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:

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.