The blue velvet skirt may look familiar - it's the one from my egyptian style dress. I still had so much of this blue velvet left that I decided to make another high-necked bodice and, playing pattern-teris once more, even squeezed in an evening bodice to go with the skirt. Always nice not having to change the entire outfit when a lady is busy plotting and solving mysteries!
Again the pattern of the day bodice follows the one I have already used several times - only this time I think I didn't add enough fabric for the button line, so the bodice fits very snugly, no chance of wearing it over a blouse as a jacket. Well, or maybe just a very thin blouse :D The buttons are, again, rather small and of a pale golden colour. The standing collar is only half the hight of the egyptian one's and closes with an additional hook and eye. It was the best solution for following the high-necked fashion of the 1880s and still show some lace underneath. And I'm still musing over additional decoration...
The pattern of the evening bodice is the one I had altered for the embroidered ballgown, the neckline this time being a little higher as there won't be any bertha and even for an evening gown it would have seemed too naked. That's also the reason why I added small sleeves roughly based on the pattern I used for the puffed sleeves of my white regency ballgown. The decoration will be black lace and beading once I find the time to go shopping.
The hat follows my new favourite pattern that I created in an hour of boredom because I couldn't find any decent pattern online.
Thursday, 28 January 2016
Wednesday, 30 December 2015
1880s ballgown of embroidered silk
This is kind of a "Scarlet"-dress in three ways: firstly, the main fabric actually was a curtain that, secondly, is Irish because I bought it in a little second-hand store near Dublin, and is, thirdly, scarlet ;) Not that I'd particularly like that pigheaded priss, so it'll rather be my Ireland-gown.
I miraculously found matching fabric for underskirt, lining and decoration immediately - that's good because a week ago I was given the date of our upcoming victorian ball, which is not far into January. So I hastily put aside the umpteen-thousand marguerites for February baroque and whisked that dress through the sewing machine. This is what the internet offered as inspiration:
As an option I even found perfectly matching trim in my neverending store!
I miraculously found matching fabric for underskirt, lining and decoration immediately - that's good because a week ago I was given the date of our upcoming victorian ball, which is not far into January. So I hastily put aside the umpteen-thousand marguerites for February baroque and whisked that dress through the sewing machine. This is what the internet offered as inspiration:
As an option I even found perfectly matching trim in my neverending store!
Thursday, 17 December 2015
Dark blue 1630s dress
Actually it was the second one I ever made, right after the red one. Dunno why I never mentioned it here. It's already served its purpose very well several times.
Here I went from the original design (that I wasn't too content with) to the design that's closer to the actual look of 1630s dresses. I altered the pattern to this trusty one that closes with hooks and eyes below the bust and has the typical flaps round the high waist. Only here I hadn't discovered yet that actually the skirt should be attached to the bodice beneath said flaps, so the skirt is still separate which has the disadvantage that if the flaps happen to move in a gust of wind or so, one can see the white chemise beneath. Plus worn as a winter version (as the skirt doesn't drag too much) with long gloves and a high-necked blouse, this area around the waist still becomes the least insulated part.
The sleeves are a little longer and fuller this time, and I found really nice, broad lace that has the perfect look. Ignore the limp curls - it was raining when we arrived at the park for our picknick, and curls don't go well with rain :P
And here the winter version with longer undersleeves, gloves, and hat. You can't see much of the costume here but I'm so proud of this pic because at last there's one in which I look really good! :D
Here I went from the original design (that I wasn't too content with) to the design that's closer to the actual look of 1630s dresses. I altered the pattern to this trusty one that closes with hooks and eyes below the bust and has the typical flaps round the high waist. Only here I hadn't discovered yet that actually the skirt should be attached to the bodice beneath said flaps, so the skirt is still separate which has the disadvantage that if the flaps happen to move in a gust of wind or so, one can see the white chemise beneath. Plus worn as a winter version (as the skirt doesn't drag too much) with long gloves and a high-necked blouse, this area around the waist still becomes the least insulated part.
The sleeves are a little longer and fuller this time, and I found really nice, broad lace that has the perfect look. Ignore the limp curls - it was raining when we arrived at the park for our picknick, and curls don't go well with rain :P
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© Iam NOther
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And here the winter version with longer undersleeves, gloves, and hat. You can't see much of the costume here but I'm so proud of this pic because at last there's one in which I look really good! :D
Baroque jewelry
Thankfully they used a lot of pearls back then, which are cheap and easy to come by if you content yourself with fake ones. And as I also tend to randomly buy all things that look baroque, I have a nice selection of jewelry parts that I can choose from when I design something. Here's an overview of pieces I put together either for my baroque jewelry-case or for sale in my webshop. Maybe you'll find something inspiring for your projects ;)
This is a design you often see in baroque pictures - those short necklaces made of large pearls with a medallion.
The white crystal set was made for the silver-grey renaissance dress (aka "winter dress"). I admit that I'm not 100% sure of this design's authenticity, but it certainly looked good ;) A similar set was made in blue with a medallion and matching earrings.
This is a design you often see in baroque pictures - those short necklaces made of large pearls with a medallion.
The white crystal set was made for the silver-grey renaissance dress (aka "winter dress"). I admit that I'm not 100% sure of this design's authenticity, but it certainly looked good ;) A similar set was made in blue with a medallion and matching earrings.
Wednesday, 25 November 2015
Cabochon jewelry
Pretty simple once you've gathered all the ingredients, like frame, glass, glue, and pictures. The glass covers come in flat and convex. If you're using convex covers, only choose landscapes, flowers or anything neutral as your motif. Portraits only go well (i.e. undistorted) with flat glass, and you don't want your fiancé at twice his breadth on your necklace ;)
The trickiest thing is to avoid bubbles of air when you glue the images to the glass. I find it easiest to put a generous dollop of glue on the flat side of the cabochon, press the picture onto the glue and wiggle it very gently until it has spread the glue all over the glass and lies down flat. Dry on a flat surface (some hours will be enough, I just leave mine overnight), cut away the excess paper and glue to the metal frame.
The simplest way of wearing them would be to attach them to a piece of satin ribbon or a slender metal chain, or you can attach them to any pearl or bead necklace, lace ruff (expecially for rococo), or whatever you fancy.
For a rose quartz version I also added a matching pendant, the beads are rose quartz and crystal.
A very nice thing is a two-faced version. Take two pieces of the same foundation style and very diligently glue them back to back with some jewellery glue so they're absolutely apposite. For the front picture, proceed as above, with a rounded cabochon and a nice picture. For the reverse side that is to remain hidden when worn, use a flat cabochon so the pendant won't turn but remain nice and tidy with the flat side down and the convex side up and you can keep your secret lover's picture nicely hidden ;) If you're in a hurry and there are no flat cabochons at hand, it also works well with a piece of clear plastic cut into shape to cover the picture.
The trickiest thing is to avoid bubbles of air when you glue the images to the glass. I find it easiest to put a generous dollop of glue on the flat side of the cabochon, press the picture onto the glue and wiggle it very gently until it has spread the glue all over the glass and lies down flat. Dry on a flat surface (some hours will be enough, I just leave mine overnight), cut away the excess paper and glue to the metal frame.
For a rose quartz version I also added a matching pendant, the beads are rose quartz and crystal.
A very nice thing is a two-faced version. Take two pieces of the same foundation style and very diligently glue them back to back with some jewellery glue so they're absolutely apposite. For the front picture, proceed as above, with a rounded cabochon and a nice picture. For the reverse side that is to remain hidden when worn, use a flat cabochon so the pendant won't turn but remain nice and tidy with the flat side down and the convex side up and you can keep your secret lover's picture nicely hidden ;) If you're in a hurry and there are no flat cabochons at hand, it also works well with a piece of clear plastic cut into shape to cover the picture.
Tuesday, 17 November 2015
Baroque spring dress
My baroque character's name is Marguerite. And the motto of the upcoming ball is spring. So what else is there to do than plan a dress decorated with marguerites! Lots of them! From small to big, strewn all over the dress like a shower of spring-blossoms. It definitely helped that my preferred fabric store suddenly had plenty of lace-marguerites on sale. Finding the right fabric was a more difficult story and involved driving an hour to another fabric store. Well, things you do for your art when you can't spent fortunes on the silk you'd like to buy...
The pattern is, once again, the 1660s-gown from Janet Arnold. No train this time, I don't want to drag the white flowers through the dust. Cleaning the hem will be tedious enough. Funnily the design looked better in my mind than it did once I laid out the flower design on the hemmed skirt. I already feared I'd have to ditch the whole idea. But as it's meant to be more of a show-off costume, I decided I can just as well go a little over the top. Mixing the big flowers with smaller ones also helped greatly to improve the overall impression. Btw the grey satin behind the green taffetta is the grey 1630s in the making. I worked on two dresses simultaneously.
The resulting 117 big and about thrice as many small flowers were carefully pinned to the fabric in a regular pattern, dense at the bottom and lighter the higher up it gets, to create the impression of a shower of blossoms over the whole skirt. They were sewn on during my bus journey to my favourite flea market, but the nice useless things I bought there are a different story. Let me just mention that I ended up carrying home two antique chairs. Among other things. By bus. After having carried them through the city doing more shopping. Fabric shopping...
As always with my costumes there was a not-completely-finished-yet beta-version that I rushed through the machine until five minutes before dashing off for the ball, unkempt, swearing, and with luggage for three. The flowers on the bodice are still missing, as are the ones along the edges of the sleeves, and though after three dresses I've finally figured out the best way of sewing on the hook and eye bands the cover fabric still has to be attached to the front closing by hand. And I ditched the idea of a new chemise completely. Marguerite lace next time... But the overall outcome was good enough so far, and nothing to be ashamed of ;)
The bodice is now decorated with small flowers along all the edges, plus little bouquets of bigger marguerites at the waist. Given the hoopskirt and the petticoat, gaining a little circumfence still won't harm the silhouette.
The chemise is the same pattern as all that go with my 1660s, the lace now taking up the flower motif of the skirt.
I even made a petticoat. Having this very fancy, almost stage-like dress I felt a light-green petticoat would round the whole thing off. Decorated with the remainders of the marguerites, as I bought too many of them, as always ;) The overskirt can now be taken up to reveal a bit of the light green petticoat that mirrors the sleeve lining. I'll have to re-use the colour combination for a victorian dress, with more of the light green, it's really nice but sadly doesn't fit me at all if worn on its own.
And the decorations... Of course there's plenty of artificial marguerites to put into my hairdo, I even found metal ones to adorn the hairpins with. And I remembered I had some bits of lace from my earlier sewing days, and the piece in the shape of a chain of little flowers fittet around my neck perfectly as a choker. Together with plenty of other jewelry for baroque opulence, of course, like the marguerite ring I bought in Paris (in these modern days a girl has to treat herself to some jewelry...) for, umm, well, not solely for this outfit but to a great degree. I fear now I've finally reached the point where I buy not only everything with a fleur-de-lys on it but also all things with marguerites! :D
The pattern is, once again, the 1660s-gown from Janet Arnold. No train this time, I don't want to drag the white flowers through the dust. Cleaning the hem will be tedious enough. Funnily the design looked better in my mind than it did once I laid out the flower design on the hemmed skirt. I already feared I'd have to ditch the whole idea. But as it's meant to be more of a show-off costume, I decided I can just as well go a little over the top. Mixing the big flowers with smaller ones also helped greatly to improve the overall impression. Btw the grey satin behind the green taffetta is the grey 1630s in the making. I worked on two dresses simultaneously.
The resulting 117 big and about thrice as many small flowers were carefully pinned to the fabric in a regular pattern, dense at the bottom and lighter the higher up it gets, to create the impression of a shower of blossoms over the whole skirt. They were sewn on during my bus journey to my favourite flea market, but the nice useless things I bought there are a different story. Let me just mention that I ended up carrying home two antique chairs. Among other things. By bus. After having carried them through the city doing more shopping. Fabric shopping...
As always with my costumes there was a not-completely-finished-yet beta-version that I rushed through the machine until five minutes before dashing off for the ball, unkempt, swearing, and with luggage for three. The flowers on the bodice are still missing, as are the ones along the edges of the sleeves, and though after three dresses I've finally figured out the best way of sewing on the hook and eye bands the cover fabric still has to be attached to the front closing by hand. And I ditched the idea of a new chemise completely. Marguerite lace next time... But the overall outcome was good enough so far, and nothing to be ashamed of ;)
The bodice is now decorated with small flowers along all the edges, plus little bouquets of bigger marguerites at the waist. Given the hoopskirt and the petticoat, gaining a little circumfence still won't harm the silhouette.
The chemise is the same pattern as all that go with my 1660s, the lace now taking up the flower motif of the skirt.
I even made a petticoat. Having this very fancy, almost stage-like dress I felt a light-green petticoat would round the whole thing off. Decorated with the remainders of the marguerites, as I bought too many of them, as always ;) The overskirt can now be taken up to reveal a bit of the light green petticoat that mirrors the sleeve lining. I'll have to re-use the colour combination for a victorian dress, with more of the light green, it's really nice but sadly doesn't fit me at all if worn on its own.
And the decorations... Of course there's plenty of artificial marguerites to put into my hairdo, I even found metal ones to adorn the hairpins with. And I remembered I had some bits of lace from my earlier sewing days, and the piece in the shape of a chain of little flowers fittet around my neck perfectly as a choker. Together with plenty of other jewelry for baroque opulence, of course, like the marguerite ring I bought in Paris (in these modern days a girl has to treat herself to some jewelry...) for, umm, well, not solely for this outfit but to a great degree. I fear now I've finally reached the point where I buy not only everything with a fleur-de-lys on it but also all things with marguerites! :D
Thursday, 22 October 2015
Early baroque dress of grey satin
I have four dresses I need for certain plays next year. So it's no wonder I start working on a fifth that I don't really need...
Again it's gonna be a 1630s gown, this time extra-long as you see in the paintings. No lace this time but the typical english ruff for the sleeves and a very fine but plain white collar. The truth is that I was unable to find perfectly matching lace despite my considerable collection. So I'm planning something like this only in a warm grey.
In the meantime I also decided that I would wear this dress to a small historic ball come week. Self-motivation and all... The skirt turned out a little much too long, at least for a ball, and only while putting the bodice together I realized that I had forgotten to make the required changes to the pattern after I had discovered a couple of small faults in it already while making the last 1630s dress. So no new underdress for the upcoming ball, only for the one in spring where I'm planning to wear the same dress only with different decoration. So many balls this season, the comtesse's seamstress is a little stressed! :D
Compared to the light-blue 1630s, I shortened the flaps and the stomacher a bit. Next time I'll try one without any flaps at all and a laced front closing, like in this picture. But this will involve some more research, so the grey one just has my trusty hook-and-eye closing over a stomach piece. Plus a couple of ribbons for later, maybe, whatever I'll find in my boxes. As it was actually meant as a day dress, not as a ball gown, there's not much decoration. The motto of the ball was "cabinet of wonder" and we were asked to have some interesting decoration, so I took some inspiration from the palaces I visited this summer. Due to time's fast pace (damn, I'll never get used to that!) I threw all plans overboard to make some shell decoration in mute colour for the first (small) ball and some bright red-coral decoration for the next, bigger one. (And there's people who say I wear my dresses just once, tsktsktsk... ;) ) Anyhow, I was unable to find my collection of shells so I decided to do some pearl decoration. The irregularly shaped ones for the tiara were surprisingly expensive so I switched to faux corals already for the small ball (which was good because I realized I'm already tied up for the grand one anyway) and had a splendid micture of red and white corals with shell jewelry borrowed from my flatmate. Sometimes it's great not to live alone, against my usual disposition :D
Despite me looking surprisingly great that evening the camera didn't like me and the pics turned out horrid, so I'll add decent pictures later that I don't have to be ashamed of...
Again it's gonna be a 1630s gown, this time extra-long as you see in the paintings. No lace this time but the typical english ruff for the sleeves and a very fine but plain white collar. The truth is that I was unable to find perfectly matching lace despite my considerable collection. So I'm planning something like this only in a warm grey.
In the meantime I also decided that I would wear this dress to a small historic ball come week. Self-motivation and all... The skirt turned out a little much too long, at least for a ball, and only while putting the bodice together I realized that I had forgotten to make the required changes to the pattern after I had discovered a couple of small faults in it already while making the last 1630s dress. So no new underdress for the upcoming ball, only for the one in spring where I'm planning to wear the same dress only with different decoration. So many balls this season, the comtesse's seamstress is a little stressed! :D
Compared to the light-blue 1630s, I shortened the flaps and the stomacher a bit. Next time I'll try one without any flaps at all and a laced front closing, like in this picture. But this will involve some more research, so the grey one just has my trusty hook-and-eye closing over a stomach piece. Plus a couple of ribbons for later, maybe, whatever I'll find in my boxes. As it was actually meant as a day dress, not as a ball gown, there's not much decoration. The motto of the ball was "cabinet of wonder" and we were asked to have some interesting decoration, so I took some inspiration from the palaces I visited this summer. Due to time's fast pace (damn, I'll never get used to that!) I threw all plans overboard to make some shell decoration in mute colour for the first (small) ball and some bright red-coral decoration for the next, bigger one. (And there's people who say I wear my dresses just once, tsktsktsk... ;) ) Anyhow, I was unable to find my collection of shells so I decided to do some pearl decoration. The irregularly shaped ones for the tiara were surprisingly expensive so I switched to faux corals already for the small ball (which was good because I realized I'm already tied up for the grand one anyway) and had a splendid micture of red and white corals with shell jewelry borrowed from my flatmate. Sometimes it's great not to live alone, against my usual disposition :D
Despite me looking surprisingly great that evening the camera didn't like me and the pics turned out horrid, so I'll add decent pictures later that I don't have to be ashamed of...
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