The vampire bat/halloween costume (again)

She sews! Okay. So today in church (well highschool youth group for me) they announced that they'd be doing SOMETHING for the highschoolers for halloween, of course that made me think "I'll go just so I can wear a costume!" This costume, of course. It's really THE costume for halloween. So I got cracking tonight (before the weekend ends).

The peplum, just off the dress. It kinda got shaken as I took the other parts of the dress off to hem them, and I wanted pics.... The length that the peplum hangs is that fold line on the side; see it? I'm terrified to cut the peplum down yet, though, I need a fitting first, with my corset and everything.

My mum found my missing spiderweb fabric, yay, it was hidden in the family room.... note kid toy.

Here's the tag that's been on my wing pannels so I won't get them mixed up with my other fabric. (I can sense people saying "What? Wing pannels? She never said anything about wing pannels!")

The short little chemise I'm not going to wear, in favor of a standard black cami! Because a cami is so much more practical!

My skirt without all those hangings.

...And finally my wig on somebody! She works, right?!?!






See? What a cute widdle munkee.

The wig should work quite nicely, I think, once I style it with fabric scraps and riboon. And maybe a haircut. Oh and curlers and gel and aquanet..... hehe

Note knitting and exersise bike, the latter of which belongs to my mother.

Actually the wig is quite small and managable WHEN it is in a net.

So my next part was wings! I was planning to use orange and black ribbons to tie the wings onto my arms, but didn't want to cut into my ribbon yet unless it turned out wrong. I messed around for a while, trying to figure out what to do for practice, when I went "Right! Hair ribbons! And they're in my bathroom, which has a nice big mirror for pictures!" When I used to have long hair, I had to cut my ribbons quite long, so some of them were long enough to tie around my arms.

....So I pinned the ribbons onto the fabric, and this is what I came up with. Dorky pics, sorry, but they give the main idea. I'll have to give the wings a bat-wing-cut around the edges, rather than this rectangle.

They lift quite nicely though, if I do this for the real wings, I'll have to attach another teeny ribbon at the top of the fabric to tie around my pointer finger, to keep the fabric in the right shape. You can see here that I'm just holding it up.

The same.

And lower down. Note messy counters. My only (current) complaints about the wings are that the top ribbon is slipping off my shoulder (that will be annoying to fix over the course of the night) and that the whole thing makes my arms look really wide. Not nice.

Furthermore display of complaint 2, and my ribbons. Lovely butterflies....

Here's the tie around the wrist. No, it won't be pink with white butterflies in the final.

And finally, because I thought it was so neat, some of my halloween ribbon, which I've worn in my hair in the month of october for a few years now. I like to receive weird looks for people at school/stores/ect. Maybe that's why I don't have many friends....

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a tad bit of modern sewing

I do a teeny bit of modern sewing as well. This is a skirt I bought at the store, but it was much too big (though adorable, and it fit the dress code for my school thing!) so I took a giant tuck in the waist. Note very old toys in closet and binder on bed. (obviously, I took the pictures with my mirror. I am no photographer.)
Side view, complete with extremely un-matchy tiger tee! Which I love. But not with the skirt. Note bow. I'm crazy about bows, generally...

Here's my only picture of me wearing my full-length sundress... Okay, so it's mostly of my foot... and even more of my brother's feet....

And here it is on my bed, with my huge sunglasses, which match perfectly! Like with my floral skirt, I bought this dress, but since I'm 5'8 it was obviously too short, as well as that the zipper was broken. However, loved the fabric, and since I had suddenly wanted a full-length modern dress.... home it came. For length, I added the fluffy blue ruffle out of some almost perfectly-matching cotton I had in my fabric stash, and I replaced the zipper with a new invisible one.

The ruffle. It's not as periwinkle as the flowers of the dress, but it's close, and know I've seen stuff that doesn't even match this well on commercial clothes.

Full-length. I pair it with the perfect orangey-salmon cami when I wear the dress!

Here's my green plaid skirt for this winter. It's over-knee length, which is very strange for me; suddenly I have two skirts/dress over the knee, when I haven't worn any like that for years and years! hehe. This skirt is made out of this fabulous fabric I had hanging around since summer started. Unknown content, but the skirt is modern! It's waist-high, as that is the fashion for girls right now...




And of course I needed a giant matching hairbow. I do love bows... When I say giant, it's giant. I like matching things such as this.... I now just need a pair of little black pumps to wear with it....

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The halloween dress. again.

So more on my halloween dress! I haven't been doing too much on it, so I haven't been posting. And I've had school. I need credits!

But here is the dress as of a week-ish ago... obviously it needed something in back. The "dressform" is laundry baskets and storage tubs. (It works, right?)

Another view. Too much black as it is, and not enough orange. I'd only have my orange-and-black-striped stocking and my corset.

And the same from the front. I finished my apron!

...So I added orange-spidery under the tulle netting. I quite liked the effect, but I wasn't sure if it was enough...

so I added stripes down the middle (too much, looked like I had a monkey-tail.)

The same...

On the sides... it was okay, but I wasn't sure...





I tried pulling up the orange layer too, but decided not to.

With the orange-spidery pulled up, it's a bit crowded! You can see in this shot, though, that I've finally cut the peplum to rounded.

The dress in the living room... on top of the sewing-table... I eventually decided to just go with plain-orange in the back, with a bit of tulle over it.

Here, you can see I've experimented with two aprons in the front. (Yes, if you are wondering the top apron is just my peplum, which I've added pleated trim to.) It was a bit much, and severely distracted from the bottom apron, which I do like. And you can see my totally awesome sewing machine! It's amazing! Note stripey stockings.

The peplum, pinned to its proper place. It looks strange because I haven't pleated/gathered it correctly. I designed it to be like a smaller apron on the back of the dress.

My stockings! I bought them last year for a very uneventful witch costume last year, which I tore apart since.

And all my ribbon. Note nerf-gun-pellet, courtesy of little brother(s)!

the halloween dress 2009 again

...And continuation of the victorian-halloween dress project. Sorry that all the pics are out of order; I'm not that great with blogger. Or computers in general for that matter. Anyway, these are the side-hangings for this dress.... I was inspired by a fashion plate with triangular side-hangings, and decided to do something similar myself.

This is the pleating that goes on the front apron, which is made out of black-and-white striped fabric.

The finished corset.... but it didn't fit right, so I've reworked it since, though I haven't tried it on, so no report on its status of fit now yet. (I look horribly cheezy in this pic, I think...)

The back of the corset.... It really compresses, as you can see by comparing it to my natural back... it's quite creepy, actually! Note very unmatchy blue ribbon lacing. We've tried so many things to keep it laced shut... finally ribbon worked, though I'll probably use multiple pieces of ribbon on the actual halloween night.

The front again...

closeup of my fabric! I think the flocked spiders are perfect for this outfit.

The interior boning channels, made out of ribbon as directed by my pattern. I used cable ties as boning; at first I was worried that they wouldn't bend the right way for a victorian corset, but they achieved the victorian curve splendidly, though not extremely noticeably. So fyi, thick cable ties may not work too well for extreme "hourglass" victorian corsets.

The interior of the corset. I've since reworked it a bit. My only problem with how it looks is that you can't see the patterned lining much due to all the boning channels! But I suppose that doesn't matter too much.

Front/back shot. Why? I don't know.






The front of the corset. For those of you who want to use Butterick's stays and corsets pattern, the gussets will need to be upsized quite a bit.

The binding again; you can see me folding it over with my fingers. Sorry my nails are a bit messy.

The binding of my corset. After this picture was taken, I folded it around the raw edges and hand-sewed it under. It's one of the only hand-sewn bits of this costume.

My corset lining. I wanted to line my corset with a halloween-y print. The ribbon is for boning channels.

Before the lining, boning, and binding were added. For some reason blogger does NOT want to let my photographs be turned on their correct sides....

The fabrics for the dress! I've also used a bit of cotton-y black stuff.

I was going to add piping to the corset, but as you can see it didn't work out at all. It did not give the effect I wanted.




The breakfast-nook table, which I invaded with my corset and sewing machine....

The corset, in pieces.

Before the orange-with-black-flocked-spiders fabric was added. The reason for the usage is that I have a lot of it! I'm using it to make a set of 18th century french panniers as well.

the mockup. It was huge!

The corset, plus the mockup and fabric.

Some of my wigs... the halloween one is the black with white stripes. I intend to style it in a take-off of victorian era hairstyles, but of course adding lots of ribbons and flower petals and such!

Some embroidery I did while listening to hermenutics lectures for homework... I don't know if I'll be able to incorperate the embroidery into the dress; most likely I'll use the embroidery for something else. The colors are more black/orange in person, btw.

Detail of the still-pinned pleats on the side of the hanging side-parts of my dress.














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