Pink, pink and …. yep, more pink

A very quick, very pink, very ruffle covered costume we knocked up in a couple of days for a dance show. Denise added trim to an eBay corset, while I made the skirt. Four layers of ruffle on the outside, and another three on the inside. It’s a circle skirt with the waist off centre so it’s longer at the back.

I made the blouse as well, believe it or not, this is the sleeve pattern. It’s this funny shape because it has a slit a the top.

This project involved a very large amount of trim. The dance was to Candyman, so we were going with the sweets and candy, pink and white vibe.

Final Valkyrie Pictures

Well it only took me 5 months, but I finally managed to get round to organising a proper photo shoot for my Valkyrie costume, and so after a brief hiccup when I accidentally locked the costume in university, here they are.

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.

Unmaking type making

Last week was a different kind of challenge to normal. Instead of carefully pattern cutting and step by step making up, we took a different tack. The project was a post-apocalypse, “Mad Max” style outfit. I started off on a bit or a disadvantage on this, being a bit too young to have seen mad max.

So we started with a box of leather clothes and scraps, then hacked, cut, tore, ripped, and patched away until we had something wearable. Its strangely satisfying to attack leather with scissors.

We then did some repair work with leather scraps and adding rings, patches of fur etc. The whole thing was very rough and ready, see how it looks and have a go, quite playful, and a very different way of working.

After three layers, woollen underskirt, main skirt and top skirt; Denise spray painted the whole thing with black mist, this made such a difference, like it had been worn for years, and survived the end of the world.

Martin was making the male counterpart costume by attacking police protective armour with an electric sander.

Can you can-can?

We started this last year, but it has been sitting on the shelf nearly finished for a few months. It is a very ruffley can-can skirt, so heavy with ruffles in fact, that it would take some serious leg strength to actually can-can in it.

Its so heavy in fact that Denise turned into a pile of fabric on the floor when she tried to put it on.

I actually don’t have a picture with it hanging like a regular skirt, though the one from the back where I’m hovering makes up for it I think.

2 weeks, late nights, and a lot of ruffles

It was a different project to what I’m used too, instead of lots of time on one outfit with a decent amount to spend or a decent amount donated for a very special occasion. This time I had to be very quick, and spend as little as possible.

I like to make my corsets to the best standard I can, hand sewing the bias-binding etc, because of the time constraints I had to machine stitch the bias-binding, and it actually made me cringe to do it. It was very satisfying to see everything come together so quickly though.

A little bit more space would be nice

I have spent the last two weeks using all my spare time to make 5 Moulin Rouge outfits. All this making in a short space of time in a short amount of space means my bed spends most of the time like this:

Believe it or not those are actually some well organised piles.

This is why I’m not the photographer

I wish I knew her name, here are the pictures taken by the professional that uni organised for the end of the project. I get my feedback about how I did soon, hope it goes well.

In the mean time, I’ve been feverishly corset making. 2 down, 3 to go, I have 5 full sets of Moulin rouge costumes to make for my flatmates birthday night out next Wednesday.

Completed Skirt

After all the effort of O.C.D. cleaning and sewing in bin bags, I was not about to dirty up the train on the floor, so you will have to excuse the bin bag my (stand-in) model is stood on.

This is the skirt with the short bustle, and around 10 layers of netting underneath. I am very pleased with the shape from the side, I am not quite so sure about the back. I may just be the way I draped it on the bin bag.

Next stage of skirt

Hand sewing the panels together took a total of about 10 hours, here is the first (and easiest one) done, before I tackled the scalloping at the bottom.

When all that was done, I traced the pattern out again onto the lining fabric, a very soft cotton, and then sewed them together right sides facing and added the graded wadding. This part took a lot longer than I thought it would, there was a lot of smoothing out to be done.

When I'd turned it right way out, it was time to pin. I started by following the ones I had traced out (very faintly) on the liner, but for some reason it wasn't really working. So after all the time I had spent working out the feather patterns, I pretty much scrapped it all. The version I ended up with was just made from careful pinning and re-pinning until it looked right.

After I had quilted it (which was a fairly quick process compared to the rest of it, due to the wide spacing of the feathers) I added on the waistband, the very last little bit. I had a battle with what fabric to use, the plan was to use the darkest skirt silk, but when I ironed it onto the waistband interfacing it changed the colour to an icky grey. So in the end I used the pale grey silk of the corset. I pleated the wings in with small pleats and hand stitched the waistband...twice. Either I measured wrong or the fabric shuffled as I sewed, because waistband attempt one ended up 4" too large.

15 metres of hem later...

Its a pretty huge skirt that's what it is. This is our current project at work, an orange skirt, corset, shrug, jacket and wings for a Venetian ball. The lady is a UK size 10, so rather slim, but the skirt is HUGE!

11 panels worth of huge, that had to be hand mounted onto netting. Took two full days.

It was stitched together at the seams, then I hand sewed the 15 meter fake hem. I thought it would be a job to spread out over about 4 days, 3 panels here 3 panels there so I didn't go insane, but it turns out I find hem sewing oddly therapeutic and I knocked it all out in a day.

So, waist band on, and layered on top of a large crinoline and a 3 layer tiered nett skirt, and Tah-Dah! Happy days.