Woohoo! My article goes public!

The reason I started this blog was to document the creation of my competition costume for Costume-Con 2013.
Then I decided to wait until after the competition for my tell all story.
Then I was asked to write an article on its creation for Virtual Costumer e-zine, so I put it on hold here once again.

Now you can read the whole thing!
The older versions of Virtual Costumer are available to the public when a new version comes out for the guild members. So my article is now available for your viewing pleasure.

http://www.siwcostumers.org/newsletterarchive/VirtCostV11-I3-2013.pdf

Kwakwaka'wakw Dress

Kwaka what?

When I first got the book The Worldwide History of Dress by Patricia Anawalt, I found a couple of pictures that really struck me as interesting. One was the black and red yelek that I talked about a few posts ago. Another was a potlach dress from the Kwakwaka'wakw tribe of the Pacific Northwest.
Here's a wikipedia article about them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwakwaka%27wakw

(However, as a librarian, I urge you to take anything wikipedia says with a grain of salt.)

The dress is canvas with hand-painted designs. According to the book, those are stylized wolves.
The back is the same as the front. The neck and wrist are edged with grey fox fur. (Recycled from a very old vintage coat that was given to me.) There are abalone shells around the neck. The fringe around the bottom is actually from cotton mop heads!

This is the last of my Costume Con 31 costumes that I'm going to post. I actually wore 1 more - I went as Ada Lovelace to the Friday Night Social. But I neglected to get photos. :-(

(Photo by Don Searle)

The Titanic Outfit....Big Hats are the Best!

This costume is one that I made last year for the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. The traveling Titanic exhibit was in town at the time and there was an entire weekend full of lectures and events. (Including a 10-course recreation of the last dinner!)

This is the outfit that I made to attend the exhibit and lectures. 

I used Simplicity pattern #8640 (which has since been discontinued). It's their version of Rose's blue tea gown from the movie. I made the yellow version on the left, but made a few changes to the pattern.

 For one thing, I made the tunic a little longer because it seemed a bit short to me. And I used a LOT more lace. I love my lace, you know! ;-)
I made a little matching draw-string purse to go with it, and wore it with a pair of pink gloves that I inherited from my husband's grandmother.

You can't see the shoes in these pics (taken by the supremely nice Don Searle at Costume Con 2013) , but I wore a pair of nude-colored dance character shoes with louis heels like these:

Very comfortable, although not completely historically accurate.

But my favorite part of the outfit was the very big hat!
If you want a really impressive 1910-1915 day outfit, bigger is definitely better when it comes to hats.

I found the hat at Dillards. I took off the generic white bow and added my own stuff. I started with a silver wired lace ribbon. Then pleated a pink ribbon to add at the base of that. I curled white, light pink and dark pink ostrich feathers and added them next. Then I created rosettes from the ribbons and used them to hide the base of the ostrich feathers. One last little feather glued on to the front of the rosettes completed my hat.

I've gotten a lot of use out of this outfit. I made it for the Titanic exhibit in 2012, wore it to Costume Con in May of 2013 and then wore it again to the Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival in Sedalia, MO in June 2013.

Neo-Bedouin....Did I spell that right?

So here's a costume that I kinda threw together for Costume Con.

I made the coat a few years ago just because I found a pic I liked in The Worldwide History of Dress by Patricia Anawalt. It's called a yelek, a female coat first introduced into the Syrian area around the 1830s.

I'm wearing baggy black trousers and a turquoise top which matches the coat's lining. The slits in the side of the coat let an Indian dupatta scarf peak out like a skirt. It's too bad that pics can't capture the sparkle of the scarf with its sequins and goldwork.

I've wrapped a long scarf turban-style around my head. For accessories, I just grabbed a bunch of ethnic-style jewelry that I had and topped it off with a great leather bag that I bought at Naka-Con from Crimson Chain Leatherwork.

Since I'm a face painter, I took my black face paint and went with Moroccan-style designs painted on my face to look like harquus.

So the only thing I actually made for this costume was the coat. The rest was purchased and re-purposed. But it was really fun to wear!

(Photos are by Don Searle.)

Delayed....yet again!

So I had *finally* started talking about how I made my 1775 francaise for the competition.

Unfortunately, it looks like I'm going to have to pause yet again.
It's a good reason, really!

You see, I met this couple at Costume-Con in the historical masquerade. The gentleman was dressed in a VERY good late 18th century suit so we took a few pics together. The lady was the one that created the incredibly detailed (and hand-embroidered) outfit. They were so nice!

It turns out that he is the editor of the Virtual Costumer - the quarterly online costume magazine put out by the Silicon Web chapter of the International Costumers Guild. I love that magazine and have all the back issues saved on my ipad.

He has since informed me that the August issue is focusing on Regency and Georgian periods. And he asked me to write an article about how I put together my francaise!!
Fangirl squeal!

So I'll be putting those particular blog posts on hold until after the issue comes out, naturally.

In the meantime, I think I'll start posting pics of the other costumes that I wore to Costume-Con this year.

Here's a couple of sneak peeks:

Engageantes? What are those?

I started backwards on the dress…

I didn’t jump in to the dress construction right away.  I started with the accessories. Huh?

“Why?” you may ask.

Well, thank you for asking.

I was kind of putting off doing the stays, which intimidated me. And I couldn’t do the dress until I made the stays.

So I started with the accessories.

First up:

Engageantes (or sleeve ruffles)

(Close up of a painting from the MET)

These sleeve ruffles were made of lace like this one from the MET:

or fine embroidered cotton like these from LACMA:

They were basted to the end of the sleeve and were removed for cleaning or switching to a new dress.

They are cut in a wavy pattern and the ends are stitched together. Then the top is gathered and basted to the end of the sleeve. The skinny part fits in the crook of the elbow. The long part hangs down in the back.

Most of the ones that I’ve seen on the museum web sites appear to be around 39-44” long and around 8-9 inches wide at the widest part. By the 1770s they had multiple layers, 2 or 3. I decided to make mine with 2 layers. A 9” wide one and a smaller one about 6-7” wide. 

I thought about getting a pre-embroidered cotton and making the ruffles out of that. But I *really* wanted lace. Such beautiful silk taffeta deserves it, but I figured that I’d never find a good enough lace for a price I could afford. The lace had to be at least 9” wide. And it had to be soft and drapey. Most lace today is stiff and scratchy. And I needed about 4-5 yards.

Then I decided to try searching for cotton lace on etsy and I found this:

Hmmm….

Looks soft enough to gather.

Seller says it’s soft. Seller says it’s cotton (probably with a synthetic background, though). The pattern is a little heavier than most 18^th century examples I’ve seen, but not outrageously so. I honestly know next to nothing about lace, but it looks good to me.

And it was only $12 for 2.5 yards.

So I took a chance and ordered 5 yards.

I waited for the shipping from China, tracking it all the way.

Then it finally came!

Wait…”that package is too small for that much lace” was my first thought.

But it wasn’t. The lace was just THAT soft and drapey that it was folded up into a very small envelope.

You just can’t believe how soft and flowy this stuff is!

Here's what it looked like finished.

The lace may not be exactly period, but aren’t they yummy?

 

The Fabulous Fabric

Okay, now that Costume Con is over, I can start posting all of the entries that I wrote way back when I started this blog. You remember --- that's why I started this whole thing?

When I talked about it, I put up the intro and talked about the pattern (which I ended up not using actually).

Now on to the things I wrote back then:

Got the fabric! Yay!!!!!

Beautiful, smooth, shiny, crisp ….

So many adjectives, so little time.

The color isn’t as peach as the picture appeared on the web site. It’s more of a beautiful cross between peach and baby pink. “Pinch” or “Peak”, maybe? (grin)

And it’s nice and tightly woven, too. Just like a good taffeta should be. No raveling at the ends at all. I showed it to some costumers here and one of them said that it looked almost plastic because it was so smooth and reflective. No slubs on this silk!

The Hips Don't Lie

So I'm finally able to get back to where I started with this blog - my competition costume for Costume-Con 31! I started to blog about the whole process, but then thought that I shouldn't reveal everything before the convention.

Now the convention is over, so here it is:

 

It's all hand-sewn using period techniques. I won best workmanship for the Journeyman category and an honorable mention for my documentation. Nothing for presentation, though. Phooey! (pout)

I guess I know what I have to work on now, huh? Although I did get a couple of really big laughs. I came out and started dancing to harpsichord music. After about 30 seconds, disco lights started flashing and Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie" started playing & I boogied down. :-)

That's where the title of this post came from - it was the name of my entry in the competition.

I thought it was appropriate given the hoops. There were 2 other women in the competition with even bigger panniers, though.  Mme de Pompadour's gown was more elegant and Marie Antoinette's was more over-the-top, but I think my dress was prettier. (I even did the "pretty, pretty princess" dance the first time I put it on.)

And, hey.... check out the hair!!!:

 

 It took about 45 minutes to get my hair up in that style. Another lady in the competition (the Marie Antoinette) had a similar style. Hers was a wig, but it was even taller than mine! I was limited by the length of my hair, but I honestly don't think that I could have gotten it any higher by myself. I could have had longer hair, but my arms couldn't have reached any further. (grin)

Over the next several blog posts I'm going to detail the whole process of the costume from start to finish, so I'll talk more about how I did the hair later.

(BTW, the convention had a great photographer so I got a lot of good professional shots of most of the costumes that I took. Check him out at www.donsearlephoto.com.)