I keep wanting to do a 2012 wrap-up post, but am stymied by the fact that I have yet to upload photos from the GBACG holiday tea last weekend and then to post about said event. So in lieu of those posts, which are indeed forthcoming, let’s talk about the coming year!
I’m going to France! Specifically, the same group of friends who rented a manor house in England a few years back are getting together to rent a petit château in the very south of France, near Toulouse. I’m going to get to play dress up in this:
We are, as all sane and right-thinking people would do, making it all 18th century, all the time (for our costume events). So while I have some things in my wardrobe that I may bring along (one of my françaises, my Turkish ensemble for lounging, my proper polonaise for sure; maybe the round gown, or the gaulle, or the riding habit, or the Brunswick — oh god, I need to start whittling!), I am of course making some new things. Although after looking at that list, I am wondering why a bit…
For sure, I am going to make:
1. A 1770s camisole à la polonaise, this jacket filled out by this fashion plate:
Caraco, entre 1770 et 1780. Musée Galliera, Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris. GAL1992.177.X.Camisole à la Polonaise, de Mousseline des Indes, doublée de Taffetas rose. Gallerie des Modes et Costumes Français, 31e. Cahier. 1780.
2. This c. 1780 redingote as seen in this sketch of Marie-Antoinette:
Drawing of Marie Antoinette, about 1785, ink and color on paper, Artist unknown. From Lofstad slott, Norrkoping, Sweden. From the blog Fashion Is My Muse.
3. I’m also going to be making a hand tambour-embroidered waistcoat for Francis.
If I have time, I may also make either this robe à la turque:
Wille, Young Woman Admiring a Miniature, 1778
Or a 1770s robe à la française from this striped fabric:
Phew! I’ll be posting lots more about each of these projects — the camisole and redingote are actually under way — shortly. Plus that tea recap, and the 2012 recap!
Hey, I finished something! Even better, this albatross!
Of course, I was up pretty late the nights before I wore this in order to get it done. I widened the center front and reattached the trim, only to realize that it was STILL too narrow. Ain’t nothing like doing it the hard way!
For lacing rings, I didn’t have time to get some real soldered rings, so I headed off to the hardware store and looked at random bits and bobs until I found some small-ish keyrings — hey, they worked!
I had one small issue when I put the gold ball trim on the CF, which is that I got to finish putting on the trim and realized I had about a half-ball-width hole, so I had to decide between a slight gap or trying to squeeze one more ball in. I ended up squeezing one more in, which meant that the trim in front ended up looking kind of wonky.
I ran out of time to do anything useful with the champagne label, so I had to safety pin it on. Looking back, I should have basted it on in the car, because it looks a little bit lame. But oh well!
Last thing, I didn’t want to wear my hat until we got to fair because it was raining, and I hadn’t really planned out my hair. So while I pictured wearing the hat on the top/side of my head, the only thing I could find to attach a hat pin too was way back/side — so I ended up looking pretty frowzy hat-wise, but everyone agreed that it was appropriate for a champagne bottle!
It’s not my best work, but it’s a whole lot better than the first try, and it was fun (and practical) to wear! I had a great time at the fair, running into all sorts of friends wearing fabulous costumes and having a lovely tea. Oh, and most everyone got the costume, which was a good thing!
Me and Tara, who went in a beautiful bee-themed fancy dress ensemble.
So what’s next? A whole lot of 18th century, but that’s another post!
I’ve been sewing away on the champagne costume and am nearly there. I managed to get the sleeves and trim on the bodice, add the gold netting to the neckline, and make the gold netting underplacket. I’ve been wibbling about how to close things — I want to do whatever is lazy and easy, but none of my options seem to be either! I want the LOOK of a laced bodice as in the original fashion plate — I like the contrast of the ribbon on the netting. I kept thinking about ways to fake it, but they seemed harder than just sewing lacing rings on the damn thing. Only problem is I only have 6 lacing rings on hand, so I decided to try using some of the flat sides of grommets as well — essentially works, but they are wide, and long story short I had to take them all off anyway, so I may hit the hardware store tonight and see if I can find some other kind of substitute.
Here’s the crappy late night cameraphone try-on pics, in which you can see my problem (other than the one lacing ring that snapped off, hence the wonky lacing) — it’s too big! Not if I close it all the way, but I was conservative in how much I cut out of the front to make the lacing gap, because nothing is worse than thinking you want an X wide gap and then you try it on and that X has doubled, but the thing closes edge to edge. I tried lacing it a little bit loosely, especially on the top half, just to see the effect of the netting and lacing, then in a fit of craziness took off the gold balls along the front edge, cut off a bit more from the CF, and resewed it all (all while watching “Sparkle,” which I can report is pretty shlock-tastic).
Front, a little wonky because of the too-big issue!Le side!Back, looking a little limp below the waist b/c of no bustle/skirts.
Also, the cats report that Mom wandering the house with a really long ribbon trailing from her bodice = GOOD TIMES.
The sleeves took a couple of tries just to figure out what I was going to do. Originally I thought whatever I’d use as the gold netting would be the sleeve too, as in the fashion plate, but after scouring Joann’s I couldn’t find anything in the right shade. I’m weird, but I love the caramel-y gold color of the taffeta I’m using for the hat, and all of the nettings I could find were either too yellow-gold or too brown or not sparkly. Whatever, Joann’s! And here I thought you were a bastion of sparkly synthetic craptastic fabric. I even checked the casa collection aisle, which was terrifying!
So first I decided to make the sleeves in the same gold taffeta as the hat, and even got so far as patterning the same shape from the fashion plate (narrow cap, wide hem) and hemming it, only to discover that my armscye was WAY bigger than my sleeve sloper’s armscye. As I was pondering my options, I was worrying about having a dark green dress with random gold sleeves, and hit on the idea of doing an overlapping tulip sleeve in the few scraps of the green velvet that I had left, and then trimming it with Yet More Gold Balls.
So, what’s left: find more lacing rings, sew those on, add one more row of gold ball trim to the skirt, widen the skirt waistband about .5″, and throw together a necklace out of yet more gold balls. Oh, and figure out how I’m attaching the champagne label — I think I’ll just tack it to the underskirt and call it done!
“Pulling teeth,” because that’s what writing this blog post has become. Gah! It was another busy fall semester with little sewing, and I’ve gotten out of the habit of blogging. I have been noodling on my embroidered fichu, but I’m not going to bore you with “embroidered another flower” posts.
This Saturday I’m heading to the Dickens Fair in San Francisco to see friends and for GBACG day. I was waffling on whether or not to go, because I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to wear… mid-Victorian is just a total butterchurn-y snoozefest to me. Bonnets! High necklines! Giant sleeves! Giant skirts! I feel like it’s all too much, and as a tall girl with a lot of padding, the last thing I need is to add more pouf in all directions. But when I remembered the Champagne project and what I initially WANTED it to be (not what it ended up as), I got a little more into it.
Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback on what didn’t work (besides the lack of trim) a few months back. I took your suggestions and basically took the whole thing apart… ditched the bodice, took the skirt apart. So here’s the new plan:
First, I’m going back to the original fashion plate inspiration, which is just so perfect for turning into a “champagne” costume:
Original fashion plate inspiration.
I decided to make the whole dress out of dark green velvet, and keep the gold/foil/cork part for my head. So I took off all that lighter green silk on the skirt and replaced it with green velvet. Only problem was, I had some dark green velvet in my stash, but it was a yellower green than the blue/green I’d used for the original skirt pieces. I decided to try overdyeing the stash fabric with a bit of blue, and to my amazement it came out to a perfect match, so off I went merrily… until I tried taking a picture of the pile-o-velvet that is the bodice and skirt and the colors are coming out totally differently. I swear to god, they match 99% in real life… knowing my luck, all pictures taken of me will totally show the different velvet colors. Sigh.
The pile-o-velvet that is the finished skirt and almost finished bodice. In real life, the velvet colors match. Sigh.
So the plan is to follow the fashion plate and trim the bodice and skirt with some kind of gold ball trim to evoke the idea of champagne bubbles. Last year I searched and wibbled and prevaricated and never ended up finding a trim I liked. This time, I managed to find some cheap xmas garlands at my local hardware store (after scouring the craft store — weird!) and am Just Going With It.
Gold ball christmas garlands.Pulling them apart to make trim.
I’m going to string them (on wire, I guess?) and sew them on to many of the edges. I’m also planning to put some gold netting in the center front of the bodice and around the neckline, again hoping to evoke foil and champagne bubbles. We’ll see! It works in my head.
I want my head to be cork/foil part, so I bought a mini-top hat frame off of Jenn to recover. Because I realized after the last try that I need to be Really Obvious for this costume to work, after I covered the hat in pretty gold silk taffeta, I fabric-glued champagne corks all around the brim:
Mini top hat frame.The covered and be-corked hat.
All of this brings me to… most of the time I’ve been a costumer, I’ve been a relative purist about historical accuracy. Oh sure, on some costumes I may cut some corners, and I’m pretty religious about wearing some kind of makeup with costumes for the last few years, but I’ve never wanted to make totally non-historical stuff. Something about making the Marie Antoinette dress this summer has changed that, and that and the Pierrot/maja costume have been the most fun things I’ve worn in a long time! Suddenly doing (most) straight historical costumes is seeming boring, and I’m finding myself wondering what I can add to costumes to put them over the top. This is new and weird!
To that end, I bought a bunch of gold makeup that I plan on using this weekend, plus I’m contemplating crazy hair (it seems like champagne hair should be curly and frizzy and UP, am I right? I’m thinking about getting my Helena Bonham Carter on — what do you think?).
Last night was the annual PEERS Vampire Ball, which is one the few balls I still get excited about! It’s in a great venue (an Elks lodge that has a beautiful look) that’s about 3 blocks from my house, plus people really go all out with the costumes — over the top historical, vampire/goth, scifi, fantasy, and hybrids of all of these. There’s so much eye candy, and that’s the best part! Plus there’s not only historical dancing but also a goth club with a DJ, so you can get the best of both worlds. Okay, and 2 bars.
For the past three years, Bella Donna has performed two 30 min. song sets at the ball, which is always lots of fun. We’ve rewritten all of our English songs so that they’re vampire focused (so, for example, “Sweet nymph come to thy lover” becomes “Sweet prey come to thy vampire”), and it’s fun to get to do something different than our usual Renaissance show… and we get to wear whatever costume we’re in the mood to wear!
This year I was thinking about wearing the Marie Antoinette dress, but it’s so huge that it would be hard to get into singing formation with the group and I certainly couldn’t do any historical dancing. So I decided to wear the Maja fancy dress costume, but I wanted to do something different with it. I came up with the idea of doing a Pierrot makeup, in line with the whole black and white theme.
To do the makeup, I used Kryolan Supracolor again, and made my illustrator husband do the black/detail work. Everything went swimmingly until I went to power the makeup, which you need to do to set it — I was using a brush and all the black smeared! So I had to do a bunch of repair work, which was super annoying… I’m not positive what the best way would be to powder when you’ve got more than one color going on, does anyone know? I ended up using a power puff and just pressing it, but it still smeared a bit.
Makeup pre-smearing
I wanted to do a new wig, and decided to try a 1760s tete-de-mouton just to do something different — something along the lines of this. I used a pretty ratty wig that I’d cut to be a hedgehog, so the hair in front/top/sides wasn’t quite as long as it should be to do full justice to the curls across the top of the head… and I ended up doing things a bit backwards, in styling the front before the back, so had to do some curls at the side/back top to pull things together. But it was interesting to try something new, and now I know what to do differently next time!
The clearest shot of the wig I've got, which isn't very clear; or, yes, aquanet is period!
I ended up recovering a mini-tricorn form and trimming it the vintage b&w ribbon I bought at Hyman Hendler in NYC.
Pierrot Maja
The ball was fun and I had a great time seeing new and old friends, although I didn’t do ANY historic dancing — bad me! Instead after our singing sets were over, I pretended to be goth with some of my Bella Donna friends in the club room and had fun doing swoopy dances and “catch the bat, release the bat.”
Pierrot MajaBella Donna performing at the Vampire Ball
