Diary of a Costumer

Hmm... Apparently I never did any CoCo wrap-up posts this year. I had so many costume events in August that I completely forgot. Whoops!

So here's part one of a brief wrap-up, assuming I can remember everything. 

I arrived Wednesday into Long Beach, met up with a few other ladies (Sarah, Britta, and Patricia), and we drove (in our super fancy Infiniti rental SUV) to the Queen Mary. We changed into our Titanic-era clothing, and spent a few hours there. We dined in the restaurant, then did a self-guided tour all around the ship, taking a ton of pictures as we went (so many pictures, that by the end of it, my phone had died!). It was awesome. We got a lot of stares and complements, of course, and our pictures turned out sooo good! I would love to do something like this again. Here are some pictures:





We changed out of our costumes and left Long Beach around 8:30, I think, stopping for groceries on our way up to Woodland Hills. The next day, DodiRose, Sarah, Britta, and I went off to Burbank to check out the vintage-ish shops in the area. We went to Unique Vintage and Besame, among others, before heading back to Woodland Hills to change for the checking in and the pool party. That evening, I wore my burgundy silk Regency dress. I was pleased with the dress, but I wish I had styled my hair differently, as I don't think the pictures of me look very flattering. 



Friday morning, I took a limited class that they should not have allowed me to sign up for. I signed up for Hand Stitches in Millinery during mid-registration, but it overlapped by 30 mins with the class I was teaching (which I didn't notice until like 2 days before CoCo). Combined with the fact that that class was running waaay behind schedule, I learned about 2-3 stitches. It was a good class otherwise, though. I ran behind in the Making Royal Orders class I taught, too, because I forgot to factor in the time it would take to distribute materials (which was like 20 mins). That said, I saw a bunch of my students wearing their royal orders for the gala, and I got lots of good feedback on it, so I think it was still a success. I watched some of Jennifer's Dressing the Silhouette class before going to grab some lunch, before my shoot with quincy134  (it was so nice that she did that!) and I finished off the class portion of the day with Jenny-Rose and Abby's Pomatum or Hairspray class, which was really cool to watch. During the day, I wore my 1890s Ice Cream Parlour shirtwaist and wool skirt. 



Friday evening was when our Titanic group decided to wear all of our costumes. I loved the turnout on this! All my past costume groups tended to fizzle out, but we had nearly 20 people in this group, and everyone looked wonderful. It did make it really difficult to round everyone up for photos, though, and I know we missed at least one or two people in the big group photo, which is really too bad. Some of us made movie reproductions, others opted for costumes of the era, and we even had one person dress as the iceberg! Naturally, we took a bunch of pictures. After a quick tour of the marketplace, several of us gathered for champagne, cupcakes, and chatter in our room - it was nice to host a small room party!  






I'll do the rest of CoCo in another post, since this is already really picture heavy. 

I started sewing again on Sunday! We were chatting during the Colonial Festival about our plans for this weekend's Railroad Days. Originally, I had wanted to wear a bustle dress, since that's my favorite, but as of last Sat, the weather for this Sat was supposed to be 87 degrees and sunny. Way too hot for any of my bustle dresses. (Of course, now that forecast has gone down to 81 and mostly sunny, so maybe I could have done a bustle anyway. Oh well.) So anyway, I decided last weekend that I would try the new teens-era Butterick pattern - the one that looks quite off because her shoulder trim is ridiculously huge, and the waist seam seems wrong. This one. 

So anyway, I've been working bit by bit since Sunday evening on this pattern. I had to go to three different Joanns before I found one with enough of the fabric I wanted, which is that white-on-white 100% cotton dobby stripe from the shirting section, but I did finally find it. (PS - pretty sure Joanns is closing out this fabric, so if you can still find it, you might want to do what I did and buy all 10 yards they had. I've been eyeing it for about a year, but had never pulled the plug on purchasing it, and it was almost too late!) I'm mostly using lace from the stash, which unfortunately isn't insertion, but then again, the pattern also doesn't call for insertion lace. I'm going to see if I can get more of a similar lace so that I can put some on the skirt as well, since otherwise it looks really plain. 

A few notes on this pattern in case anyone wants to try it.

• For one, it's huge. Naturally, I didn't make a full mockup, though I did mock up the paper, which led me to increasing the length of both the bodice and skirt, changing the armseye (it was so far off the shoulder!), and tweaking the neckline a bit. Luckily, it's really the back that is huge, and for some reason, the pattern calls for it to meet edge to edge and close with hooks and eyes. Weird. So mine is now overlapping and closing with buttons, at least down to the waist. I'd say it was about 4-5" too big, and that was with using the size down from what I normally am anyway. So, like, super huge. 
• The skirt unfortunately is also way too big, but it also calls for a weird continuous lap closure thing. Which I didn't want to undo. So now I have a little bit of gathers in the CB of my skirt, which are uneven on either side. Hopefully it's not crazy obvious. The skirt is not as ginormous as the bodice - I'd say maybe 2.5-3" too big. That said, it does seem to me that the skirt is also a bit on the slim side for a white summer dress - I think those usually were less fitted. 
• We already all know that the trim goes way too far off the shoulder. I'm using much narrower lace trim (I think it's about 4-5" instead of 6 or 7"), and it goes over the edge of the shoulder seam by about 1". Then again, I also took the shoulder seam up a couple inches, because it was so far off the shoulder. 
• I'm completely redoing the sleeve on this. A) It's too short, by a long shot. The sleeve should hit just above the elbow. B) It's huge. Like, probably at least a few inches bigger around than my arms (and I usually have to widen a fitted sleeve pattern). It's like a men's t-shirt. I'll hopefully be redrafting new sleeves tomorrow. 
• I'm putting lace around the waist as well. It just looks wrong otherwise. 
• The yardage requirements for this pattern are very overblown. I added 4" of length to the skirt pieces, plus about 1.5" (I think) to the bodice, and though I have not yet cut out the sleeves, everything else has so far used up 2.5 yards of 54" fabric. Pretty sure those sleeves aren't going to take up an extra yard of fabric... 

All that said, I think it's still a relatively quick project, despite all the complications I'm adding to it. If I had more time, it would probably be a fun one to play around with insertion lace on, but alas, mine will have ugly modern lace. I probably don't have time to sew today, but I would like to get the buttons/buttonholes up the back tomorrow. That will leave me all day Friday to do the sleeves and the hem. Everything else is already done!

I've been really terrible about posting to here with Titanic progress since it takes so long to do pictures on here, but I have been posting pretty regularly on instagram and on facebook. Basically, at this point, the entire project is complete except for the dress hem, sourcing that darn buckle, and acquiring the right jewelry and hair comb (I should probably get on that).

I was playing around with my hair yesterday to try to get the right look (I swear that simple-looking Edwardian hair is somehow one of the hardest hairstyles for me to achieve), and decided to take some pictures while wearing the full outfit. Of course, at that point, I still hadn't finished all of the closures, and I have since also tweaked the pickup in the back in the attempt to get a little more hem length, so these pictures are not ideal. They're also not edited yet, so while I will be posting them soon, I'm really just teasing them now. If you want to see the pictures I've already shared, you can click the link above for my instagram. 

But in any case, I plan to put it all on again today and somehow figure out where I need to mark the hem length in the back so that I can get the whole thing finished tonight. I also have an etsy order for a tiny Cinderella dress, so that needs to be done tonight, too. After that, I have a Victorian commission I'll be starting work on as soon as I get the contract back, and that will likely be followed by another commission, so I'm not sure when exactly I'll be getting back to the bustle gown. Still, the commissions are good, since they will help me pay for Europe next year!

I've been playing around with research/patterning/draping the yellow deck dress from Titanic, and I've come to a conclusion - it's impossible. Not sure if it's that Kate Winslet was just that small, or if they were working with extra wide fabric, but I would need a piece of fabric approximately 74x72" for the skirt portion, because THERE IS ONLY ONE SEAM. 

Like seriously, I'm not even sure how that skirt works with the only seam being the center front, but that's just what it was. I still haven't concluded if the original was one piece from the top of the yellow to the hem. I'm leaning towards it having been two pieces, because it's a dogleg closure up the front, and that seems like it would be easier to do if the bodice was a separate piece from the skirt.

So anyway, my version is going to have a seam at the waist, as well as a curved seam up either side, because my fabric is 55" including the selvage. Then again, I suppose I shouldn't be stressing, since although the dress appears as a butter yellow on screen, it is actually a gold fabric with a leaf spray pattern. And mine is taffeta instead of satin. I did, however, find that I have an embroidery pattern that will be pretty darn close to the embroidery on the kimono sleeves. I just have to figure out what fabric to make the sleeves out of, and I'm really not sure what it's supposed to be... (any ideas?)