A Sketchy Mouse

The initial design for when little mouse ventures out in the snow.

1940s Dress

My cousin asked if I would make her an outfit for a 1940s themed street party, so here is a little sketch I did as the idea for it.

Just a bit of Drawing

 

I am coming to the end of my 3 years at university, this is my last term, I finish in June; so this term is all about pulling it all together and finishing everything off rather than making. So I haven’t had the time to make much to post.

But in the process of getting my portfolio ready for marking I have been bulking up my costume drawing section. I did these over the past few days, just a bit of acrylic and pencil.

Do you recognise any of them?

Let them eat cake…kind of

Denise recently wrote an article on being inspired by history to create a dress, but not actually making it historically accurate. So to go along with it we are making a dress inspired by Marie Antoinette.

Its quite a quick little project, and starts out with netting. Lots and lots of layers of netting.

The sewing machine kind of got buried in it all.

Denise found two silk wedding dresses for £5 each in a jumble sale, and we are up-cycling them in this costume. Here is the skirt from one drawn into a new waistband as part of the underskirt.

The top of the skirt involves a pink and purple silk swag, we are just playing around draping and pinning until something looks right. I really like it pinned up with the flower.

Wollaton Corset Toile

So four hours, one vanilla yogurt, and several pin-pricks later, here is the first fitting of the toile. I’m pretty pleased with it as a first go considering all the alterations I made. I don’t have the right busk yet, at the moment all I have in there are two together which are too short and too thin, so not the best guide.

The only major alteration was that the straps needed shortening, I’d predicted this because it was the only area of the pattern I didn’t alter. From the research I have done, the corsets were almost entirely single spiral laced, I’ve never done that before, but it was a pleasure to only have to do half the number of eyelets.

It is bagging out around the waist, I’m not sure quite how to solve this. The real thing will be made of stronger fabric than calico, so maybe that will help. But I might try shaping the waist a bit more.

It did not feel like making a corset at all to do this, what with the sleeves and the lack of bones, only four in the entire thing.

I’m hoping the wrinkling here at the front will be solved with the right busk, also I need to remember to do fittings with a braless model, I’m sure there was a sneaky bit of padding going on here.

Making a physical start

For my Wollaton Hall project I am starting with the ladies outfit, I have much more experience with female clothing than male, so I thought I would get this out of the way before tackling the footman costume.

I’m working from the base up, so corset is the first port of call. I can’t find the book I made this sketch from, but this is what I’m aiming for. My model is naturally slim, so she doesn’t need much in the way of support.

I borrowed this pattern (the short corset in the middle oval) as a starting point. I had to change it quite a lot, my corset is to open at the back not the front, come down to hip level not under-bust, and include a front busk. Also this pattern does not go smaller than a UK size 14, and my model is an 8.

Here is my version part way through, since this I split piece 5 into two with most of the angling for the hip going between the two new pieces, the angle on the far right in this version looked far too harsh.

Footman Research

I’ve been researching footmen for my project, there is surprisingly little that I can find. The one relevant book in the library seems to have disappeared without a trace. So I have looked into films about the times as well. The footman uniforms were always fairly old fashioned, and there does not seem to be that much variation past colour, so I’m sure making a plausible design will not be too difficult.

Houses tended to have their own colours so i have been trying to find out the colour Wollaton house used, no luck so far though.

Jumping into Jane Austen

My new university project involves working with one of my best friends on a small tourist attraction for Wollaton Hall in Nottingham. We both have different roles in the project, and my job is to make the costumes. We need two outfits, both from around 1810, a lady of the house, and a footman.

I want to make the corset and underskirt in the right way, and something along these lines for the dress. I will be focusing on historical accuracy, but my lecturer is keen for me to have theatrical reasons behind all my design choices. What are my reasons for that colour? Why is it relevant to the character? That kind of thing. Of course I will try to consider all these things, but we are basing the character on an actual person (Lady Jane Middleton) rather than from a story or play, so I don’t know how to go about it.

I’m starting the corset tomorrow, very different in shape to the ones I’m used to making. When it comes to the dress I need to find the appropriate fabric, something that drapes appropriately and doesn’t cost the earth – we have a fairly small budget to stick too.

Cutting into the Plastazote

I traced out the patterns from my cardboard versions of the armour.

Then used a craft knife to cut them out of the plastazote.

I cut and traced all the main section of the helmet and pauldron onto 9mm, the gauntlet onto 6mm, and the pattern detail onto 2mm.

Then placed and pinned them all.

Designing the designs

Old norse designs and Celtic designs have a lot in common, so I used a lot of Celtic design books to inspire the patterns on my armour.

I spent the entire day working out the patterns. I incorporated a swan, a horse shoe, and a northern lights inspired swirl, into them all subtly in different places.

The designs had to be simple enough to be clear when cut out of the plastazote, but intricate enough to have a strong aesthetic impact.

And onto the skirt...

Its hard to know exactly where to start with the skirt, it not being a typical shape. So I used this pattern as a base.

It has a long train section, a version of which I think would look lovely underneath the folded wings.

I shuffled it around a bit, I ignored the stay section of the pattern and fitted it over the bustle. I does give a nice shape, but not quite what I wanted.

So I got a large piece of calico, pinned, tucked, and nudged it around into place.

Then I cut out the shape that I wanted. And went off to analyse swan wing anatomy for a while to get the feather shapes.

And after about an hour, drawing and redrawing, I sketched it roughly onto the calico.

It looks pretty decent I think, time for the next stage of toiling.

Basic Block Fitting

I have until early December to complete this entire project before the photo-shoot and marking takes place, its do-able, but its not going to be a lazy month and a bit. I made the basic block and had a fitting

I'm not sure what happened, I must have miss-read the measurements, because the hips were ridiculously out, a good 5cm on each side. Other than that it fitted pretty well. And I drew on a rough corset shape.

I made a corset pattern and toile from that, the upper and lower lines were nice, but the fit around the waist was far too tight.