Saturday, November 17, 2018

Guilds are GRRREAT!!

I think that title makes me sound like Tony the Tiger. Hmmm...

Anyway...

I thought I'd post some pics of what my costuming guild has been up to in the past several months. This spring we decided to have an April Promenade at a local arboretum. The weather was fabulous!
I wore my Titanic-era evening gown.

I know. An evening gown for a daytime promenade. How gauche!
But it was comfortable and I didn't have any pictures of it yet, so on it went.

This is the group we started out with:



Then more people joined us later.


A picture of me hamming it up theatrically and a photo-shopped version one of the guild members made.



Later in the summer, the guild had a booth at our local Maker Faire. We have had a booth there for as long as it has existed in Kansas City. In fact, that's how I found out about the guild in the first place.

We like to offer some interesting hands-on things for the kids, so we had coloring sheets to design your own superhero costume and a mask-decorating station to make superhero masks. We were totally wiped out of everything by the end of the second day!

For the adults, I bring in my dress form and 3 costumes. This year it was an 1885 bustle gown, a 1775 robe a la francaise and a kimono. I have a poster that says "What Underwear is Under There?" and I periodically undress and re-dress the dress form whenever anyone asks. Fun for me & educational for them.




 Then in July, we had a workshop to create steampunk accessories. This was in preparation for an August outing to our local Steamboat Arabia museum. We're doing a Steampunk Steamboat tour!

Things we made at the workshop:


















Monday, August 13, 2018

I'm a very bad blogger...

I have been very lax about posting my latest costume adventures exploits work.
So I'll be doing a couple of posts to catch my subscribers (all 3 of you) up with what I've been doing lately costume-wise.

First, my last Costume-Con historical entry (talked about here) was the subject of an article in Virtual Costumer. Virtual Costumer is the newsletter put out by the Silicon Web Chapter of the International Costumers' Guild. They took my long-winded and rambling documentation that I submitted and edited it into something resembling an actual article! Kudos to the editor!

Here are the pics of the costume:


If you want to read the article, you can download it here.

You can read all of the prior issues of Virtual Costumer here. (Current issues are for Guild members only.)


Photo pics are from Scott Johnson of Realtime Portrait Studio.

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Monday, August 6, 2018

Big Hair

Just thought I'd pop in and show you what I've been working on this week.

A group of us from my city are driving to St Louis to join the St. Louis Georgian Sewing Society for a francaise tea. That's a fancy tea party at the Ritz Carleton where we all wear our 18th century finery.

If you remember me posting pics of my 18th century "Marie Antoinette-style" dress, you'll remember that I had GIGANTIC hair. (No, really! It was freakin' huge!) When I cut my hair short, I used the inner wire support form to make a similar style wig. Well, that was very good for a stage presentations but very unwieldy for regular wear. So I decided to re-style the wig. I've spent the last week undoing, de-tangling and restyling it.

BTW - I used the book 18th Century Hair & Wig Styling by Kendra Van Cleave. I can't recommend it highly enough! I chose one of the designs from the late 1760s-early 1770s that was a medium height.

Here are the results -
Before

After




After