What I wore to Dress U

This was Firday night and I was very very unhappy about the way the blouse came out. As you can see, the bodice came out well - after two weeks of tweeking it- and the skirt was okay, but the blouse made me cry. :-( The bodice kept giving me issues to the point I really couldn't play with the blouse as well - I just didn't have the time. I'll play with it now that I do have time, once I get around to wearing it again.



Saturday morning, I was much happier. This is my Edwardian Tea Dress that I made a few years ago. I had just bought a pair of wonderful leather gloves in the photo which is why I'm looking very silly. :-) The tea dress is almost all other people's stash fabric. I can't recall exactly whom I received the main white embroidered from, but it works really well for the main body of the dress. The lacy center was from Loren's stash. The orange I think I bought off of ebay for a completely different project and it was too orange - not pink like I wanted. It's a fun, simple, dress.



For the afternoon, I wore my Edwardian Bathing Suit. It had issues but all of them were well hidden beneath the over-swimdress. Basically, I added the corset to the combinations way too low so I couldn't get it to close up or sit properly. I managed to fiddle a way to wear the outfit but I need to fix the combinations so I can wear the bathing outfit properly.





The super secret Titanic Ghost outfit! I knew there would be a lot of lovely outfits at the Titanic Dinner Party so I decided to do something a bit different. I came as a ghost from the Titanic! The dress is from an old sari I distressed and pieces of very old Edwardian sheer fabric I got from someone that was selling all there grandmothers old sewing stash. The fabric was already distressed so it worked really well.

The make up is white face clown make up, old silver eyeshadow for around the eyes, silver eye liner, and a lot of glitter glue and crystals. I also had glitter hairspray. My roommates managed to put up with me and all the glitter I got all over the bathroom floor before I left for the party.



This is my Lolita Regency outfit. I made the dress last year and never got a chance to wear it. It's made out of off white silk with a red poly satin ribbon around the base of the dress. My hair - I used soft curlers after washing my hair of all the glitter the night before.



My Mad Hatter outfit! It's based off of me wanting a cupcake on my head and the movie Dangerous Beauty. The outfit is out of an embroidered silk. The sleeves are out of metallic silk organza. I wore this Sunday afternoon - even through my extant gowns class although I lost the hat by that point. That would just be ridiculous! ;-)



I wasn't happy with the bodice on this one but the skirt came out lovely. The outfit is based off of Anna's ball gown in Van Helsing. It's out of some wonderful Red Silk my Mom and Cousin managed to get for me in LA. I just need to re-do the bodice (I used a simplicity pattern that came out a bit too big) and it should be a pretty decent outfit. My tiara was from ebay. :-)

That's it for my entire wardrobe during Dress U. I had a lot of fun at the event and I really hope to be able to go and teach again next year.

How'd you find that?!? Or how to search for costume related items.

At Dress U, I taught a class regarding using search engines like Bing and Google as well as searching on ebay for costume related items. Basically, it was about learning various formulas that work in the search engines to better refine your searches. I've included examples and hope this is clear. Please, feel free to comment with any questions!


Quotation marks:

         ""s around a word or phrase help to look for that EXACT item.   Capitalization isn't important but spelling is.   Using quotes around a phrase helps immensely when looking for something like examples of a Robe a l'anglaise. In any search box, just use "Robe a l'anglaise" to find the 18th Century fitted back gowns.   On both google and bing, it will come up with appropriate links as well as images.

The beloved minus sign:
       I <3 the - sign in searching.  I use it rather liberally and suggest everyone else to do so as well.   The - is used to get rid of terms you don't want.   So, let's say you are searching for a green dress but you don't want a yellow one.   Your search term would be as follows "green dress" -yellow.  This way, anytime yellow shows up on a webpage with the phrase green dress, that webpage will not be included in your results.   You don't have to use exact phrasing (quotes).
     On eBay, they have an even more sophisticated method.  If you are searching for a green dress but not any other colors, all you need to do is the following green dress -(yellow, blue, red, pink, orange, purple, black, white).  Ebay will allow up to 10 search terms inside the parenthesis. For both Bing and Google you need to add a - before each term.  Also, both Bing and Google seem to have a lower limit for the amount of negative terms you can add.  

It was just here, on this site, I know it!
    
     We've all been there.  You see something pretty, think "Oh, that's nice", continue on your merry way only to think you might want to bookmark that site later and.....it's gone.  The item you just saw - that black 18th C gown or that lovely silk fabric- is no where to be found now and you can't recall exactly how you got to it in the first place.  The site: function is for you.
       In the search box of either Bing or Google (I'm sure it works on Yahoo and Ask as well) type the following site:www.metmuseum.org blue silk and it will search the entire Met museum for any page that contains the words both blue and silk somewhere on it.   This function is only good, however, if the page itself is public and not private (ie, doesn't work quite as well on blogs.)

I kinda sorta think maybe this or this or that but they all mean the same thing...

   As we all know, in the costuming world, we can very easily have ten terms that mean the exact same thing.  On one page a dress might be called a gown, a robe, formal attire, ect.   You want to be able to find all the terms that refer to that one item.  Rather than doing multiple searches, just use the ~.   By placing the ~ before a term, it means "like".   So ~dress will also search for, at least, gown.   It's basically pulling from a thesaurus and looking at every similar term.  

All I know is it was some PDF that had pretty pictures

   This is something I've done.  You find a pdf that has awesome research and your computer dies on you or you otherwise forget to save it.  You have NO idea where the pdf was hosted, all you know is it had information on your topic and it was a specific type of file that was not a webpage.   Filetype: can be used with any file type.   Let's say you saw a nice Word doc on women's renaissance shoes but you can't find it again - just type into your search bar filetype:doc renaissance shoes and it should find the file for you.   If the file was a pdf, then use filetype:pdf renaissance shoes .  It works very well in both Google and Bing.

I only want to see items from the 1880's!

   Trying to sort through the wedding dresses when all you are looking for is a bustle gown is highly annoying.  You keep getting links of Vera Wang when all you want is House of Worth!  To help narrow your search by a decade, used the following 1881...1890 bustle dress  This will force the search engine to only search for pages that have a number between 1881 and 1890 on the page plus the words Bustle and dress.   Although this helps narrow the search for links, it doesn't work well on images since a wedding gown can still be number 1882 as the price or as the retail number. Of course, this will work with any decade.  :-)  Or, century if you want to see everything from 1701 to 1800, of course.

The almighty wildcard, *

    I probably overuse the asterisk.   It's GREAT when searching for items that have the same root but have multiple endings.  My favorite example is embroidery.  It can be embroidering, embroidered, embroideries, and yet, it all means the exact same thing.  It just depends on what the seller or webpage owner decides to use.   Since embroider is at the heart of each of those terms, just use embroider* as your search term.   You can, sometimes, use the wildcard (*) at the start of a term but it works much better at the end of a search term.

Google Image Search [Insert Drool Here]

   The new Google Image Search is awesome.  Have you ever saved an image to your computer and forgotten where you got it from? Go to Google, click on images on the upper bar, and up should come a search screen where there is a camera in the search bar.   Click on the camera to upload the photo you want to search on.  If it's still on the web, Google will find it.
    Google is also very good at finding where other people got their images from (tumblr /cough).  That pretty dress that has no sourcing with it on a blog post?   Just right click on the image, go to properties and see the address of the image.  Copy the address and paste it in the search bar.  Google will find it.
   On Bing and Google, if you see an image in your searching results that you like but it's not quite right or it's too small, they both have functions to find "similar" or "other sizes" of the image.   Don't give up if it says that's the only size in that image, do a similar search and you'll often see the exact same image right next to the one you just searched.  Click on the second image and do a "more sizes" search.  I've found images that are much bigger than my first results this way - which is great for movie costume recreations.


That's it!   Feel free to ask questions and I do hope this was helpful for both those that took the course and those that weren't able to make it. 

Holy Thursday

According to the Roman Catholic tradition, after Holy Thursday mass, Lent is over. Now, normally this is because mass is right before sundown and passover begins. :-) However, we had mass at work at 11 am. :-) It was great since the hall we used was right above the cafeteria. Right after mass, I ran down the stairs and bought tater tots and chicken nuggets. I hadn't had either in a very long time. It wasn't great (cafeteria food) but it was nice not to get a salad for once.

I didn't get a cake because I knew I had this waiting for me at home:



Chocolate covered strawberries!!!!! Yummy!

Oh and:



Mini cake pops!

A few weeks ago, Amazon had a "local" deal- spend $15, get $30 worth of chocolate covered strawberries. Honestly, I forgot about it until I got an email reminding I had to use it before April 8th. I figured that a good way to celebrate the end of the medieval diet would be with my favorite food, chocolate covered strawberries.

Since then, I've been eating a lot of fun stuff - to the point I made myself sick on Sunday. Easter weekend was a blast - really, one of the best Easters I've ever had. I did have to buy my own Easter candy -which is sad- but it's super yummy. Vegan chocolate covered marshmallow chicks are freakin delicious. To the point even the carnivores in my family loved them. I can't eat normal marshmallows since they are made with corn syrup. Vegan candy tends not to include corn (it's not "natural" unlike cane sugars) so I eat a lot of it. I'm allergic to corn (it's not super serious but it's annoying enough to avoid it).

I really did like the medieval lent diet. I learned a lot and it helped to make me very excited about Easter. It was NOT easy but it was manageable. I'm not sure I'll try it again -although I like the idea of eating seafood all late winter/early spring long - I enjoy potatoes too much. :-) I might try just doing the fish thing next year and not actually go with pre-17th C recipes.

Some things that helped me get through this were my friends and family of course. :-) It was wonderful that they were all very understanding during this season. I know it wasn't easy on any of you either. ;-) But also hot chocolate and salads, believe it or not. I think not having sweets restricted other than the pre-17th Century rules was VERY useful. I could have sugar and I could have apple fritters. If I wanted chocolate, hot chocolate was always available. I think the salad helped so much because it had a)salt and b) was something very familiar in taste and look. It never took long to prepare either.

This was definitely a different take on Lent for me this year and I'm glad I did it and I'm glad it's over. I'm just disappointed that I might have a milk allergy. Grr... Luckily, it's not serious and I'm just going to have to be aware of it for my own cooking. I'm not going to worry when I go out - I'll just take allergy pills.

Last Lenten Dinner

I decided to try trout and saw this recipe:

This is an excerpt from Libre del Coch
(Spain, 1520 - Robin Carroll-Mann, trans.)
The original source can be found at Mark S. Harris' Florilegium

183. Trout in crust or roasted or boiled. The trout must be scaled, and if you wish to make it in crust, cast in pepper and a little ginger. And if you wish to cook it in some other manner, such as roasted or boiled, cause water to boil in a casserole, and cast in the trout. And when it is almost half cooked, cast in a little salt so that it should have good flavor. And then cast a half glass of vinegar into the casserole, because the vinegar will make it firm, so that it shouldn't break; and eat it with pepper, and with a little broth of the pot or of the casserole itself.

And if they want to eat it roasted, it must be eaten with orange juice and water and salt and a little oil, and all the good herbs; and prepare the plate of the roast trout. And cast this juice on top of everything. And know that the best morsel of it is the snout.

I really liked the idea of broiling it in OJ, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and a seeing how it would come out. I did a half and half of OJ and water with a tablespoon of salt and a tablespoon of olive oil. The good herbs were cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. The recipe was good but the fish, itself, wasn't. I think I just had it in the freezer too long. I'd love to try it again some day with fresh trout.

I also had rice and carrots which was great.

By Tuesday evening, I was so excited for Lent be over, I was like a kid before Christmas. Easter really ended up being joyful which, sort of, is the point of the entire Lenten season - to prepare for Easter and realize the joyful occasion it is supposed to be. Plus, I learned that, yes, I have yet another food allergy. Grr...

More posts to come!

Monday and Tuesday

Monday was some minor snacking on my now amazing collection of walnuts, pretzels, raisins, and crystallized ginger at my work desk. I think I'll keep up having all of these as part of a snack collection because they are a)good, b)last a heck of a lot longer than a candy bar, c) good for you, and d)cheap.

I also had a salad I brought from home. It was just green stuffs (spinach and the purple lettuce I like), carrots, and sliced almond. I also brought my own salad dressing which was nothing more than olive oil and red wine vinegar with salt and pepper.

For dinner, I cooked up my rice in almond milk. It took 20 minutes and was exactly what I needed. This means that there was probably something wrong with the rice Mom got on Friday. :-) She threw it out because we weren't sure. I added a bit too much cinnamon but it was still tasty.

Today I was in too a rush to make lunch so I've been snaking on the amazing collection which is fine. I also had a peach tea and a lot of water.

I'm not sure about dinner tonight. I have a LOT of sewing that needs to get done so I'm thinking something simple like toast and jam with a salad. This means stopping by the grocery store since I ran out of salad. Hmmm...

Past Few Days

Thursday : Pretzels, raisins, and bread with oil and herbs. I wasn't feeling well and just snacked the entire day.

Friday: Had a few walnuts, raisins, a couple of pretzels sticks, some peach tea at some point, adn then went over to Mom and Dad's. I cooked. :-) I made rice with almond milk, sugar, and cinnamon but -for some reason- it didn't work. I also cooked Salmon. Mom made peas and I think she made sweet potato fries. Of course, I couldn't have the fries but everything else was fine.

Saturday: I wasn't hungry this morning. I went over to a friend's house around noon and we went out with her family to a really cool grocery store that you can eat in. I ended up with brown rice and a crab cake - which isn't period but it was good. I'll through an extra dollar in the collection plate tomorrow. :-) I'll probably eat some more bread too.

On the sewing side of life: I've gotten a LOT done. The Titanic evening dress might get done tomorrow. Today, I did the beading on the underbodice piece. I'm not completely satisfied with the sleeves but we'll see. I have some plans and I want to try pinning them into place and choose from there. Pictures to come. :-)

Tuesday and Wednesday

Yesterday, I had a salad at lunch with my olive and red win vinegar dressing. I don't like the salad oil at work and they don't give you a cup to mix the vinegar and oil together which is bothersome. I've been drinking water lately since those three or four glasses of tea I've been drinking a day are about 500 extra calories a day -something I do not need. For dinner, I ended up just having bread and oil with herbs. I could have heated up more apple pie but I just wasn't hungry.

Today, I'm not feeling great (not quite to sick yet, but getting there. I'm hoping to hold out until Friday). Even though today is a fast day, I'm snacking on pretzels for the salt. I need some of the ginger but all of it is at home. I might be able to stomach some raisins later but, right now, pretzels. Lots of them.




This is one of the apple pies I made. It looks...horrible in the picture but it really is tasty.

And, of course, Fried mushrooms:



Oh! And my "helper" that evening: