What I love most

  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.