This black silk robe a la francaise is about 80% hand-sewn, more than I ever intended. I've retrimmed it 4x now!
Recreating the pink portrait of Mary Queen of Scots had long been a dream, & I finally did it for my birthday.
My drag alter-ego is Leonard Autie, hairdresser to Marie Antoinette. He sometimes gets a new suit for Carnevale.
Finished the crown. I printed out tiny versions of the White Tree of Gondor and practiced painting over the print with dimensional gold paint. Had to trim a lot of branches from the tree so the details didn’t blur together with paint (what kind of sacrilege is that, to lop off parts of the White
Started the crown and veil. Got sidetracked by Valentine’s Day and my birthday, but I finally had a half a day free to work on these pieces. A while ago, I made a paper template of the crown and cut it out of buckram. Because I didn’t have a long enough piece of buckram in
I finished sewing the gown! This must be a record time for me, especially since I spent so long fiddling around with the trim. Today I spent six straight hours hand-sewing the hem and the final parts of the trim. Also this weekend, I bought the black chiffon for the veil. Went with the dirt-cheap
I gave up on the trim embroidery idea. Here’s the sordid, stupid story of this gown’s trim… Because I couldn’t find any trim that really looked like what’s on the costume, I tried to improvise. I bought two yards of unbleached, cotton, crocheted lace and used fabric medium and acrylic paint to turn it an
Finished sewing the main gown, except for hemming it, sewing on the buttons, and the trim. All praise the Mighty Walking Foot!!! I finally got one for my sewing machine, and I’m kicking myself for not buying it a decade ago. Makes sewing velvet much easier. There’s still some side-to-side shifting, but none of the
I used Simplicity 9891 for the body of the dress and McCall’s 3663 for the sleeves. Luckily, I discovered that I had enough black velvet in my fabric stash already. Also had enough black lining in my stash. Only fabric I needed to buy was the silky dark red fabric for the sash and the
Immediately after seeing The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, I decided to recreate Arwen’s Mourning Gown. It was the one costume that really stood out to me, even among all the gorgeous costumes in the movie. Partly, it’s the most classically gothic outfit in the two movies so far. Of course I wanted
For the 10th anniversary of our Famous Dead Person’s Ball, I decided to indulge myself with a costume I’d dreamed of doing for years — a somewhat historically accurate Cathy in Wuthering Heights from the early scene where she’s a ghost scratching through the bedroom window. It’s the scene that Kate Bush‘s wonderful song “Wuthering
Currently, all I have of my 18th-century costume is a plain white cotton shift which I whipped up yesterday in a rare non-headachy moment. Wow, I actually sewed something, ain’t that a hoot? That barely counts, although bias tape was involved which made it slightly less than moronically simple. Or does it? Hmm. I’m still
