Completely finished armour

I'm not sure why, but the pictures have come out in completely different colours, this first one is the most accurate.

There is a slight bend to the helmet crest, I think that came from easing the plastazote into place.

Well not quite finished, I still have to work out how to fasten it on. Body tape, ribbon, or flesh tone elastic are the current contenders.

Painting and Finishing the Armour

Time to paint the armour. I mixed gold acrylic with latex paint.

After coat one.

After coat 4. I had to wait longer than normal between coats of paint because the studio I work in was averaging at what felt at about -20degrees. As you can tell by the need for my oh so fashionable woolly hat below.

After all the layers of paint, it was time to airbrush. This was by far the most nerve racking part of the entire process. Something about having to keep the airbrush nozzle at least 3" away from my work, and pull a trigger where a few millimetres variation was the difference between a light mist and a dark brown splodge.

To make the detail stand out I used a dark brown in all the crevices and shadows. Most of it went well, there were a few hiccups that stand out terribly to me. I'm hoping its just because I know where they are.

Finally I varnished it all with this, great stuff. Just a 5 second spray and its done., wonderful.

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.