I was fifteen and my mom opened the door to my bedroom to see me and my friend Jenny in bed naked, she asked if we wanted to go out for brunch. She accepted my girlfriend Pam into our home for years without question.

And I am no fan of my father, but he took me to Stonewall and told me what happened there before I was ten.

So my change in identity wasn’t about shame, it was about fear.

I felt guilty about living in the Bay Area as what appeared to be a straight person. I felt guilty about the privilege that accorded me. But it seemed like compared to the people around me, I was functionally straight. When you regularly attend sex parties where you draw a trans man fucking a trans woman while she gives oral sex to a nonbinary person, being a married cis-femme seems really conventional.

Bi Pride corset by Suzanne Forbes August 29 2018Plus, as a portrait painter who often asks women I’ve just met to come to my home and pose for me, I felt less creepy identifying as cis-straight-married!

Then I moved to Berlin.

Bi Pride corset by Suzanne Forbes August 29 2018 right panelLiving in Berlin has connected me to my youth and my New York identity in so many profound ways.

There was a jump-cut that happened when I left New York at 22, in 1989, to go to treatment.

I moved to St. Paul, where the halfway house was, for six years, and then to Hartford, then to DC, then to the Bay Area, for eighteen years.

In all those places I drove a car everywhere, lived in wooden houses, people were polite in the stores… It was like a different world.

I had all these adventures in this different world, and then in 2015, I got on the subway and went home.

Or so it feels. To live in a big apartment building, take the subway everywhere, walk the city streets at 3 am, eat a slice of pizza in a doorway just out of the rain, be yelled at by a shopkeeper – this reconnects me to my fundamental self.

And of course, even though married and cis, my fundamental self is queer as fuck.

So over this year, over 200 hours, I made this corset, beading and sewing and hotfixing crystals. I will wear it with Pride at Folsom Europe next month, and I’ll get some pictures of me in it!