Day 10 Update!

Sorry for going quiet the past couple of days.  I have been working on the embroidery, see?

The collar is done (yay!) and I've starting working on one of the cuffs.  Hopefully, this cuff will go quickly and I can start on the other cuff tomorrow.  We'll see.  I'd like to have all the embroidery done before 5pm EST or so Saturday.   Sunday, I can put together the chemise.  I've done handsewn smocks before and it's actually not that bad - just a lot of straight lines to sew up.   So, movie marathon have Church!!!!

You might notice that I have traced the pattern on to both cuffs to go over.   I took a picture of how I do that thinking it's probably something and least a few people might be curious about.  I don't use tracing paper. 

Instead, I printed out the pattern from this page done by Aelia Apollonia from the West Kingdom (SCA). I edited it using photoshop to get straight lines and to change up the size so it would be easier to trace.

After printing out the pattern, I place the linen fabric over the piece and center the fabric. I then taped the paper and the linen down together to give me a slightly more stable working surface, but also to pull the fabric tightly over the paper pattern. In the picture above, you can tell the left of center rose is only halfway traced.  The black lines on the left of that rose are actually the pattern showing through the fabric.  (I'm sure there a ton of political jokes in here somewhere).

To trace, I used a simple light blue colored pencil. Once I'm done tracing, I start sewing!

Close up of the cuff I'm currently working on.

And to show I'm not just working on a high neck smock and a Regency gown that is finally out of the bad corner (pictures tomorrow), took a picture of the skirt I decided to wear today...after I made it this morning. My old, very worn, but fit perfectly jeans deserved a new life. The pink shiny fabric isn't really that shiny - it's a left over piece of sari I used last year for my Titanic Ghost costume at Dress U. The piece was roughly 2+ yards - enough to do something with. I made it into a tube, cut out a piece of muslin for an attached slip, made a tube of that, cut the legs off the jeans and gathered the tube of fabrics. Attach the gathered tube to the bottom of the jeans and you have a new skirt! It takes all of 15 minutes and makes for a fabulous summer skirt - plus giving those very worn jeans a new life.

Tiaras and Jampagne Dress

The story behind this dress is simple - Jasper, the incredibly evil cat- peed on my silk velvet I was going to use for the jumper to the Requiem dress. So, I had to wash it - and let it dry on it own- and then wash it again. He has learned his lesson about peeing where he is not supposed to but I didn't have the time to wait for the fabric to dry since this was Thursday night and I was leaving for Dress U on Friday.

Plan B. Plan b is never someone you already have - that's always plan c or d- it's something you can make quickly and will still look nice. Enter in the fantasy version of an early 16th C Italian dress.

The cut is based off of a painting and a sketch from the 1500's. Many people are familiar with the painting of the two courtesans on a roof top playing with a couple of dogs - one lady wears a green dress with what looks like a yellow apron. If you ever get to see the painting IRL or blown up in a book, it's clear that their is a piece of yellow chiffon behind her as well. A sketch, from the same time period, shows a lady standing, with what looks like a flab of possible sheer fabric to the front of back of her dress, open at the sides, but tied off at the sides as well. You can see both here. The sketch is the very first image, the painting is roughly halfway down the page.

Knowing that, I thought maybe an embroidered sheer front and back would look awesome. I have a TON of dupattas and saris that I can cut up. I played with all of them and finally found some old duponi silk I bought years ago that matched one of the dupattas well enough. I cut the dupatta in half so I had a front and a back. The Italian dress, I cut out from my own pattern done in a style I've done tons of time before.

The only other glitch was, that by the time I made a decision and found all the trim, it was 10:30 at night. On Thursday. I needed to leave Friday. So... I finished this on Sunday via sewing machine. Luckily, my roommate wasn't upset with me. At least I had everything cut out, right? ;-)

I managed to finish this at 8 pm Sunday. The party started at 7:30 pm so I wasn't horribly late. Close. But not horribly late.

Because it was a rush job, there are some issues. I need to fix the bodice, again, because of that weird wrinkle in the middle. I also need to fix the skirt slightly. Over all, another fun gown to wear to the Renn Fest though!

It's not H/A simply because of the fabric choices. The duponi I used is very slubby - something that I've only heard of possibly being used as a lining in period, and the front and back pieces don't seem to bee embroidered. Also, silk net? Not really used like this.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the way it came out. The colors went together perfectly and it's certainly sparkly which is what I was going for. :-)

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. 

Dress University Plans

Hello!   Rather than post pictures of a finished product (by Friday night I *should* have a new dress to post!), I figured I'd post my semi-finalized Dress U 2012 plans.

For the Welcome Party, rather than go 18th C, I figured I'd do something a bit different.  Ever since I heard of the upcoming movie "Mirror Mirror" a couple of months ago, I fell in love with this outfit Snow White wears:





I know where to get the silk for the bodice and I have the pattern for the outfit since the bodice looks to be a pseudo Elizabethan, but the silk for the skirt is going to be $$$.  It looks to be a Kravet Lampas Silk pattern.  I'm probably just going to go with something similar rather than exact since the cheapest price I've found is still $75 a yard.  Eeck!

I'm not sure about the Gibson Girl Pool Party other than I do want to make a turn of the century (if not earlier) swimdress.  I need to do more research on it as of right now. I know my colors will be red wool and probably black trim.

For the Mad Hatter Tea Party, I've decided to go with a somewhat Lolita 18th C styled dress to match the hat I want to make.  The hat (it is a Mad Hatter tea party after all, I need a hat!) is going to be styled after a cake.  For right now, I really like this cat as my inspiration:


...but that may change. BTW, click on the photo. The lady who made this cake has a ton of jaw droppingly gorgeous cakes and cupcakes up on her flickr page.

I'm keeping what I'm doing for the Titanic Party at Dress U a secret because I really want to see the reaction when I get there. Yes, it will be that different. :-)

For the "Let them eat crepes", I'm doing an 18th Century Turkish outfit. I have a pair of green, pink, and gold shoes that are perfect for a Turkish outfit so I'm planning around those.



The above is one of the many paintings I'm using for inspiration.

And now for the Tiaras and Jampagne. I was debating for a while on whether to go as Empress Sissi or as Buttercup from the Princess Bride. I scratched both after watching Van Helsing a couple of nights ago. I need Anna's red ball gown instead. Now, to find a tiara with red stars all over it... hmm... and way too many yards of red silk taffeta....


I'll bring a few more dresses -probably my pink 18th Century gown with the green trim and maybe an Elizabethan if not the 18th C Sack Back that will be done by then. However, I need to get all this done, plus three more projects by June.

In Jan, I need to finish an 18th C Jacket and the Catherine Parr gown (I have the materials for both, they are just in the need to be cut phase). For the beginning of Feb, I need the sack back gown. March, I might just be silly and not wear one of my four or five green gowns I already have for the Saint Paddy's Day party but make yet another one. April...we aren't even going into everything I need to do for April. And then...May. Which will be slowish costuming wise but I'll be gearing up for June! So, a lot of outfits will be posted over the next few months.

Oh, and for those that are not on my LJ blog as well, this is Jasper.


He adopted me the Friday before Thanksgiving. Poor darling was stuck in the crawlspace beneath my townhouse! Since it was 24 F out, I let him in and he's stayed ever since. (I did contact the local animal shelter/animal control but no one reported a cat missing so....he's mine! Ha!) Miss Ginsie is delighted at having a cat in the home.


As you can see, they get along perfectly fine. :-) Poor Jazz, he doesn't know what he's gotten himself into!