Thinking inside the box

A few weeks ago I decided enough was enough. It wasn’t good enough to have patterns all over the place – some in boxes in the sewing room, others in a basket in the spare bedroom and some in drawers. Whenever someone wanted a pattern they had to look in every spot (assuming they could remember all of them). If you asked my mum, she would tell you that the patterns were divided between her patterns and my patterns but if you asked me I would say the split was between ‘real clothes’ and costumes.  These two divisions almost matched but differed enough to make everything hard to find.

I googled how other people stored their patterns and found that some people have not very many patterns and other people have patterns that are all the same size, and some people have more dedication than I do, either to organisation or interior design. I decided new furniture was not an option but that a labelled set of boxes had potential.

I looked briefly at buying boxes but they were mostly outside my budget and didn’t come in useful sizes. The plastic boxes didn’t even have straight sides – not so great for storing envelopes, which do.

Copier paper boxes proved to be the right size. They were easy to accumulate as our various workplaces go through lots of paper and have no use for the boxes. However, these boxes are ugly and the different brands don't match. I’ve seen some people online who make lovely decorative storage items and I was briefly tempted to try something similar. But I decided this would slow down the organisation process considerably – I was already fed up with the state of things – and that I am not crafty or neat enough to produce something I would be happy with. So I decided to cover the boxes with black contact which would be easy to do and wouldn’t visually clutter the room. Of course Kmart ran out of black contact before I had enough boxes covered ...

The next step was working out how to divide the patterns. There are so many options: type of garment, type of wearer and ‘genre’.  And each division should be near, but not quite the capacity of one box. To solve this problem I sorted the patterns on a grid:

x-Axis: Men’s clothes, children’s clothes, complete outfits, outerwear, dresses, skirts & pants,  tops, accessories

y-Axis: Normal clothes, ‘real clothes’ (which would be costumes to anyone else), fantasy costumes, historical costumes

The final categories are:

• Women’s Tops, Bottoms and Two-Piece outfits
• Women’s Dresses, Vests and Outerwear
• Women’s Fantasy Costumes
• Women’s Historical Dresses and Outfits
• Women’s Historical Underpinnings, Outerwear and Accessories
• Men’s Fantasy and Historical Costumes
• Children’s Real Clothes
• Children’s Fantasy and Historical Costumes

The boxes are the right size to have standard pattern envelopes neatly in a row down one side while the large envelopes and zip-lock bags can lie along the other side.

I don’t have a box for the historical costumes yet and I suspect they will need a different type of box, given that the patterns are much bigger and bulkier than any of the others.

This project is part of a larger effort to neaten the sewing room (and the spare bedroom that it frequently spills into). Most of the flat surfaces are done, just under the table and the sewing machine cabinets to go. Since we now have two new sewing machines, the cabinets are undergoing major rearrangement – and changing hands.  

The room is so much nicer without large plastic containers lying around and cluttering the floor. And last week, when I needed a certain kind of bodice pattern I knew exactly where to look for it. So I am declaring this organisation scheme a success. 

We share the glory of our victories

And here’s the last Assassin’s Creed costume: a Brotherhood outfit for my dad.

Last time I posted about this outfit I had finished the jerkin and hood. The doublet took longer because it is made of 64 pieces. For instance, there are 6 tiny pieces in each lower sleeve cap.

I used several different techniques to join the pieces in order to look as close as possible to the references. (Topstitching with zig-zag turned up a lot.)

 Shown here: bound and topstitched, straight-stitch topstitching, and zig-zag topstitching.

I had been planning to line the doublet, but in the end I decided to have a red facing only on the collar. Any more would have been unnecessary bulk.

The fit of the doublet was disappointing. The muslin I made fit properly but the real thing ended up being too big, and I’m not sure why. And fixing it would be very complicated. Thankfully, the original is not a closely fitted garment and the sash holds it together. (Actually, I haven’t made the sash yet – how I make it will depend on how I decide to make the insignia for the belt. The sash in these photos is just leftover fabric)

To get the decorative design down the side of the cape I didn’t even consider hand embroidery! I found a trim at Lincraft that worked perfectly.

I haven't made the leather attachments for the capes yet, but I plan to work on that later in the year.

I made both our undershirts at once, assembly line style.

Mass producing cuffs.

All the cuffs do up with small Dorset buttons left over from the Lucy costume I made earlier in the year.

Dad’s shirt has a ruffled collar which I made with cartridge pleating. My test run worked, but wasn’t quite right so I opted to be lazy and sew it down by machine. If I figure out a better way of constructing it I might redo it more carefully.

Overall, I was very happy I got to make this. Working out how to put it all together was a great challenge which I enjoyed. However, in this, and several other outfits I’ve made recently, I have not been as successful at achieving the desired fitting as I would like to be, especially when working from measurements. Even though I would like it to be a bit better, it has turned out fine and I’m happy with it and Dad is very pleased with it.

Assassin’s Creed belongs to Ubisoft.

You had plans, and look where that got you

I had a plan for sewing this year. It would ensure everything was done in time for deadlines, avoid ‘busy’ times of Real Life and give me a feeling of accomplishment for use whenever I was stressed.

• The assassins would be finished sewing by the end of 2014 (tick – finished at 3am on the 31st).
• Eowyn, a ‘quick’ and ‘easy’ costume, would be done by the end of January.
• Before Uni went back at the end of February I would have fitted the patterns for my Regency dresses for JAFA and got a fair bit of the sewing out of the way.
• March would have been spent finishing the JAFA outfits well ahead of the April event.

What actually happened was I finished Eowyn at the start of March.

Then, starting on my regency outfits, I discovered that my bodiced petticoat gave me terrible backache. I tried it on for 10 minutes and was still sore 3 hours later. I don’t know how I survived at JAFAs past. My short stays are just as bad – which I suspect is why I still thought the petticoat was an improvement; and it was definitely better in terms of bulk under the dress.

So step one was not fitting dress mock-ups but rather new underpinnings. I tried to adjust the bodiced petticoat but I couldn’t work out a way to fix the problem. I believe the pain came from the straps being too short, but if they were made longer the bodice no longer stayed in the right spot. So I’ve spent the last few weeks patterning and making long stays.  I will need a new chemise to go with the new stays but I don’t have time to make one now. I will have to make do with a bulky old one or perhaps my slimline 1913 petticoat.

Another complication was the expiry of my sewing machine. In 2008 I inherited my great aunt’s 1976 Husqvarna 2000. Aunty Gladys had been a keen sewer and wanted her machine to go to whomever of her relatives showed an interest in sewing. That machine served me very well but at its last service I was told it was broken beyond repair. So not only was I behind on my plan, I had to research and buy a new machine. I was able to use my mother’s machine for the majority of the sewing on Eowyn and the stays but needing to get my own new sewing machine was another thing niggling at the back of my mind. Last week I bought a Brother NV610 so sewing life is getting back to normal.

Now that I have a sewing machine and my stays are nearly finished, I have finally got to the ‘fit and make two regency dresses’ part of my plan. Except now I have two weeks instead of two months. My original plans were for a ball gown from a fashion plate and an evening ensemble of my own design. I am preparing myself for the likelihood that these may not happen. But the Uni holidays are coming up and I have made regency clothes before so I have hope… We’ll see what happens.

We are the architects of our own outfits

Summer holidays are great. When Uni finished I finally got to spend a significant amount of time (and brainpower, which is actually the more important thing) on the remaining assassin costumes. (A post on the brotherhood costume will come soon. I’ll stick to my Assassin’s Creed II costume for this post.)

Once I had decided to paint and use braid instead of embroidery, the skirts and then the whole costume went together very quickly. 

There’s a bit too much contrast between the braid and paint, but it’s still infinitely preferable to finishing in two years’ time with poor embroidery.

The tunic does up with Dorset buttons, because they looked just like the picture.

 Here are the slashed sleeves:

When I made the sleeve pattern I went through many iterations until I finally got one which sat the right way. On the finished product one sleeve sits right and the other not so well, which I find exceedingly annoying (and other people probably find exceedingly invisible).

Here’s the hood:

This I think is as good as it could be (the in-game hoods are not made of real fabric). I didn’t lose the tiny beak pieces, which is a win, although there were a few games of hide and seek around the sewing room. My original plan was to make the hood removable, but instead I constructed it as a separate piece and attached it to the tunic at the front points and the centre back. Wearing the hood gives you horrendous visibility; for most of the photo-shoot I couldn’t see above knee-level (which made it very had to look in the direction mum was pointing).

I cannot see a thing.

So, not the best uniform for aiming or fighting or climbing or jumping…

Usually I make costumes that don’t involve trousers but I had to make pants for this costume. Actually, this is one of two costumes I made pants for last year. Both times I went to mum for help and she did most of the patterning. Making these trousers was no fun. Actually that’s not quite true. At the very beginning they were great. You sew this bit and this bit and here and tada! it looks like a garment in no time at all, and all that is left to go are the hems and - wait, no, it doesn’t fit and also looks bad. I spent the rest of the afternoon taking them apart over and over again. They fit now, but they don’t look great.

Since taking these pictures I’ve bought taller boots, so even less of the pants will be visible.

One of these days, I’m going to have to learn how to make pants properly myself. More enjoyable (and successful) was making Dorset buttons that aren’t white to go with them.

The other undergarment for this outfit is a shirt. Mine is made of cotton lawn and constructed, mostly, out of rectangles. The shirt is so comfortable I don’t know why this isn’t a standard feature of modern loungewear. (Probably because loungewear isn’t a thing nowadays.) Ezio has on odd curved seam in his sleeve that I had to try to match. 

It took some finagling to get the collar to sit at the right angle but it worked out in the end. The shirt closes with lacing through hand-bound eyelets. These are the first hand-bound eyelets I’ve done and I was exceedingly pleased with how they look, although I will need to work on my technique so that I can get the holes big enough to take something other than thin string.

I’m calling this costume finished for the moment, but I plan to start work on the leather pieces and weaponry later in the year after I’ve made my dresses for the upcoming Jane Austen festival.

Assassin’s Creed belongs to Ubisoft.

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

"I can ride and wield blade"

The bodice of Eowyn’s riding outfit is made of a green fabric and quilted with gold thread. The bodice has gold buttons down the centre front and smaller gold buttons from wrist to elbow on the sleeves.  The bodice quilting is invisible on the DVD version of the film, but a glimpse of it can be seen at the bottom edge of the following photo:

  A rare in-focus glimpse of this costume.

The cowl and lower edge of the bodice are trimmed with a floral tape. The cowl and sleeves appear to be brown velvet, and the sleeves have a gold floral pattern.  

I made my bodice out of green twill, thin wadding and lined with the leftovers from my 1879 gown. This fabric was ideal for the lining because it has a diamond pattern that I used as a guide for the quilting.

I based my pattern on Vogue 8323 (which is a knit pattern, but it worked). I adapted it to open at the centre front with an overlapped opening. The bodice closes with clips – I had no interest in sewing a dozen buttonholes through all those layers of fabric and wadding.

I sewed each layer of the bodice together separately before layering and quilting. To avoid having bulky seams on the wadding layer I cut the pieces out without seam allowances and zigzagged them together with the edges meeting.

 There was a lot of quilting and it took several days to do it all.

I need to thank my mother for letting me use her sewing machine for this project. My sewing machine was exhausted by the end of last year and is currently having a well deserved holiday at the sewing machine servicing place. This outfit has been entirely sewn on my mother’s Janome, which was the machine I learned to sew on.

My sleeves and cowl will be made from a stretch panne velvet; the sort of fabric I would usually cringe to use. However it looked just right for this costume, was available and affordable, and this particular one has been much easier to use than panne velvets I have used in the past. I added the gold decoration to the sleeves with fabric paint – the leaves are stamped and the flowers were painted freehand.

I want to report that I managed to put both sleeves in properly first time :-). 

I have been unable to find the floral trim for this outfit. I have searched every fabric shop I know of in Canberra, a few interstate, and etsy. I even went to The Other Side of Town (for non-Canberrans: that’ a half-hour drive away and is considered a day-trip, made once a year at most).

Have you seen this trim?

Here is the bodice in its current state:

The Lord of the Rings images belong to New Line Cinema.