Some Old Costumes

Well, in going through my pictures of past costumes, most of them end up disappointing me. While I was quite delighted with them at the time, they're well below the level of fitting, finishing, and embellishing that I would insist on today. Which of course is fine -- we are talking about patterns I made 10 or more years ago. So rather than giving them each their own post, I'll lump a couple together at a time.

I called the first one here my Evenstar dress. Now, I believe I conceptualized this costume well before the Lord of the Rings movies came out (I was always a huge Tolkien fan) so I'm a little amused at some of the similarities in styles compared to the costumes for Arwen Evenstar in the movie. (I should note that I've since created another Evenstar dress, specifically based on the movie costumes, but I'll give that one its own post. I need to get some proper pictures of it anyway.)

Anyway, the dress was basically me just following the McCall's pattern 3010 (making it a whole size smaller, because good lord, McCalls patterns were huge at the time. Maybe they still are, but I no longer use them at all because of too many bad fitting experiences when I was younger).

Ruffler Foot

Okay, today's project is to turn this:



into this:


It doesn't seem like a lot, but I've got something like 25 yards of this stuff, and to do that by hand would be a headache at the very least. Not to worry, though, because at the last Creativ Festival (I'll need to write an entry about that sometime) I bought myself a ruffler foot!

Puffy, pink, and pretty!

Okay, so one of the major projects in the back of my mind is the pink masquerade dress from the Phantom of the Opera movie.




It's huge, and pink, and lacy. For the most part, I generally don't wear huge, pink, and lacy - I was all about pink when I was small, and then I ended up getting what I wished for which was a room entirely made of pink: pink carpet, walls, pale pink ceiling and window trim, pink bedding, pink vanity,pink-stained desk. I got over pink at that point.

But this dress -- it would make me so happy that it's something I would probably secretly wear to do housework. You know, if it wasn't big enough to make going through doorways nigh-impossible.

Gypsy

The first bunch of costumes that I made I didn't take any pictures of until they were done. Looking back, I wish I had, as there's always a new lesson to take from each project, and in every case there are tiny little painstaking details that no one ever sees in the finished project, but that I just had to do because I can't do things halfway. Nonetheless, I have my finished pictures and I can detail the things I remember about them.


My gypsy costume didn't really have a lot of sewing to it -- in fact the only piece that I sewed was the blouse, and that was already made up for my wench costume. I did actually sew myself into the top whenever I wore it though -- it had a tendency to ride up over my shoulders otherwise. So I wore a strapless bra and tacked it in four places to the bra when I needed to get ready.