Driving around grey, chilly Seattle today with my cousin after brunch and a stroll, something practically jumped out at me from a shop window and fluttered before my eyes. I exclaimed, “Oh my god, what is that?!” and my very patient cousin (you’ll recall that the Selfish Seamstress has the attention span of a particularly ditzy fly) graciously drove back around the block and stopped the car so I could get out and have a better look at this:

This, as it turns out, is one of the monarch butterfly dresses, a signature silken confection of one of Seattle’s local star designers, Luly Yang. It is utterly dreamy. Subtle it is not, but I’d wear it in a heartbeat if it were mine. Unfortunately the store was closed for the holiday and I think I might have left my American Express Black Card in in my gold wallet in the diamond encrusted glove compartment of my other Aston Martin. My cousin mentioned she has a friend who went to high school with the designer, which I suspect … will not help me at all in acquiring this dress. (Not that she was suggesting it would, it was just an offhand comment.)

What do you think, readers? Is it a hopeless cause, or is there any chance that something like this could be recreated by yours truly, a decidedly intermediate home seamstress with no silk painting experience, without it looking like the cheap drugstore Halloween costume version?? Probably not so much, huh?