What I love most

I was a beautiful day, nothing went wrong (I was prepared with a sewing kit in the car but thankfully I didn't need it)  So here is the finished dress:  

  I'm all done!!! The wedding dress is finished, only a week later than I planned, but we will put that down to my very poor time management skills. So a few things I learnt: Lesson 1 although I do this routinely for my historical costumes, apparently it is couture to interline even heavy weight satin. Lesson 2 do not use pressing cloths on satin with a black (or I would imagine any strong coloured) ironing board cover, disaster. The black marked the satin, HOWEVER with a little product called stain go, all marks are gone and disaster avoided. Lesson 3 don't underestimate how long things can take, it will usually take longer. Lesson 4 tea can dye polyester  So venture if you may some sneak peeks - full dress will be revealed after Saturday (or when the bride allows) So on to the next project:  improving my natural form bustle. This will entail making a bustle cage (from Francis Grimble), adding extra trim and maybe some embroidery and raising the skirt a tad. This will be...

  Or shop with girlfriends that encourage you to buy awesome things like .... Awesome 40s suit cheap as chips at $80 Au. 

All of my attention at the moment is on completing my friends wedding dress. Everything has been going along well and I was just bragging about that until...... *back story* my friend fell in love with a designer dress she tried on with me, it was a slight mermaid style with keyhole back and covered with the most devine lace. Now finding a lace that was not going to cost an arm and a leg but still has the desired effect was proving difficult. So we ended up with this embroidered organza the problem being there was only 5 yards and that's all folks. The final design will be an under dress with straps with the organza over dress that has the keyhole. Mock up So continuing on I had all my patterns set and juuust cut out the fancy fabric, then while contemplating seam finishes etc on my way down to meet some gal pals it suddenly dawned on me that I cut the organza out the same as the underdress without extending up for the keyhole. Argh how cou...

I was showing a friend my LJ (which also means my blog as I keep both in sync) yesterday and I noticed that it has been (nearly) 2 years since my last post.  Well there are a few fairly good reasons.... marriage separation.... new house.... grown children graduating.... 2 overseas trips to the UK.... loss of my beloved dad and of course LOTS of costuming. So life has been busy.  In my costuming world it has been pretty full on, too many to post photos so here is a quickie movie snapshot of most of the costuming I have done over the past 2 years.

This is starting to be my new habit ... posting 6 monthly ... and just playing catch up too. Here is the last 6 months since the last post (most of theses photos are curtesy of my friends) ...  Re-wears ... Teens at the Marburg Festival:  Georgian to the QLD Art Museum:  Georgian in Steampunk mode for the ACG Christmas breakup:  Egyptian for the RIFF Christmas breakup:  50s cocktail dress for a QLD museum exhibition: Re-wears but altered. Crinoline with new evening bodice for Proclamation Day:  20s lace dress with skirt panel inserts and vintage lace added for Art Deco High Tea: New: Vintage early 60s dress for Afternoon Tea for M & C: Egyptian for the SCA Roman feast:  1885 Bustle dress yet to be worn at an event (I was supposed to wear it that day to a picnic but you can see that it was wet):  So that wraps up the last 6 very full months.  Hopefully I will try to be more motivated to post more ofte...

Had a great time (although hot) at the Victorian Picnic last weekend. My mini me wanted to come and I was going to make her a new bustle dress but the inspiration and motivation just wasn't there. I happened to take out her older sisters corset I made about 5 years ago, we tried it on and bingo it fit.   This got me thinking...... mmmmm if she fits the corset just maybe she might fit the bustle dress I made for her sister as well .... mmmmm. So we tried it on and it was a little big but not too bad that a bit of tweaking and taking up wouldn't suffice. The issue I have with that dress is that I trimmed it in a very light weight (and white) cotton muslin that just fell apart.  So I decided to re-trim the dress. Another stroke of luck was that shopping for fabric we came across some striped cotton that matched perfectly (and I really mean perfectly).   So mini me has a new dress that she can grow into.  The only thing I didn't get to do was cuffs which I ca...