Origin story

This year marks 10 years since I started costuming.

The story actually starts a bit earlier, when I was about 3. My mum used to sew a lot of clothes for me so I was very familiar with the sewing machine. I was allowed to use it (electricity off – handwheel only) and I set out to make an "Indian costume".

So I suppose this was actually my first costume.

Around the same age I requested a purple dress 'down to the ground'. The dress did have to be taken up a little because I kept tripping on it, but it was The Beginning.

Extravagance!

I played dress-up a lot as a child, haunting second hand shops for interesting clothes. Star Wars was a particularly popular subject. Somehow, my later choice of costuming as a hobby still managed to take all of us by surprise.

Princess Leia you can probably recognise, the other is Sabé from The Phantom Menace.
I have not sewn a Star Wars costume yet. I don't know why this is.

I did a little bit of embroidery when I was 11 but mostly sewing remained mum’s domain until I was 12 and discovered that the sewing machine could be turned on. It had a light! And it could go fast! I made some clothes for my favourite soft toy and then started on cushions. That was a mistake; lots of cushions take up far too much space.

Some of the cushions I made.

In 2005 my best friend had a dress up party for her 14th birthday. I decided I wanted to make a flapper costume. Mum did most of the work to develop the pattern and cut the material but I sewed all the seams myself. Mum hand-sewed the feather boa on in the office of an osteopath (I had an appointment before the party) where it left a lot of feathers. I got changed there and walked out in costume.

I started spending a lot of time on the costuming part of the internet and discovered, mostly through Koshka-the-cat and her connections, that 'costuming' was an actual thing that people did.

The next few years had multiple dress-up events that I wanted to do properly and while I was turning school assignments into dresses I found that sewing was a thing I really enjoyed. Instead of sewing in order to get clothes I wanted, my focus has long been making clothes that I want to sew. I really enjoy the challenge and learning opportunities from this hobby. My "genre" of focus has changed a lot over the time I’ve been sewing: historical, fictional, original designs, corsetry, 'real clothes'... There’s always something new and interesting to explore.