Project the third: Avengers Assembled!

Well, Dragon*Con has come and gone, and with it, the debut of the Steampunk Avengers group costume! So for all of you who are curious how it turned out, here are the piccies.

Here's me, all dressed up and ready to go out on the town. :)


Incidentally, this was probably my best pose of the night. Let this be a salutary lesson to all costumers out there - perfect your poses before you head out to be photographed. I've got one photo of me where I look like a grumpy guy in drag. *shiver* Don't let that be you! :)

 

And here's the whole group! From left to right, you've got Thor, Enchantress, Scarlet Witch and the Vision.









And, close-ups!

Thor and Enchantress on the left. Scarlet Witch and the Vision on the right. I wish I had a better photo of the makeup on the Vision's face. It was done up with gears, and it looked really cool! Folks were coming up all night to take photos of it. :)

And for all you Star Wars fans, here's a pic of the Sith (and one random clone trooper). :)

(Had to include it - they just look so good!)

Anyway, D*C was, as usual, a whole lot of fun. It seemed more crowded this year, maybe because we spent more time wading through the costume floors in the Marriott than in years past. It was my first year to go in costume, and it's definitely a different experience. But it was still a great time. :)

Happy sewing! (And practice your poses!)

Project the third: Enchantress, revisited

And I thought the previous weekend was crazy... nothing is worse than having real life intrude on your costuming. It makes one very sad. Ah well.

Anyway, Enchantress updates. Of course I didn't take any pictures of this process, but the initial idea for fixing the Enchantress (see post here) was to build a small placket to widen the back a bit. I opted to do a rectangle the length of the gap and sew on some snaps so it could snap to the original skirt (because I was too lazy to actually cut larger panels, and I live in hope that someday the smaller one will fit). So, that sewn and snapped in place, I took the entire thing over to my friend's house for the fitting.

(I apologize once again for the jeans in the photos. I promise they aren't part of the real costume! I had to sew some eyes into the waistband of the skirt for the back piece to slot into, and I had to wear the front piece in order to mark out where they needed to go. Since I was then going to sit and sew the eyes in, I didn't want to go ahead and put on the leggings at that point. So we tried it on with the back piece, and then we realized that when you've got a corset on over jeans, it's darn near impossible to remove said jeans. /facepalm)

And here it is! :)

And the back ... please ignore my hideously over-inflated arm. :)


















One Steampunk Enchantress. :)  You can see Eg's Scarlet Witch over at Between I and J. The menfolk are being a bit more camera-shy, but I'll be sure to post some photos when we get the whole group together done up. Everyone should share in our joint insanity. :)

Post-frenetic-weekend updates!

Ever have one of those weekends where you feel like you've not really stopped to breathe? Yep, had one of those this weekend. However, much was accomplished! So, here we go...

First off, the IO caps, otherwise known as my procrastination project. I'd left off at sewing the binding strips on the outside edge of the flaps. I'll say it again, this step is optional, and I only subject myself to it because I'm just that picky. :)

Here's how the binding goes on. You cut about a 1 1/4" wide strip out of your outer fabric, stitch it to the outside edge, fold it over ...

... pin it (or use those little clips - never been so happy with a sewing purchase in all my life!) ...












 ... and hand sew it down on the other side. Repeat with other flap. Binding done!

Note on binding: you'll want to cut this strip on the bias if you're not using twill.

Then you stitch it all together (no photos because there are excellent ones showing how to do this on the pattern I linked in the last post), and you get one Imperial Officer cap.

I think all told, it took me about 15 hours to do both caps. :)

My husband and I modelling our new caps!
With greeblies!

Project number two: the Enchantress. On the agenda for this weekend was, finally, working on the leggings - the last major component of this project. I can't tell you how many pairs of black tights I bought for this, searching for a pair of a large enough size that they would maintain their opacity when worn (I am both tall and have pudgy legs, which is a really bad combination). When neither of the last two pair worked, my good friend who's been in on this since the beginning had the brainstorm: "Why don't you wear two pairs?" Holy Smokes, Batman! Why didn't I think of that?!

So, with the decision made, we proceeded with the painting. This involved my sitting really still for several hours at a time over two days on Eg's dining room table while she painted away. I kinda felt like the central exhibit in some strange performance art show. :)

Here's an in-progress photo from the end of the first day. This picture doesn't really do them justice. They look pretty darn good in person! Eg did a great job just free-handing them. :)















The other part of the Enchantress project for this weekend was working out the wig. LOL! I so totally don't look good in wigs. My head's too big and I have too much hair. But just to show that I'm willing to share all the highs and lows of costuming, here's a wig pic...

Eg says I look like Nellie Oleson!

Feel free to chuckle. Lord knows I did, after I got over the /facepalm moment. We still need to work a little on tucking all my massive amounts of hair under the wig, but we'll get there. :) I'm living in hope that the hat will hide some of that too.








And now the third part of my weekend. The part we like to call "retail therapy". Saturday morning while I was going through a depressed-at-my-fat-legs phase, my husband and I stopped by the local fabric store. My husband's not a huge fabric person, so he decided to pop into the estate sale place next door, and eventually I followed him in. And there I found Nirvana, for in the middle of the store was a large collection of vintage hats. Whoever this lady was had lived very well, as she had hats from all over the world. My guess is 30s, 40s and 50s eras. I love hats, love hats, even though I don't look good in most of them (see previous posts), so I couldn't pass this up. I ended up taking several home...


Thank you godmother! :)

And finally, recommendations! The IO caps were accompanied by a very dry English cider (Crispin) and the painting was helped along by a lovely little Chardonnay (me) and rum & Coke (Eg).

Happy sewing!

A brief interlude ...

Over the weekend I sat down to sew. As I looked around over the clouds of netting, I realized that I had neither the desire nor the will to work on petticoats. So, in the time-honoured tradition of students everywhere who have term paper deadlines looming, I found something else to do. :)


For reference, this is the hat
in question.



A while back, my husband had asked if I would make a black Imperial Officer cap for him to wear around during an upcoming trip. I said, "Sure!", and then nothing else happened on that project. Over the weekend, though, this became the rough equivalent of the aforementioned student's realizing that the bathroom needs to be cleaned or the floor should probably be swept or perhaps those dishes in the sink should really be washed. So I dug through the fabric stash to find something that would work, and on I went...

IO caps are small and finicky, but they're really not all that hard to do. You just have to make sure you have all the pieces, follow the directions and take your time about it. In about 6 hours (with time out for dinner), I cut out all the pieces for two caps, did all of the interfacing for both and got most of one sewed together (in my defense, I only stopped because I was at the handsewing stage, and black on black at night is just not fun - there's probably only another couple hours to get it finished).

Fabric choice here depends on how authentic you want to be. Medium to heavy cotton twill or wool gabardine is closest to screen accurate, I'm told. These are a heavyweight cotton twill on the outside lined with a shirt-weight cotton twill (because that's what I had, and it will breathe :).

Roll photos...

I'm making two of these at the same time, so I thought I'd lay out the pieces in the tan one and show the sewn-together piece in the black. Here's the visor section. It has two pieces - one interfaced with a light or mediumweight interfacing, the other has a sewn-in heavyweight stabilizer.

Here are the pieces for the crown of the hat. Two pieces interfaced in the lighter interfacing and sewn together into a loop.

And the two flaps - one at the front, one at the back. Each flap is made up of one piece that is interfaced and one that isn't.

Note on the flaps: the standard IO hat pattern doesn't include something you can see on close-ups of the movie costume hats: a binding on the outer edge of the flaps. It's a small detail, and something you can add or not as you like or as your authenticity desires. :)

And the most important piece of all - the greeblie!! Without a greeblie, you've just got a cap. The ones with the notches cut out of them (bottom row) are the ones recommended for hats. The smooth ones are usually used on belt buckles. As you can see, we keep a small stock. :)




So, why, when the movie Imperial Officers are all dressed in gray or black (or occasionally white), am I doing one in tan? Well, it's for a group called the RSO (Republic Services Organization), which is like the USO but for the 501st. It's a way for the handlers (ie, the wives ;) to dress up too. So the tan one is mine.

And for those folks who'd like to try this, here's the link to the standard IO hat pattern. It has great directions - follow them, take your time, and you can't go wrong. :)

I'd gotten the crown and top sewn together, but I'd stopped at the handsewing required for putting the binding on the flaps (because I am that authenticity-minded, unfortunately). More when I finish them!

Happy sewing, folks. :)

Airship Project: Still the petticoat

I have discovered a new and very deep respect for all those ladies who make or have made tutus and dance skirts for ballet companies. Ladies, chapeau.

So, netting ... yeah ..... *sigh*

Let's start with the good things about netting:

1) The clips I bought for the satin work like a dream for netting. You can even catch the gathering thread under them instead of trying to wrap it around a pin (because pins, FYI, have a tendency to just fall out of netting).
2) Netting is self-gathering. Run a long gathering stitch across the top of a strip, and you'll find it's gathered itself up very nicely by the time you get to the end. Note: this does mean that you need to leave a very long thread tail at the start of the line just in case you need to take some of that gathering out.

And then there's the not-so-good things about netting:

1) It loves everything. As in, wants to hold it, squeeze it and call it George. And I do mean everything - fabric, thread, your clothing, other strips of netting (oh, it LOVES these!), random pieces of paper - nothing is beyond its loving reach. My personal favourite (not!) is when it grabs the thread coming down out of the machine to the needle and pulls it under said needle so it gets stitched to the fabric, thus creating a thread-based negative feedback loop that immediately locks up your machine and sends you in search of the nearest alcohol-based beverage. My only consolation is that the wig is in another room completely (but I'm only half-convinced that I won't get up one morning to find the netting curled up happily around its newest platinum blonde acquisition).
2) My little well o' sewing is not nearly large enough to handle multiple long pieces of netting.
3) Netting strips, when sewn together, are quite difficult to fold up into orderly stacks (see previous post for a photo of said orderly stack). I resorted to gathering them into piles and placing them in different spots so I'd know which length was where. My well o' sewing now looks like a Spielberg early experiment in special effects:


Yep, it exploded.

Yeah ... I recommend cider for this. Right now I'm drinking the Woodchuck Summer. It's got blueberries! :)

The Airship Project: V's Petticoat

I've three projects all proceeding at the same time. If I were ADD, this would probably be heaven. But I'm not, and it's a little stressful wondering if they'll all get done in time.

I had a couple of hours last night so I started working on the petticoats for "Mrs. V", the wealthy patron of our airship. This is one of those projects where I said from the beginning that if I was going to do it, I was going to do it right. /footstamp. The other one was the Star Wars Imperial Officer. Note that the Enchantress project (of which I did not utter those famous words) is the one that's almost done.  Anyway, back to V...

I'm not au fait with Victorian costuming, so this project is pretty much being done from Truly Victorian patterns, although some modifications are being made because I'm tall. (As in, I had to add 6" to the petticoats here!) This one is pattern TV121.

Here's the pile of fabric pieces. Yes, there's a big stack of netting pieces underneath.




Yes, those are my monkey slippers in the background. :)











The body of the petticoat went together pretty quickly. If I could figure out how to install an ironing board in my little well o' sewing, it would have been much quicker! I opted to do the ruffle around the bottom of the petticoat, so I had to sew together and hem four large strips of fabric before I could start ruffling / gathering. Here's where I make a recommendation:

This is a godsend. This is a rolled hem foot which I'd gotten for my machine lo, these many years. It pretty much sucks up the fabric, rolls it and stitches it all in one go. No fold, pin, fold, pin, sew. Takes a bit to get used to it (ie, how much fabric you need to feed into it to keep the hem consistent), but once you do .....

... it did hems on both sides of two long strips of fabric in about 20 minutes (it got quicker as I got more practiced). You can see a big learner's bobble down towards the bottom of the stack there - but I figured it's a ruffle, right? And it's at the bottom of the petticoat, right?


Right.



Then it was time to get some sleep, so more on this project later. Happy sewing!

The hat: assembled!

Alright, so I gave some childish whoops of glee when this was done. It was silly, I know. :)

When last we left our intrepid adventurers, all hat pieces had been covered in fabric and were ready for final assembly (you can see that post here). What had to happen next was probably the scariest thing I've ever done to a project.

See, the brim of the hat was a solid piece of buckram, wired and covered in the satin. (In this photo the crown's just sitting on the brim for the sake of the picture.)

The next step was to stitch everything together just inside the wire ring (on the "headhole" side). Then you have to cut out that inner circle. Now, the pattern has lines on it as guides for cutting, but when you draw those on the buckram that you've now covered with fabric, it makes it a touch hard to see. So a little bit of guesswork to add to my total panic at cutting this apart. But, it had to be done, so I took a deep breath and took the scissors to it.





I did have a photo to show of this once it was cut out and looking horribly ragged and scary, but the camera for some reason didn't save it. :( Stupid camera.

Anyway, so you fold the clipped bits from the inner edge up into the crown of the hat, sew through it all to keep it together, add a piece of extra wide bias tape for a hatband, and you end up with this:

BTW, the lower edge of the crown where it meets the brim - total mess. Stitches everywhere! I gave myself permission to do this because I knew I was going to have some fairly full trim around the band.

And then I set to trimming. I'd gotten some green netting to drape the crown with to give a nod towards the headdress the original character wears in the comics....

...and in one image I'd found, she has a green diamond-shaped gem set in the headdress right in the middle of her forehead, so to kinda bring that in, I found these at Fire Mountain Gems (great place, btw :). I'm horrible about judging the size things need to be on hats, and they looked kinda small so I wasn't certain if I would use three in that triangular pattern in the photo or all four in a larger diamond-shaped pattern.


As it turned out, I opted for only one....

Happy sewing!

Episode "I": Update

Way back at the beginning, I talked about how I would one day do an Imperial Officer costume from the Star Wars movies (original trilogy, thank you!) to go with my husband's. With all the work on the Enchantress lately, I haven't really been doing as much on it as I should be (the shame!), but I thought I'd do an update nonetheless. :)

OK, first off, I'd like to point anyone interested in doing one of these to the Imperial Officer forums at the 501st Legion main site. There is a wealth of information to be had there. Go mine it! This is where we started when we were doing my husband's IO, and it's where I got the tip to start here:

This is a McCall's Civil War costume pattern (M4745). It's a good place to start, but it needs modification - more or less modification depending on how accurate to the original you want to be.

As I think I've mentioned, I have a bad tendency to want to do things "right". So, armed with this pattern, some photos from a museum exhibit of the Star Wars costumes, and photos of the inside of one of the original movie IO's (all found on the forums), we set to work.



There are several things that are right with this pattern - the seams on the back, the fact that the panels are seamed at the waist, for example. But there is still mod'ing to be done!

Modifications include: 1) reshaping the panel that overlaps in the front so that it's the same shape as the IO's in the movie, 2) putting in pockets on either side for the code cylinders, 3) tweaking the way the shoulders lay (they kinda kink off towards the back on this pattern), 4) shortening the panels over the legs, and 5) adding a seam to the overpanel on the left side (to match movies). We also ended up adding shoulderpads and sleeveheads to get the sleeves to look right. And because I wanted this to look just like the original, we reseamed the right panel. It's not something you can see in the movies, but in some of the photos we had, it's there, so I had to put it in on mine (unless you really are that worried about being completely accurate, you can skip this step and save yourself a lot of headaches).

Now, I don't have photos of this process because most of it was done with my husband's, but I'll sum up by saying that we ended up tracing the original pattern onto brown paper, taping it all together to do the seamline modifications and cutting it to pieces again, putting together a muslin mockup, pinning fixes there, transferring those to paper patterns, redoing the muslin mockup, etc, etc, until we came up with one that worked. Then we made those same modifications to a paper pattern made off the pattern pieces of a smaller size and created my muslin. (Note: I don't know why the centers of the following photos have a green tinge to them. I apologize.)

I tried to label some of the changes on there for folks who might want to try this at home. This is the mockup of the jacket above the waist (no leg panels), laid out as if it were being worn. Note the added seam on the right side of the picture (left side of the jacket if you had it on). Also note the pocket seams labelled. Let me tell you about those...

There are several theories on doing the pockets. A very popular one is to cut the side pieces longer and then fold it up onto itself to create a pocket. I was worried that the heavier fabric we were using would cause too much bulk there, so I decided to do in-seam pockets out of the lining fabric. We really should have done them out of the main fabric as you can see the color change if the pocket gaps - one of the things I'll change on mine. I'll probably still do them as in-seam, though. Although probably cut-on.

Here's the same shot with the overpanel laid back so you can see the craziness we indulged in. (This is that step you can skip if you want to save yourself the frustration.) Now, it's perfectly allowable to do this side as a long piece folded up on itself for the pocket. However, I had found a photo that showed one of the original movie IOs with the overpanel flipped back, and they'd done this side with this funky square inset piece. The seam for the pocket is at the top of the piece, and then you've got a seam that runs down under the overpanel, but that doesn't go all the way to the shoulder. When you put this piece in, you have to do an inset corner, which has to be one of the most annoyingly finicky techniques ever. *sigh*



And just for all those folks who may want to try this, here are a couple of photos with the muslin turned inside out (it's easier to see where the seams are).

This is the same lay-out as the first mock-up photo, only inside out, so it closes the opposite way.

And here's the second photo, inside out, showing the seams on that funky square inset piece a little better.




There are still several things I need to do to this to make it fit me and look good. The first is to shift the long seam on the overpanel piece in about 1 1/2 inches. I will also probably tweak the long seams a bit to account for the fact that men and women are not shaped the same (in-seam darts? who knows!).






The good news about working in brown paper and muslin is that you're not so worried about staining them should the red wine spill. So indulge in some nice Languedoc or Provencal reds if you're pattern-mod'ing with paper!

Happy sewing!

Project the Third, in which my dreams are crushed.

So, apparently my offerings to the sewing gods were deemed inadequate. While the bodice of the Enchantress costume fit beautifully, something went wrong with the skirt. There were many theories as to what exactly happened:

1) Water retention caused by the sustained crazy heat we've had here lately;

2) Something hinky with the pattern itself (supporting evidence: the skirt was cut from the same pattern and same size as the bodice, so in theory it should have all fit together);

or, my personal belief:

3) I have a big ole butt.

Anyway, there is a photo to prove that I actually did try it on. :)

I apologize for the jeans underneath. I hadn't put the leggings on yet, and trust me, no one wants to see my pudgy legs!

There is about a 1-2" gap at the back of the skirt. In this photo, it's held on by sheer will power. The bustled back part of skirt looked pretty good when we tried it, but there's no photo as it was held on by wishes, dreams and more safety pins than you can shake a stick at.

I'll also note that the room we were doing all this in was west-facing and it was *very* hot. Not too long after we'd tried the full skirt on, I ended up kneeling on the floor trying to stop the world from spinning. My first fit of the vapours. I do declare!




The current idea to fix this is an extra panel across the back to span the gap. However, a good friend of mine suggested (as I was standing there holding back the tears of frustration) that I put this in a corner for a while and work on something else. Think I'll take her up on that. (My first thoughts tended much more towards mad capering around a large bonfire, but we have a burn ban on.)

Needless to say, there was much wine after this little setback. There was a Hook & Ladder Chardonnay that my friends had found. It was pretty tasty - not heavily oaked and some nice fruit. Lighter than a typical Chard and quite good for the really hot afternoon it was. The second wine was a 2011 Charles & Charles Rosé (another tasting bar find). One of the Charles's involved is the Charles Smith who does Kung Fu Girl Riesling, which is a favorite among our friends. The Charles & Charles is a 100% Syrah rosé and it is quite yummy.

Happy sewing!

Project the Third: Skirt!

What I learned this weekend:

1) Those little clips are a godsend for satin. Seriously.
2) The mantra for sewing satin is, as a former roommate of mine in Edinburgh was fond of saying, "softly, softly, catchy monkey."
3) French seams ... I loathe French seams. Whoever dreamed up a system where you sew the seams backwards?! Do. Not. Want.
4) Bustled skirts do not look good in photos if they are laid out flat. (Which is by way of an apology for the photos to come.)

OK, the design concept for the Steampunk Enchantress was a saloon girl look. So the skirt is bustled up short in the front and hangs long in the back. To carry through the fringed skirt she has in some comic book depictions, we decided to fringe both the base of the bodice and the lower hem of the front of the skirt.

[As a side note, I attended a panel once where the conversation turned to how to steampunk non-steampunk characters (like Boba Fett or Princess Leia, for example. The advice given was to determine the defining characteristics of your character (like Princess Leia's buns and white dress), make sure those were in your costume design so folks would have a visual reference, and then have fun with the rest. Best advice ever. :) ]

Alright, so back to this weekend's skirt-making adventures. Got a late start on Saturday due to the prologue of the Tour de France (yes, I'm a cycling fan!), so didn't really start sewing until the afternoon. Over the next 5 hours before I was called away to play WoW (oh! the sacrifice!), I managed to get this done:

I'm afraid I got on a roll and forgot to take "in
progress" photos. So all I've really got are
"done" photos. Sorry! I'll try to do better.


That's the apron, or front of the skirt. Entirely too much handsewing and gathering in this skirt, by the way. And, yes, I totally forgot I had a gathering foot for my machine!

Must. Remember. All. Tools.

The light green at the top is a grosgrain ribbon used for the waistband. It'll be covered by the bodice once the whole thing is sewn together. At least I hope it will, because it's really, really ugly with all the random things stitched to it. Around the back are snaps and skirt hooks and all kinds of rigging. It ended up being a lot more time-consuming than I'd thought. Ah well.

Sunday, I started again on the back of the skirt which is a series of layered, semi-bustled poofs with a straighter train at the bottom.  It was pretty straight-forward apart from the hated and loathed French seams, but those were enough to make me grumpy for most of the morning. Especially when I had to take one out right across the back of the skirt after I'd already trimmed it down. Going all Hulk Smash! on the world became a serious option for several minutes. But anyway, there's the skirt at right with the apron laying on top of the back (yes, for reasons unknown to me, Simplicity opted to make the skirt two separate pieces). The white you can see at the edges are twill tape ties that bustle up the back part of the skirt. Not sure how I'm going to hide those in wearing, but I'll figure something out, I'm sure. :) Time here: 3 1/2 - 4 hours.

And below is the back of the skirt.

Again, sorry about the fact that these just look like piles of material. Apparently one needs a dressform or a live model to make bustled skirts look good!

The plan is to try all this on in the near future, so hopefully there will be "live model" photos to post soon. Yes, I've not actually tried it all on since the initial fitting of the bodice interlining way back at the beginning (my "fitting assistant" has been on vacation :).


Yes, I'm doing a lot of praying to the sewing gods. :) 





This weekend's drink of choice is a bit different and owes something to our family's custom of "drinking the Tour". When the Tour de France is underway, the chosen beverage for the day relates to whatever part of France the Tour is currently passing through. Since they started this year in Belgium (and Belgium really doesn't make a whole lot of wine), we opted for the Belgian beer Saison Du Pont, which is a farmhouse ale and was pretty darn good (and I'm not really a beer drinker). Quite light and worked well for our highs-in-the-upper-90s temps. :)

Happy sewing!

Project the Third: Bodice, Assembled!

Sometimes you find motivation in the strangest of places. I can be terribly lazy at times, thinking to myself, "Hey, I got all those pieces cut out, it won't take me any time at all to sew it together. I can go play WoW (or watch this British mystery marathon, or whatever)." And we all know what happens then. Now, I go to lunch at the same place almost everyday. And there's a woman there I'd been talking to about this Steampunk Avengers project. Last week I find out she's moving away and she'd asked if it might be done so she could see photos before she leaves. And I thought to myself, "Hmm, dunno. I'll see what I can do!" So Tara, thanks for the motivation! :)

This weekend I sat down in my sewing area (which looks like this, by the way):

Yep, no large open areas here! That spot is just big enough for me to sit down in, and I sew with the machine peddle under my thigh. I know, I know ...

... with the piles of fabric I'd cut out a while ago...







 
... and I started sewing. Much, much basting. Much, much hand sewing (I will be a master at slip stitch when this is done). Many moments where the in-progress texts you are sending to your co-conspirators become a little strange (note: even though texts are all about brevity, under no circumstances shorten the update that you are putting all the boning into the bodice of your costume to "boning the Enchantress" ... that's just wrong.)

By Saturday night, I had this:

That gives you a pretty good idea of the size of my sewing area. The bodice is laid out in the "well" where I sit. Yes, really. Anyway, that's the bodice all put together with those fantastic little clips holding the bias tape over the neckline edge that I'd still left to sew. This was about 7 hours work, I think. There are three layers in the bodice and a fair amount of sewn-in structure. You can see a piece of the boning by the small scissors at the top of the picture. By the way, those are titanium scissors that my husband gave me. He'd discovered them while working on his clone trooper. They so rock.

Anyway, so Sunday I got back to work. At this point all of the machine sewing I could do on this was done, and only the hand-work remained. Remember how much I hate hand sewing? Yeah, still hate it. But now I'm better at it! End of day Sunday:

I have it laid open here (ie, the zipper and neck tie at the back aren't closed) because I was working on the fringe. In some of the depictions of the Enchantress, she has this long fringe skirt, so we opted in this costume design to fringe the bottom of the bodice and also to fringe the bottom of the front of the skirt. This was probably another 4 hours of work or so, then my fingers got really mad at me and rather insisted that I stop sewing.

Anyway, on Monday, the gloves I'd ordered showed up. :)
 

Yeah, I know it's not exactly the same shade, but you know what, I'm good with that. They aren't the same shade in most of the drawings of her either!














And that's the update. :) I still hate hand sewing, and I really suck at zippers (yes, I'll admit it), but the bodice is together! And now my co-conspirator (that would be "Scarlet Witch") is back from her vacation, so hopefully I'll soon get an opportunity to make sure it all still fits (luckily, it's worn over a corset, so there's a secondary fitting mechanism that does not involve, hopefully, my taking this thing apart again).

No wine recommendation, I'm afraid. It was terrifically hot here this weekend, and my sewing spot is right by a window, so I was pretty much on ice water and the occasional Diet Dr. Pepper all weekend. Besides, handsewing needles + titanium scissors + alcohol = much blood. :) Safe sewing, people!

The Hat, Con't.

And here's an update on the hat. :) I was horribly lazy and didn't work on it at all over the weekend, so this is really "the hat through Friday", but meh, that's just how it is.

This particular construction method has you leave the brim piece as a complete circle (ie, not cut out like a doughnut) for covering. So here's the fabric stretched across the underside of the brim (with the crown sitting on it for scale) ...

And here's the same shot with the fabric for the upper side clipped on. Nothing's sewn yet here. BTW, a note on those little clips all the way around the edge. I'd seen them in a sewing magazine and thought they might come in handy but hadn't managed to get hold of any until they showed up in my local sewing store just before this project took off. They absolutely paid for themselves with just this hat!

That said, they are a PitA to sew around - they love to grab the thread. But they are otherwise so terribly handy, I can work around that. :)


So here's the hat with the brim all sewn together.

There are spots where I didn't get the stitches quite right (see "well of fail"), but I remind myself that most of it will be covered by the netting and trimmings and brim shaping, and then I don't feel so bad. :)

Note that the pieces aren't actually sewn together in that photo, but that's roughly how it will look before all the aforementioned netting, trimmings and shaping.  I still need to cut the "head hole" out and stitch it up inside the crown piece - a process for which I finally procured some curved milliners' needles (which, btw, I should have recommended way back in the beginning - ah well!).

As a random sidenote, in case you too are comic-book-challenged, here's the Enchantress:

This is the photo I received randomly on my phone during lunch one day with the appended note: "How about her?" From such small things do such mighty projects spring!

(Good Lord, wherever will I find a wig with that much poof!)







Happy sewing!

The hat, day 3.

Well, I've learned a fair few things from this project so far. :) The most important one being that satin, due to that beautiful sheen we covet it for, will "reflect" anything and everything that's underneath it, including the stitches of your frame wiring efforts. Ah well, guess that's why we have trimmings, yes?

So on to the photos.

Here's the frame completely wired and stitched together. Now here's where I kinda messed up. See, I failed to check the diameter of the opening at the top of the crown when I pinned the back seam, so when I went to stitch the top piece in, there was a gap. Not a huge gap, but a gap nonetheless. So, we fall back on the "they won't see it when it's done" doctrine and sew it in with slightly looser stitches, so it holds, but it's tied down like a trampoline. 

Important note here: neither buckram nor wire will stretch, but you can use them as bracing for taut, but open, stitches. :) In the end, it looked like the picture to the right (that's a quarter for scale). Ah well, not perfect, but it will do. The second important note: hats don't usually require the rugged construction of clothing - they just don't get that much stress, so you can get away with things that you can't with clothes.

Remember that, and it will save you much sanity. :)

Next up, start covering with fabric:

Here's the top piece of the satin pinned loosely over the top of the hat. I decided I would just tack it in a few places and then smooth the fabric out as I stitched around the edge.

And here's the top all stitched down. I went around the edge right up close to the top first, figuring that's all that was really needed. But satin is pretty stiff, and it stood away from the frame a bit when I'd finished, so I opted to take some extra time and do a second row of stitching right above the bottom edge of the fabric with the idea that that would keep it from bunching up under the fabric on the crown (it kinda did).

Then I pinned the crown fabric all the way around. You can see just below the top what I meant about satin "reflecting" what lies beneath it - the bumps are from the stitched-down top piece. *sigh* If I were to do this again, I'd probably a) not use satin, and b) line the frame first with something like light flannel to cut down on the framework showing through to the outside (you're really suppose to do that - I'm totally lazy).

And finally, the covered crown (yay!!!). Here's my admission for the day: for all that I love making hats, hand sewing is my personal well of fail. So anything that requires "small, neat stitches" as this does tends to make me giggle nervously and go looking for the nearest bottle of cider (random side note: if there's anything I've learned from hours of dungeon-healing on WoW, it's that cider is the best calming agent ever invented. True story). You're seeing the pretty side of the sewing here. The other side is .... not.

So, the growing list of rules for hatmaking:

1) Patience, grasshopper.

2) The "they won't see it when it's done" doctrine: if it won't show when the hat is done and you need to do it, do it, even if it's ugly. :)

Up next, finishing the bottom edge of the crown, covering and adding the brim. Then ... trimming! :)

(I wonder if there's a cold cider in the fridge.)