Diary of a Costumer

After my gig yesterday evening, I managed to come home and sew for the rest of the night. Actually, I stayed up way too late, and am regretting that today, but I wanted to get to a good stopping point, and apparently that meant sewing until midnight (and I wake up at 6:25). 

Anyway, I managed to knock off a fair amount of my list. I started with the day bodice sleeve trim. At this point, it's almost entirely done. One sleeve is 100% done. The other sleeve just needs the lace ruffle sewn in (it's already pinned in place). I also sewed down the lace trim at the back of the neckline. That means all I have left on the day bodice is the lace sleeve ruffle and making and attaching two bows! 

Then I moved on to the evening bodice. I added the rest of the hooks onto the front closure, so I just need to do bars there. And I figured out my trimming! I took the fine net that is over the sleeves and added a 4" wide ruched section to the bodice front, and then over that is a 2" wide strip that is heavily gathered down the middle. This strip goes all the way around the neckline, curving around to be over the 4" wide net at the bust. This has all been pinned in place, and I started sewing down the 4" strip this morning, though I still have a long way to go on it. Naturally, all of it has to be handsewn. Once that is all done, this bodice just needs a bow at the CF. 

Go to my instagram for a pic of the evening bodice. 

So here's my to-do list now, in the order that I plan to do it. I hope to accomplish at least the first four items today: 

• Stitch down two layers of net trims to FG evening bodice
• Stitch the lace to the one sleeve end in FG day bodice
• Put 10 bars on the FG evening bodice closure
• Finish the other 12 or so pleat edges on the FG skirt trim
• Make and attach the 7 bows that go on FG. Plus two for my shoes if time and fabric allows
• Bustle tapes for FG overskirt
• Make a belt for FG
• Add decorative buttons to the front of the plaid skirt
• Decorate a hat to wear with the plaid bustle outfit
• Re-decorate my old candy bustle hat to wear with FG day bodice
• Try everything on and pack!

I did get a tiny bit of sewing done this weekend, though. Thursday afternoon, I stitched down I think about half of the pleats over the half-bows on the skirt, and added most of the lace trim to the day bodice neckline. And yesterday, I got 5 out of 10 hooks on the front of the evening bodice (I brought sewing to do while waiting for Rupert Grint's panel), and then when I got home, I managed to get the pleated and ruffled sections prepped and pinned onto one of my sleeves. Of course, since I was already tired at that time, I cut them out totally wrong, but I was able to salvage them with small seam allowances. I'm almost out of the pink fabric now, and still have to cut out all my bows, the belt, plus the half-bows for the sleeves. I hope I can make it!

So here is my updated to-do list. It doesn't look much different from the last one, especially since I forgot some things on the last one!

• Stitch down pinned-in-place sleeve trim on FG day bodice. 
• Prep, pin, and stitch the sleeve trim on the other sleeve
• Make and attach the 16+ half-bows for the sleeves
• Add lace to sleeve trim
• Finish the last 5 mins of stitching the lace on the FG day bodice neckline (already pinned in place)
• Net trim around the neckline of the FG evening bodice
• Finish the other 5 hooks and 10 bars on the FG evening bodice closure
• Finish the other 12 or so pleat edges on the FG skirt trim
• Bustle tapes for FG overskirt
• Make a belt for FG
• Make and attach the 7 bows that go on FG. Plus two for my shoes if time and fabric allows.
• Make a hat to wear with the FG day bodice
• Add decorative buttons to the front of the plaid skirt. And probably make a hat for that as well, come to think of it. 
• Pray that the rain currently forecast for Friday, and especially for Saturday, goes away. FG is too big to fit under an umbrella! 

That's a lot to do, and when I type it out it feels even more! Luckily, other than one gig tomorrow night, my evenings are free this week. And I have a feeling I will wind up forgoing the gym on Wed and Thurs, too. My goal for tonight is to completely finish the sleeve trim. Then finish stitching down skirt pleats and the lace trim on the day bodice. I'm exhausted just thinking about it!

Naturally, other than the few that wind up on instagram, pictures from both the Outlander Ball and Comicon will be coming after VicFest is over. 

I had a busy weekend, but a lot of that busy-ness was caused by sewing! Yay! 

My Thursday and Friday gigs went well. I think I am mostly over the bug from last week, but my throat still feels a little swollen, so hopefully today's gig will go well, too. 

I sewed a little bit before the show I went to on Thursday night, sewed some more on Friday before and after my gig, and sewed a tiny bit Saturday morning. Then I attended an 18th c Outlander themed ball! I wore my old courtgown, and it was much fun. I already have a few pictures up on instagram, but will do a ball post on here in the next couple days as well. I'm still editing all the pictures, and want to post them to facebook first, though. 

Then Sunday, I got to stay home all day! A lot of it was spent sewing, though I did also spend a couple hours on yard work. I now have most of the giant shrub gone, which I'm super proud of. I think 1-2 more yard waste bins will take care of what's left, other than the trunk/thick branches, which are too thick for me to get out on my own. 

I managed a little sewing after work, a callback, and an audition yesterday, too. 

So, what all did I do, sewing-wise? Well, for one thing, I figured out how to mostly put the pleats and half-bows on by machine! I sewed across each pleat, but under the fold of the pleat, so that the machine sewing is all hidden by the fold and the bow. Then I stitched the end of the half-bow down, again under the pleat fold. Now, I'm sewing just the fold of the pleat to the top of the half-bow by hand. All of the skirt and neckline machine sewing is complete, and I already did half the hand-sewing on the neckline pleats. So for now, that means 34 to go, plus however many are on the sleeves. I have not yet started the sleeve decoration on the day bodice at all. 

To be honest, that's most of what I did. I also cut/sewed/attached the sleeves on the evening bodice. They just need the other side of the sleeve hem binding hand-sewn. My hooks and bars finally arrived yesterday, so I need to put those on, too. So much hand-sewing! And I have to add the lace to the day bodice neckline, and some net trim to the neckline of the evening bodice. And put some bustle tapes inside the back skirt drape, so I don't pick up all the dirt in Port Townsend with my skirt. 

So basically, I'm getting close, but I have so much fiddly stuff left to do! There's pics on my instagram - I'm too lazy to put them into the post here. 

Over the weekend, my organdy order arrived, and I made a petticoat to go with the Fairy Godmother dress. I didn't have anything big enough/the right shape to go over my cobbled-together crinolette, so I used the Truly Victorian bustle petticoat pattern as a base. I used the three main pieces relatively as is, lengthening them by 3" and widening the back pieces by about 3" each as well. I added three tiers of ruffles on top of the back sections to add more oomph. And then I decided to rip strips of the organdy and use my ruffle foot for the two additional tiers of the petticoat (in addition to the ruffles on the higher back sections), so I don't know exactly what the math worked out to, compared to the actual pattern. And I'm still not sure it's entirely done, mainly because it is shaped to go over a bustle, not a crinolette, so mine is pretty high off the ground in back, and I may add another ruffle to the bottom of the back that tapers off to nothing at the sides. But it's done for now!



After I finished the petticoat, I pleated up the skirt and put it and the overskirt on the same waistband. Once I finished it and pinned up the hem, I realized that the overskirt was not coming far enough around on the sides. So I undid that section of waistband, undid a pleat on the overskirt, and moved it about 2.75" farther along on either side. Then I tried on the skirt, and realized that it was 1 7/8" too big around the waist, and I couldn't just have a bigger overlap because of the overskirt. Gah! So then I undid the CB of the waistband, made a CB seam in it, removing that extra length in the waistband, and increasing the back pleats. But because I kept having to redo the waistband, I'm sure I wasted a good 2 hours. Really frustrating!

Anyway, it's done now, and I stayed up late on Monday night to finish hemming the whole thing. Yesterday, I marked where the pleated tiers go on the front of the skirt, did the math, and found out that I don't have enough fabric. Ugh. I need 51" length x the entire width of fabric, because the front is wider than I had estimated originally. And I'm almost 100% certain that there's no way that I can get the bodice and those tiers out of the fabric I have left, let alone the bodice trimming (or the evening bodice I was also thinking about making), since I have about 2yds left. Val has said that she can check the fabric district for me when she goes in a couple weeks, but in the meantime, I'm going to make the day bodice first, so that I know exactly how much is needed. 



But before I start that, I decided that I should really finish cutting out/fitting the mockup for the plaid 1880s bustle bodice, whose skirt has been hanging there mostly finished since the end of December. So that's what I did yesterday evening. I only had a few small tweaks that needed to be made to the pattern, so now I just have to take it apart, transfer those tweaks to my original pattern, and cut out the plaid fabric. And I can use my mockup as the flat-lining, which is nice. Hopefully I'll be able to finish that bodice this week. I'm going to try to use much of the same base bodice pattern for the Fairy Godmother, too, though I'm going to attempt to turn it into a two piece back instead of a three piece, since that's really obvious in the extant one. 

But anyway, work reopened today, so the next few days will probably be quite busy between work, gigs, rehearsals, and auditions. That said, we're expecting more snow on Friday night, so who knows what might happen?


Here's some cats in the snow pics. For some reason, the ones of Lion and my yard are refusing to upload to Flickr, but you can see more on my facebook if you want.