Dorothy Vogues

For the most part, I did not torment my pug, Tulip, with clothing.  She had a few warm coats that she would wear, but only when the temperature was about twenty degrees or lower.  Tulip was not a sartorialist; she wouldn’t try to get the clothing off, but she didn’t seem that excited to have it on (unlike her pug cousin, Nancy Alice, my sister’s pug, who was very proud to wear her winter coat with the faux fur collar, looking, as I used to say, like a toad in a prom dress).  It was also hard to find coats to fit Tulip, because as pugs are wont, her neck was rather considerable in girth.

Here for example is a picture of Nellie, my parents’ Tibetan Terrier, in a hand-me-down coat of Tulip’s that never quite fit around her neck:

Isn’t Nellie a vision in grape?!

Where I did lose it a bit, I admit, was on Halloween.  In Philadelphia, the pug meet-up group we attended went all-out and would throw an annual Pug-o-ween party.  Tulip, much to her chagrin, was forced to participate!

At first, I was motivated enough to make Tulip a costume, and I knitted her a sweater with dragon spines.  I don’t have any digital photos of her wearing the sweater, but you can take my word for it when I tell you that she didn’t like it much.  The best costume that year by far, was this one:

Pug-ahontas!

The next year I got a bit lazy, and Tulip was dressed in a purchased princess costume.  Doesn’t she look like a Disney vision?:

And the year after that, we celebrated my parents living in Maine by dressing Tulip up as a lobster for Halloween:

(Yes, I do know that it looks like she is being eaten by a lobster, and not like the lobster herself.)  She made it onto the evening news in this costume!

Oh poor Tulip!

I do still have the princess and lobster costumes, but I don’t think Dorothy will a) fit into them, or b) tolerate them on her little body for more than a minute.

On a whim, though, I got out the dragon sweater today, and dressed Dorothy in it!  I then had to distract her from attacking her own back by placing kibble in her food dish -- so that explains why in all of these (blurry) photos, she is a dragon eating kibble!

And this amused me so much that I decided to put on her trench coat, given to her as a welcome home gift by my boss.  Isn’t she spiffy?

And to end with some more cuteness, here is Dorothy in the baby sweater she got from her Auntie Heidi, a kicky stripe!

My next project:  a pinstriped waistcoat and bowler hat for Plum.  J