Middle [school] ages

In a year 9 history elective my class decided to have a medieval lunch. Due to my internet-ly wanderings at that time I had just discovered the concept of ‘historical accuracy’. I decided I wanted an accurate costume and couldn’t possibly wear the supposedly ‘medieval’ hot pink satin ‘frog princess’ costume my mother had previously made for me to wear to a birthday party.

Frog Princess

So I sought out a pattern for a sideless surcoat outfit (Burda 7977), bought some cotton poplin and embarked on the project. At the time it seemed like such a huge project. I had a week to make it – but it was a week when we were out every night.  Fortunately it’s not a complex outfit and I was able to follow the pattern as is (a very rare occurrence). Only the godets caused some grief. Godets were a new concept at the time for both myself and my mum and I had to redo them several times. Now I know to sew them differently from the pattern instructions (one should attach godets before sewing the side seams).

The outfit was ready to wear on the day, albeit unhemmed; Mum made the hat while I was at school and dropped it off just before lunch. 

This was my first attempt at a deliberate, accurate costume and I have never looked back.

This costume has since been worn to birthday parties and medieval festivals and has been a visual aid in class presentations. I’ve grown so used to it that it has migrated out of my costume wardrobe to be mixed-and-matched with my everyday wardrobe. 

Of course this is perfectly normal uni wear.  What do you mean it’s 700 years out of fashion?

I have since accumulated quite a collection of early medieval cotton garments. I made outfits for the doctor and lady-in-waiting for a scene from Macbeth in English class (I do that). These are both essentially lengthened t-shirts. I tried to use trims that looked like weaving if you squinted at them from a distance, and the one on the brown robe kind-of does. Lady Macbeth wore the cream dress (above) without the surcoat.

More recently I used the Burda 7977 pattern to make an everyday dress. I adapted the sleeve pattern into bell sleeves and I was very happy with how they turned out. This pattern has surprisingly agreeable sleeves and I use them when I have to add long sleeves to other patterns.

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.

In Raptures over vintage clothes

The fabric I used for my first 40s dress was really lovely so when I found it in a different colour and print I bought enough to make another dress. This time I decided to complement the patterned fabric with a plain fabric for the waistband and cuffs and a contrast piping. I also adapted the dress design to have a peaked waistband and the bodice gathered into a yoke, rather than the shoulder seam.

The too-short zip problem is solved by having a V-shaped back neckline.

Since the waistband on this dress was clearly visible, I had to make sure both sides matched up at the zip.

The waistband peak is topstitched by hand. I was trying to use backstitch, but I think it came out as some kind of elongated stem stitch. The hand stitching adds a nice texture, I think.

This pattern is proving dependable and adaptable. I have one more version currently half made but no more planned. These dresses go together very quickly which is gratifying but I’ve finished uni now so it’s time to tackle more complex projects. I am very glad to be going into summer with a wardrobe that, when I wake up thinking ‘I want to look like Bioshock today’, can now supply me with something appropriate.

All good girls gather dresses

I really like the 40s style dress I made recently, so I patterned up a few different bodice designs and started making more.

A few weeks ago I posted about my planned projects for the rest of the year. That plan did not include a handful of 40s dresses. But it’s exam time, so I needed some simple projects for study breaks. And I’m not over Bioshock yet.

I overlooked this fabric in the stash last time I searched because I didn’t think there was sufficient of it for anything I would make but turns out there was just enough for this dress.

The darts give just the right shape.

I added darts at the waist and shoulder, placed very wrongly I’m sure, and changed the neckline to take a Peter Pan collar I filched from an 80s dress pattern. I also put side seams in the waistband to make it more fitted. I couldn’t find a fabric I liked for piping so I left these cuffs unpiped, just to be different.

I really liked the method of pleating I used for the sleeves, although I think the pleats probably should be brought forward a bit more. The pattern said to use a gathering thread but I always find that gathering gives you very uneven sleeves – not only because it is hard to gather evenly but always having fabric on the left of the sewing machine means one sleeve’s gathers are pushed to the front while the other’s are pushed to the back.

I am not happy with the invisible zip. On my old sewing machine I could get close enough to the fold of the zip for it to actually be hidden. The foot on my new machine keeps the needle further away (admittedly saving a few broken needles) but results in an ugly zip line down the back of the dress. It’s thinner than an exposed zip but really! I use invisible zips to avoid this. I had to leave a gap between the top of the zip and the neckline because I couldn’t find any invisible zips that were long enough.

That zip is not invisible!

I made this dress after a really hectic day at work – a good day but so busy! So I came home and made a dress to unwind. By the time I went to bed all it needed was hemming. The dress turned out really nicely. I used a lot of new techniques and equipment that I learnt about at the sewing classes I took a few weeks ago (I love my sleeve roll and tailor’s ham) and I think the quality of my sewing has definitely improved. The finishing let me down however, because the beginner course didn’t cover things like collars or zips, so they are still done in my made up way which is functional but not neat.

We all make choices, but in the end our choices make us make clothes

With sewing lessons booked, I decided to put all sewing projects on hold until I had completed the lessons but halfway through the course I couldn’t bear it any more. So on a Friday night, after having handed in a uni assignment during the day, I decided I must have a new dress now and started scouring the pattern boxes and the stash.

I wanted something 1940s style, particularly in the vein of this dress:

Source

My sudden interest in 1940s dresses came about because for the last few months I have been playing through the Bioshock series of video games. The first two games are set in the 60s but in a city that isolated itself from the rest of the world in the 40s, so the styling of the place is more reminiscent of the earlier time. Fiction I consume tends to make it to my wardrobe almost as fast as it gets to my brain, so after a few hours of starting at a computer game full of 40s clothes I began staring at my cupboard wondering why there weren’t any there. I wanted some 40s-style dresses of an everyday, utilitarian kind, which is bizarre because I am usually all about the extravagant.

My pattern search turned up very little that was useful but I did find a 1970s bias cut 4-gore skirt pattern that was nice and picked one of the blouse patterns fairly arbitrarily – probably for the sake of the sleeves. The drawings on the front make it look alright but it really is horribly sack-like.

I spent the evening making a mock-up and adapting the pattern. In the bodice, I added pleats to the waist, gathers to the shoulder seams, changed the neckline and swapped the button up front for a zip in the back. I also made the back more fitted by tracing from this tunic which fits me very nicely.

This meant adding fabric in the shoulder area and losing a fair bit in the waist. The changes were all done by draping the mock-up which I then took apart and traced back onto the pattern. I have since been assured that this is very much The Wrong Way to do things and that centre back seams should be straight. This is why I’m having lessons. That said, it still worked although perhaps doesn’t sit as nicely as it could. The skirt I left as it was except that for the waistband I just cut a strip of fabric to my measurements and gathered the back skirts and bodice to fit it (they didn’t need to be gathered much). By 1.30am I had a mock-up I was happy with.

On Saturday, after spending the morning doing assignments, I bought fabric, washed fabric and cut fabric. The fabric I got is a printed homespun. It has a much nicer texture than other ‘homespun’ fabric I have used – I think it might be brushed. It also didn’t crinkle after washing which is very pleasing.

I sewed Saturday night and Sunday Morning but was foiled in my attempts to finish the dress on the weekend by lack of an invisible zipper foot for my new machine. I bought one on Monday and finished the dress. I had a false start with the hem because I decided to be different and actually look at the pattern instructions which recommended a 1¼" turn up finished with bias. I did this and it looked awful. So I have redone it with my usual method of a small double fold hemmed by hand.

I like this dress. So do other people, apparently – it’s done fairly well in the random compliment stakes. And someone took one look at me and said "40s dress" so I think I succeeded stylistically. Another time I would put side seams in the waistband to give it shape but otherwise I would leave it largely as is. Of course, when I make this style of dress again I will probably adjust other things for variety but I am very happy with this dress.

Anniversary thoughts

I have now, as of September, been costuming for 10 years. At the start of the year, when I finished my Eowyn costume, I found myself reassessing my hobby. The last few things I’ve made I have been really happy with and proud of what I’ve achieved but they still weren’t as good as I wanted. I am aware that nothing ever will be – but, while over the last 10 years I’ve watched my standard of work constantly improve, at the beginning of this year it seemed to have plateaued.

I’ve felt a need to ‘level up’ my sewing before. At the first Jane Austen festival I went to I was inspired by the quality of the other costumer’s work, including these two bloggers. After that I started doing little things, like pressing seams during construction, which add so much to the final look of a garment and my quality of work improved significantly in that period.

One of my favourite things about costuming is the constant learning. With every costume you have to acquire new skills and improve your techniques. But at the start of this year it seemed to me that I was no longer doing that. My work was good but I consistently had fitting problems. I was also taking too much time and too many mock-ups to create a pattern through a guess and check method. I was sure there were better ways to do things but I seemed to have reached the limit of what I could teach myself. “I’ll just have to give it up” I thought to myself. I don’t think I ever seriously considered that – I love sewing too much – but I needed to find away to continue to improve.

These are my planned projects (subject to change at any time, etc) that I’m excited to keep improving my skills with:

At the same time, people were beginning to ask me to give them lessons or make costumes for them. Lessons were a bit awkward because while I definitely can sew I don’t have any verified techniques or knowledge to pass on. Commissioned work also posed a problem because while I didn’t want to work for free I also wasn’t comfortable with charging by the hour when I was using techniques that were inefficient timewise. I also didn’t want to charge a lot for work that wasn’t finished in a professional manner. Which, given the time cost to me that a commission represents, made significant projects for others not something I could do.

I have not done any sewing for a few months. But this is not despair – it is hope! In July I enrolled in sewing lessons but they didn’t start until the end of September so I decided to put off all projects until after the lessons so that I could use my new skills to make my costumes as good as possible. (It was also really convenient – I spent that time either being sick or desperately trying to catch up on uni because I had been sick, and benefited from not having my brain trying to figure out a sewing project as well.)

I have been excitedly looking forward to the course since I enrolled, greatly confusing everyone I told about it who all looked weirdly at me and said ‘but you can already sew’. But I knew I would learn better, more effective ways to sew and I couldn’t wait. I am starting in the beginner class but that doesn’t mean it’s all easy or just going over things I know. It’s ‘beginner’ - not as in simplified but as in these are the proper, professional foundational techniques that you need to know first, before you learn the other ones. I’m nearly finished the first class in the series and I have learned so much. I’ve also bought so much – the first lesson was on useful tools.

Loot!

We Could be the Same

One of the weird things about costuming is how while you’re working on a project it can be completely consuming but after it’s finished it can just disappear completely. This is why it is important to photograph projects. I was looking through my photos a while back and got a shock to see these dresses because I had completely forgotten I made them.

Actually, that’s not completely true. I remember doing the painting. I know I spent a summer carefully painting these designs on a table with a lamp under it with a recording of Eurovision 2010 playing over and over again in the background. But that’s it. All the construction memories had gone and even the painting memory wasn’t attached to a particular project, just Eurovision.

(Suggested listening here. Or here if your musical tastes tend to calmer)

A long time ago I made a Barbie as the Island Princess costume for one of my cousins. A year or so later I had a request for two Barbie outfits so they could have one each. This time the costumes were from Barbie and the Three Musketeers.

 The short, sparkly skirts were easy – one seam, elastic and hem.

According to my notes, for the bodices I used Vogue 7845. (My notes don’t say a lot else, unfortunately.) As with the Island Princess dress I decided to have fabric over the shoulder for inset sleeves rather than having the dress held up by semi-detached sleeves. Because the necklines were annoying enough as it was I didn’t want to have to deal with having them open and close. Instead I made the bodice closure using a trick I’d learnt from a princess bodice I found in an opshop: put the zip in upside down.

By far the biggest challenge of this project was the painting. Each dress in the Barbie Musketeer series had its own skirt design repeat and bodice design repeat. As ever, I wanted to be accurate so I had to recreate these. I also decided to correct the off-centeredness of the patterns found on the dolls used in the promo photos I was using as a reference.

To make the patterns I spent a lot of time fiddling with autoshapes and curled clipart in PowerPoint (PowerPoint is an excellent graphics manipulation program).

This was the result, for the bodice and the skirt front:

 

We printed it out full size and I’m not sure what happened next. I know I painted by tracing something, probably a drawing based on of the printout but with the lines curved correctly and the swirls the right length (the computer design was mostly for scale and placement). I suspect I used a seperate set of transparencies for each colour and traced over these. As with all freehand designs I got my mum to draw out the tracing guide because I am not neat enough. 

For the purple stomacher I printed out a photo of the doll bodice at A4 size which was blurry but the pattern was visible. Mum drew it for me on plain paper and we photocopied it onto a transparency I could paint over. 

Mum also drew out the skirt design for me. The doll dress has kind-of glowy pink bits in the dress panel and I managed to find a gorgeous satin that had the look of being softly dyed with different shades.

Here are the finished results:

 

 

 

This was the project where I discovered fabric paint which turned out to be a very useful discovery. In particular, the gold bottle which I bought for this dress has served me very well.

The skirts are all lined with gold satin and close with hooks and bars.

Completed dresses:

 

(Please excuse the crumples – the dresses had been in a suitcase for two days.)

Barbie belongs to Mattel