BERJAYA

A 5-gore edwardian skirt

Posted on December 29, 2025 by avantgarbe

This is, strangely, the most recent historical thing I’ve made and I made it in June 2024. For some reason I’ve just not been on a historical kick lately.

This is also so basic it barely deserves a blog post, but hey everyone needs information on the basics sometimes (maybe some folks still want to learn costuming from blogs like us old folks, and not from TikTok? This is how I learned so I’ve still got blog nostalgia!)

In something like 2019 I bought 6 yards of a bright pink/coral wool twill, from a local quilting store of all places. It’s got a lovely subtle stripe woven in (by changing the direction of the twill weave), and I always intended it for something Victorian or Edwardian. When the costumers guild planned a steampunk event, I figured this would be perfect.

YES BRIGHT CORAL FOR STEAMPUNK I SAID IT. Victorians invented anline dye, and they loved nothing more than a painful blinding combination of colors. Therefore, it is silly that steampunk is always brown and drab; steampunk should be neon.

I realize it’s not that hard to draft a 5 gore skirt (so called for the 5 pattern pieces – 1 front, 2 sides, and 2 backs, but I detest drafting skirt patterns that are longer than a yardstick, so I purchased the Scroop Patterns Historical Fantail skirt.

First off, this fabric color will never photograph accurately. Here it is next to a neon pink pinholder as well as a light pink pincushion to try and convince my phone to show you the pink-ish coral:

Usually I will always make a mockup, but the only thing this needed to fit is my waist. So I went by waist size, and chopped off the bottom 6″ of the pattern, because I’m just that short (and this was intended to be ankle/walking length).

Here you see me ignoring the grain direction on the skirt and using some information I learned from somewhere (I think Foundations Revealed? They were pretty obsessed with Edwardian walking skirts). Since this skirt is made up of gores / shaped panels, if you aligned the grain with the direction of the panel, you would end up with every seam on the bias. That’s going to stretch in unpleasant ways. Instead, put one edge of the gore on the straight grain (the one more towards the front of the skirt). This means every seam is matching one straight grain to one bias, and the straight grain will keep things from stretching. The only bias-to-bias is on the center back seam, and that’s the most acceptable one to stretch since you’ll just end up with a slight train effect.

I decided to give this skirt what I call the full Bernadette Banner treatment – fully flatlined, with an extra crinoline layer on the lower half of the skirt, finished with a hem facing, and then hem binding. Note, despite what her channel will have you believe, this is not necessary on every Edwardian skirt. I did it on this one because I have some vague plans of sewing black soutache all over it one day and I wanted the skirt to be strong enough to hold up to that.

And despite how simple this is, everything started fighting me.

My original plan was to flatline everything with a mystery black fabric that I got free from a garage sale (feels like a linen or cotton but I haven’t tested it). Then the bottom third of each piece was also going to have some white crinoline between the wool and black lining for strength. Unfortunately, the wool is sheer enough that there was a very obvious color difference where the white fabric ended.

See that line in the middle? Yeah it’s obvious.

So I grit my teeth, put away all the black lining pieces I had cut into the scrap bin, and recut all the lining out of the white crinoline. That fabric has enough body that I decided the skirt didn’t actually need any additional fabric in the bottom half; wool + crinoline will be enough to support soutache embroidery one day.

Then in the interests of speed my plan was to serge around the edges of the crinoline and wool to avoid fraying. Unfortunately, the wiggly wool moved at a different rate than the crinoline, so I ended up two pieces that didn’t line up.

that wiggle in the wool isn’t there in the crinoline below. these were supposed to be the same size.

There is nothing less fun than seam ripping a serged seam.

So I ended up hand basting each piece of wool to lining in the seam allowance. So much for speed, but at least I like handsewing?

After that things were more straightforward. Sew the skirt fronts to the skirt backs. The only slightly tricky part is sewing the placket in the back, but the pattern has excellent instructions for this.

I also deviated from the pattern instructions and added a pocket in the seam between the left side and back pieces. Come on, we all know a skirt needs a pocket. This is something you can pick up from watching any Bernadette Banner skirt video, so check that out. The pocket is low enough to not be in the way when sitting down.

Something else I picked up from Foundations Revealed back in the day – the waistband is a separate finished piece, which is whipstitched to the folded down top of the skirt, instead of enclosing the seam allowance in the waistband. This removes seam allowance bulk right at the waist, which is where you want the least extra bulk in order to enhance the hourglass shape.

Inside of the waistband is a twill tape to reduce bulk even more, since it has finished edges with no seam allowance

Whipping the waistband on. This is incredibly strong, stronger than a straight seam would be.

The hem is finished with a facing, to add even more support kicking the skirt bottom out (or it would be, had I chosen a fabric with more body and not a thin sheet. But hey it was random stash fabric.

it’s a shaped facing since the bottom is rounded. gotta cut out those notches so it flips around evenly.

These skirts were often finished with one more thing – a wool brain hem binding. The hem of the skirt is the most likely thing to wear out first (between brushing your shoes, a dirty ground, etc). If it totally wears out, your skirt is a goner, even if most of it is good, so a hem binding provides extra protection.

I was beyond excited to find antique wool brush braid to use on my skirt hem! Brush braid is similar to wool tape, except it’s meant to go on only one side of the hem. It’s like a rough fringe that pokes out, serving the same purpose as a binding to protect the hem. It’s not made commercially anymore and is very difficult to find, especially in a color. I got super lucky and found this in the corner of an antique store in Niles after getting tea with friends. Seriously, only costume nerds will understand just how excited I was to find this stuff. (The shop owner had no idea what it was, and kept calling it ribbon.)

Basted on the inside of the hem with very large stitches, so I could theoretically remove and replace it one day if it gets too damaged. Given that I’ve worn this skirt only once, I doubt I’ll ever need to do that.

And then of course my kid got super sick the day before the event where I was supposed to wear this skirt, so it went into the closet for 6 months (still missing the hook and eye on the waistband).

Confused Kitty Sewing hosted a historical ice skating event back in February, so I pulled this out of the closet to add the hook&eye to wear!

For the event, I’m wearing this over a chemise, corset, hip/bum pad (I am shaped like a cylinder, so padding gives me the illusion of having a waist), two antique lace insertion petticoats (you can find these for relatively cheap on eBay, certainly for less than the materials cost would be today), and a 1970s-does-historical white blouse. The hat I did actually make myself from a hatmaking class at the local community college.

Honestly, my favorite picture was actually the bedroom mirror selfie, so here we go!

And attempting to look like an ice skating fashion plate (no I did not succeed)

Velvet and fur capelet from ebay, which I have worn with every era from medieval to modern. It’s the most valuable accessory in my wardrobe

accidentally matching the valentines decor

And of course, the traditional battle over Yours Truly by time travelling rogues/rakes Roger and Rupert (shh I don’t remember which is which).

Check ’em out at Cation Designs and Fresh Frippery!

I still have a pretty tremendous amount of this yardage left, so hey maybe in another 10 years I’ll make the matching jacket and add the soutache embroidery?

Posted in 1900s, 5 gore skirt | 1 Comment

18th century chintz round gown

Posted on May 22, 2025 by avantgarbe

Hoo boy, we are going to travel back in time for this one!

So back in 2011(!!) or so, Festyve Attyre discovered a Waverly curtain fabric in several color ways that mimiced an 18th century cotton print reasonably well. (Emphasis on reasonably. It’s not as good as the new Ikea cotton prints, but this was the best you could get at the time).

In 2012, I spent $40 on 2 Waverly curtains in the cream colorway:

Aaaand then they sat in my fabric bins for years.

Until…2017! When Renaissance Fabrics had a weekend workshop with Janea Whitacre, head mantua maker at Colonial Williamsburg, to learn how to drape and make a Robe L’Anglaise, or an English gown. (You can find these workshops today at Burnley and Trowbridge, it is very very rare to get them on the West Coast!)

This is the kind of 18th century gown that is fitted at the back with pleats, and the pleats release into the back of the skirt. I was very tempted to buy new Ikea fabric for the workshop, but decided to be good and stick with stash fabric instead of buying new fabric.

I was pretty sure I didn’t have enough fabric for a separate petticoat and gown, so I decided to make a round gown. This is where the front skirt is attached at the side seams with a gap at the top. Rather than me trying to explain this, check out Koshka’s pictures on how this works: https://www.koshka-the-cat.com/blue_linen1.html

I also went looking for historical examples of round gowns in cotton chintz, and found a couple so this is plausible: https://www.pinterest.com/melemolly/1700s-chintz-roundgown/

Some pictures of the draping and construction process:

Demoing how to get the back lining pieces

The center back and he waist get folded over and basted into place.

The back pieces end up remarkably square, but you are going to end up draping the front piece to overlap the back quite a bit, so you don’t care about the shape of that side seam.

The pieces are turned over and laid on top of the backside of the fashion fabric, which has a big slit at what will become center back. It’s about an inch shorter than the lining.

In an absolute feat of magic, the raw seam in the middle is turned over, and at the bottom where the fabric is a single piece, is made into a big pleat (which you can see at the bottom, and the lining is on top. Tada no raw seams, and your big center back pleat which releases into the skirt!

Flip it over, prickstitch or running stitch the linings to the outsides. Then whip stitch the two side pieces together to close up the back. This seam is meant to be visible, seams being hidden didn’t really exist as a concept until sewing machines and bag lining became more popular.

Then pleat the fashion fabric onto the lining in a pleasing looking fashion. These pleats start out very large around 1750, and gradually become narrower and narrower as the years go on, as fashion changes. You can even find examples where the direction of the pleats change around 1780, just to change things up even more.

This is more of an art than a science. Just do it until you like how it looks.

I guess I didn’t take any pictures of this part, but next you drape a piece of lining fabric on you from the center front, and smooth it over to where the back side seam should be. Then I used that fitted lining as the pattern to cut out the front fashion fabric, turned in all the raw edges, (except for where the side seam was going to be), and stitched around the outside using le point a rabattre sous la main, which has no name in English. It’s like a combination of a whip stitch and a running stitch, commonly used for attaching fashion fabric to the lining when raw edges were turned in.

Our homework for the evening was to finish both front pieces so we could spend day 2 working on sleeves. I realized when I got to the hotel room that I had cut two right sides, and of course I had left my fabric and scissors at the workshop so I had to quickly bang one out the next morning.

This is not the only way to construct the gown front piece – you could also turn in all the edges on the front and back pieces, and sew them together using the other-wonky-version-of-a-whipstitch (that the American Duchess book has named the English Stitch, although that is also not a period term).

Even though these gowns are meant to be draped from scratch every time, I took a pattern off the final fitting lining pieces so I can make more gowns that fit without having a draping buddy (and as long as I use the same stays, they should all fit the same. Of course I want new stays that aren’t a decade old, but who knows when I’ll get around to that).

A ridiculous face, but this is my first 18th century gown where the shoulders actually fit! Turns out when I had made both my previous 18th century gowns on my linebacker Uniquely You, then ended up not so good. (Yes I could absolutely refit the shoulders on those because the straps are a separate piece, but ughhhh refitting is boring and I just make do with pinning the heck out of the gown to my stays straps).

Aaaand, this is where I stopped, because I had no events to wear this gown to. It proceeded to sit in the corner unfinished until…

…we finally get to 2024! More than a decade since I bought this fabric. The GBACG was had an event called Pastoral Picnic at a park, and I wanted to wear a cotton dress, since my other 18th century dresses are both silk.

I needed a rectangle for the left and right sides of the skirt back pleated to the gown, a rectangle for the front pleated onto a length of tape, and to actually attach the sleeves (which were just pinned on) and cover the shoulder straps.

Lots of hand sewing with linen thread. Very important to wax first since it’s not a very smooth thread.

I used a mantua makers seam to attach the skirt sides – they are right sides together, basted, then the whole seam is flipped over and fell stitched down to cover the raw edge.

The top of the sleeve gets pleated onto the shoulder strap lining and basted on. The two sides probably won’t match and this drives me nuts, but bodies aren’t symmetrical and literally no one will notice.

Shoulder strap is just a rectangle with all the sides folded in, to cover up the lining and raw edges.

As usual I was starting to feel meh about the project midway through especially since the fabric is not as historical as I like, but it looks fantastic when nearly done! There is a rectangle sticking up on the back of the neck that just gets folded around the raw neckline edge, leaving a trapezoid visible on the back. Try not to obsess too much over making a symmetrical shape when the shoulder straps are also not symmetrical (aka do as I say not as I do)

Luckily I’ve amassed an assortment of 18th century accessories over the past decade to wear with this outfit; it would be much more time consuming or expensive to put together last minute. (Shift and stays are from 2015, bergere and fichu are from 2018.)

I did quickly toss together a petticoat (make from a super wiggly not nice linen curtain, but it was dirt cheap from Fabmo and is really just there to smooth out lines. Lots of tutorials out there to make your own.)

and a bumroll (free pattern from Scroop patterns), made from a bedsheet and poly fiberfill.

These always look way more dramatic on the dress form than they do under a dress.

And my hair pieces are from Jenny La Fleur because I Do Not Do Hair.

And event photos!

Waiting for a man worth 10,000 pounds to come galloping over the moors.

Hmm need a better hair plan next time, because there is an abrupt hair quantity change where my hair ends and the hairpiece continues…

Accessories very important for making the outfit look complete

And we’re done! So glad to have a 7+ year UFO out of the todo pile and out of the stash bin.

Posted in 1700s, Chintz Round Gown, Georgian | 1 Comment

2024 leatherworking

Posted on February 13, 2025 by avantgarbe

blah blah forever since I last posted, we all know the drill.

2024 was not a super productive sewing year. New job (well sortof new, returning to the place I used to work after layoffs from intermediate place), 2 kids, you get it.

Therefore, I got more into leatherworking! Leatherworking has all of my favorite parts of sewing – lots of rote work, very little fitting (at least in the stuff I’ve made).

First up, we have some leather dice rolling cups that whoops are still not done. But when you have to make 7 it takes a while (for my D&D group, who just finished a six year campaign! Level 20 and all! Going to be fun to roll new characters and start at level 1 again).

Yikes, according to the date here I started these in August 2023. But they have been cut out, punched, dyed, and half sewn together.

Testing out the G.O.O.D. leather stamp my friend 3D printed for me (GOOD = Guild of Ordinary Domains, the magical CIA-like group we got conscripted into in session 1)

I initially tried wetting the leather and putting a pile of books on top of the stamp (to mimic an arbor press), but that wasn’t enough pressure. Turns out I needed to wet the leather a lot more and whack the stamp with a hammer. I wouldn’t put a plastic stamp under a ton of stress, but I only needed 7 logos. This wouldn’t work for something needing frequent use; in absence of an actual arbor press.

Dying day. Part of the reason I got so delayed is I forgot just how thirsty leather is – it uses up water based dye *fast* and I didn’t have enough to get all the backs dyed. So it took me months before I got up the motivation to buy more dye and finish this off.

I had gloves on, but somehow some dye in…remember when dying leather, you too are made of leather.

I’ll finish these…eventually.

Next, we have a leather hip bag I made for the Renaissance Faire. My previous leather hip bag has a strap that goes around the leg which looks cool, but means it can only be worn with a skirt. This one just hangs on a belt so it gives it more outfit flexibility:

pattern layouts and minimizing wasted fabric/leather is one of my superpowers

Here it is all cut out and holes punched

I love how pretty everything looks at this stage

Aaaaand big sigh. So I have never successfully gotten any printer to print out a pattern without cutting off just a bit in the margins. I carefully mathed and counted and measured to make sure I was taping my patterns in the right place, but apparently not carefully enough because I was one hole short on this piece. I really did not want to cut and punch and dye another one, so I tried to skive down the end to make it less thick, and then patched on a tiny rectangle.

Probably could have skived these down even more to actually get the thickness of 5oz leather at the join, but I’m not that good at skiving.

Here’s why Dieselpunk patterns are so good – that middle piece is ever so slightly bigger with the holes ever so slightly spaced further apart, which means when you sew on the two side pieces it makes this whole piece curve – which is the shape it will be in the final bag.

Shoutout to my buddy Leslie who stamped a pattern on her version of this bag, and I straight up copied her to do the same because it looked so cool.

Here’s what the little pieced on bit looked all sewn together

basically invisible extra patch! Except to me I know it’s there grumble.

And finished bag from all angles!

My dress form in the living room definitely modelled the bag for a few weeks because it made me happy to look at.

Next up, a totally spontaneous project that emerged when I found a pattern for a laser cut vine corset on Etsy, and I reached out to my friend who knows how to use the laser cutter at the work MakerSpace to help me out, because I suddenly had a mighty need.

Whoops first test resulted in something way too small. We scaled it up a bit in inkscape to get something human sized for v2:

We couldn’t get a perfect cut (especially because my leather had a slight bend from being stored in a roll) and it left behind these little dangly leather bits when I tried to punch out the pieces. Still faster to go after those with an exacto knife to try and do any of this by hand!

Watch the mesmerizing laser cutter:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/BdKa6xTZFbhvgDxJ7

Yes, my sewing space did smell like burnt leather for a couple days just from bringing the leather pieces home.

I painted all the pieces with bronze metallic Angelus leather paint.

A couple rivets later, and we have a super amazing vine corset!

Both of these got worn at the Renaissance Faire, along with my previously-made leather bolero and arm bracers (turns out for this outfit I had made all my own leather, but purchased all the actual clothing).

Last, the rare time I make something for someone else, a leather wine bottle holder for my dad! I took the day off after the election results to dissociate and craft and got most of this cut and punched that day. Made of black leather (unsure if chrome or vegtan), and plain vegtan that I dyed green. I used matching green edge paint and thread, and accidentally made a Loki wine bottle holder. This works for me!

Now I really need to get back to working with fabric, but I still have plans for some more fantasy/steampunk leather in the future…

Posted in Leatherworking | Leave a comment

A (mostly self-drafted) Lamour Dress

Posted on May 1, 2024 by avantgarbe

Don’t look now, but this might be considered modern sewing?

But really it’s a dress based strongly on 1950s, so we can call it vintagey and go from there.

So a good friend of mine from college was getting married in Puerto Rico. And while I could pull a formal dress out of my closet, what fun is that? And honestly I just wanted to show off to all my college friends that I see so rarely (and this was probably the first time since graduation we were all in one place!)

I went through a lot of patterns and the entire Anthropolgie formal dress line, and finally landed on the Lamour Dress by Charm Patterns.

Usually I don’t go for Charm Patterns, but I realized that’s mostly due to how much I detest the fabric choices they use.

It has a lot of variations, and I went with strapless top (with optional halter straps) for maximum skills-show-offing, plus the sarong skirt as it seemed appropriately tropical for a Puerto Rico Wedding!

Then the hard part / fun part – making a strapless bodice that would actually fit me! And here’s where things get a bit silly – the bodice is just a princess seamed bodice. The skirt (aside from the front overskirt with drapery) is a pencil skirt. And I figured all of those would fit way better if I did some flat pattern alterations to my own sloper vs using the actual pattern. So even though I bought the pattern, I actually made all those pattern pieces and only used the purchased pieces for the overskirt and the halter straps.

Here’s what it looks like to try and remove 5 inches of length from a skirt by slashing and overlapping 😵‍💫 (I’m super short plus I wanted a more modern length than the pattern’s tea length)

And my first mockup on my Beatrice dress form:

So even though this looks really good on the form, it turns out that this is a bad representation of my body when I plan on wearing shapewear, plus I’m relying on the boning in the bodice to do the structural support of lifting. I ended up going through two more versions of a mockup, where the major changes were:

Adding a solid inch of length. I don’t mind low cut, but this felt like it would be unsafe for dancing
Taking it in in little bits on a whole bunch of seams. A bodice like this really needs to be skintight, or even have negative ease at the waist (depending on shapewear) and the under bust (since I’m not wearing a strapless bra with this).

But by mockup #3 I ended up with something I was quite pleased with:

And then the fabric! It’s funny, I ordered about a dozen swatches since I was hoping for silk, but maybe with a pattern, or maybe some texture? I was really just trying to avoid any sort of bridesmaid feel (that you get with solid colored silk fabrics, especially satins).

And then at the end of the day I ended up going with the fabric I had intended to use all along – cutting apart the second ever dress I ever made, which was made out of a $7/yd textured silk in a beautiful shade of green. The store originally sold it to me as silk dupioni, but a decade later knowing a lot more about fabric, I would call this a heavy silk organza. It’s just way too sheer and the slubs aren’t big enough to be a dupioni.

Byebye 10 year old dress! This is before I understood fitting, especially the fact that I am cylinder shaped, as evidenced by the huge lacing gap around the waist. At least I had excellent taste in fabric.

I had to flatline every piece due to the sheerness. The bodice strength layer is a gray cotton sateen from Renaissance Fabrics, which were the remnants of my Captain America Parasol lining. The bodice lining and skirt flatlining is a shiny green mystery fabric from my stash that I got ages ago from the Costume College bargain basement. I suspect it’s mostly or entirely polyester, but the color worked and I’m really trying to use up the stash. These fabrics are old enough to basically be called free, so the most expensive part of the dress was the pattern plus a long metal zipper!

I had an initial disaster with the halter straps looking like chicken wings.

It turns out I had reversed the straps in the seam, so I had to unpick (and the seams were already graded sigh), flip them over, and resew. I’m 99% sure that the sew-along youtube video actually says the wrong thing about which side should be facing shoulder vs neck, because I watched it so carefully to try and ensure I didn’t make this mistake. The actual pattern itself has the right markings, but since I drafted my own bodice I didn’t have those notches.

This try-on was with a zipper basted in. I was absolutely paranoid that the dress was going to end up too tight, especially because 3 layers + boning + zipper takes up more space than just a muslin mockup. I ended up letting it out about a quarter inch on each side of the zipper (for a half inch total) compared to mockup, which ended up being a smidge too much and it ended up a bit looser than I wanted. I swear you can never win… (but also bodies are fickle day to day).

Choose your own adventure bodice! I ended up wearing it entirely strapless at the wedding, but I quite like the halter variations as well.

Then attaching the skirt! For some reason I got a very odd pulling at the hip that didn’t happen in the mockup, and I’m still not positive why it happened. Definitely some error in patterning or cutting that I would need to address if I ever make this again.

I ended up opening the seam and taking in one piece a solid inch. It’s still a little wonky on the outside, but not enough for anyone to notice without me pointing it out.

And then it was time for the scariest part of this whole endeavor – a lapped zipper.

I haven’t done one of these since making a sample back in Intermediate Sewing Construction class.

But hey, turns out the instructions from that class were pretty good! I pulled out the class binder and followed along (hand basting every step of the way to make sure that thing was lined up perfectly).

pinning before basting. Pretty sure this whole dress was made to campaign 2 of critical role (which I am still woefully behind on).

Woohoo a zipper! That lining you see up top got pushed back into the dress and hand whipped down around the zipper and waist to cover all the exposed seams.

The final try-on was just a smidge too loose (I let out just a bit too much from the earlier try-on with just the bodice) but I added a waist stay which took up just enough to keep things firmly in place. The moral of the story is you should add a waist stay to any strapless garment you own, even one purchased from a store. It’s not a ton of work for a ton of security!

And luckily I finished a whole 24 hours before getting on an airplane!

I’m wearing it with a vintage Edwardian amethyst pendant (from Marsh and Meadow on Instagram), a bustle-era hairpiece made by my friend (omg the best way ever to do fancy hair. Takes about 5 minutes to clip on), and shoes from Nine West that I painted silver with leather paint (when I couldn’t find silver shoes I liked anywhere, but did find ivory).

Turns out there are street cats all over Puerto Rico, so I declared them all my wedding dates and had to pose with them (yes my husband came too, but KITTIES)

See I brought a backup date in case the cats rejected me

Phew, that was a fun 4 month adventure into a different era of sewing! Now I just need to find more formal events to go to so I can try out the other strap styles.

Posted in clothing from this century?, Lamour Dress, vintage | 3 Comments

Transitional Tawny Tudor Gown

Posted on January 5, 2024 by avantgarbe

That’s a mouthful eh?

So the GBACG was going to see a Tudors exhibit at the Legion of Honor. I had planned to wear a this-old-thing Elizabethan gown, but a perfect combination of events:

I had been laid off, but found a new job, and had 6 weeks in between offer and starting
my kids stayed healthy so could be at school/daycare
I abandoned all household responsibilities except childcare

to quickly bang together what I’m calling my Transitional Tawny Tudor gown in two weeks.

The transitional part:

My inspiration was dresses like these between 1500-1510, which so clearly show the transition from what are traditionally considered medieval gowns (kirtles, fitted to the body), to the classic Tudor style (triangular skirt, square neckline, huge sleeves folded back).

Alas my pinterest link is erroring out, but says
Réunion des Musées Nationaux-Grand Palais
01-005022 folio 13R

From “Hours of Joanna of Castile”, Master of the David Scenes in the Grimani Breviary and Workshop. Bruges or Ghent, Between 1496 and 1506. The British Library, Add. Ms. 18852.

And you can see more of these on my Pinterest board (I didn’t make this style, but can you believe how many are wrap gowns?!?)

The Tawny Part:

The fabric was my luckiest find ever; an orange-on-orange toned silk damask that I got for $6/yard. No I’m not joking. There is a wonderful nonprofit called Fabmo near me which collects fabric from industry and local donations and sells it super cheap to keep it out of landfills. This fabric was listed as maybe-silk, and I immediately recognized it as the Lionheart silk damask pattern that Renaissance Fabrics was selling for $30/yd (at the time of writing this post now $40), except I have no idea where it came from because they’ve never had this colorway.

To quote The Tudor Tailor, tawny was a color description that covered orange/tan/light brown that we don’t use as a color category today, but was a popular gown color at the time (black was the most popular in the clothing warrants, this was the second-most popular if you exclude the quantity of red gowns for Queen Katherine’s coronation).

I also knew I would need a head covering and luckily Fabmo had 1.5 yards of italian-made cotton velveteen for $10 when I went looking for velveteen so I nabbed that as well.

I cannot express how happy these fabrics make me

I then immersed myself in the phenomenal scholarship that is The Queen’s Servants. If you don’t have this book, you want this book. It’s several PHDs worth of research and speculative construction information of gowns at the time. It’s useful as well for understanding what became the more typical Tudor gown.

I already had a black kirtle to wear as my shaping-layer. Not much changed in about 100 years of kirtles aside from whether or not they had sleeves attached. Earlier kirtles would more likely be short sleeve, but it’s not like anyone could tell under my gown. Rather than using the Queens Servants kirtle pattern and making it fit, I traced off my old kirtle pattern and added a bit extra seam allowance to the back and sides to account for the fact that it was going over a kirtle. Crossing my fingers that it would fit perfectly the first time because it came off a fitting pattern right?

Sigh nothing is ever that easy. Mostly because I made the kirtle a decade ago on my Uniquely You dress form which is decidedly line-backer-ish compared to my extremely narrow shoulders. So I mostly had to tweak the angle and where the shoulder straps fell.

I know it looks decent, but you can see my dotted lines that the strap needs to sit a solid half inch higher up the shoulders. I also pinned on a piece of muslin to make the ridiculous point at the center front because why not go extreme silly styles!

I was tempted to go straight from this alteration into my real fabric (remember, only 2 weeks to make this) but I know myself and my alteration skills too well. And to not test a sleeve mockup is absolutely to mock the gods.

Next mockup using an absolute hodgepodge of stash fabric beause I managed to lose my bolt of muslin (I finally found it 3 months later. Literally next to my sewing table under a pile of mending). It was pretty close, but I found a few important fixes!

1: Bring this corner in a bit more to cover the kirtle strap. (If I ever make a later tudor gown it will need a new kirtle that also goes out further because those are wiiiiide at the neckline). Also I planned to bring up the center point higher to make it more pronounced like my inspiration images.

2. I pinched a *whole inch* out of the back necline to tighten it up and keep the shoulder strap on. How this was necessary I have no idea but hey do what the fabric tells you.

3. I have a lot of draglines at this armscye, probably because the Queens Servants sleeve draft has a super shallow sleeve head. But I decided to leave it in order to have more mobility in the final gown.

Pretty pleased with the end shape of the pattern. The acute angle where the strap meets the bodice is exactly what I’ve seen other patterns look like.

yes you could try to make your own pattern draft off of this instead of The Queen’s Servants, but it won’t work for you unless you are 4’11” and shaped like a cylinder

Finally time for fashion fabric! The bodice has an interlining of linen canvas (leftover from these stays) and a thin linen lining (a curtain, also from Fabmo. It’s not a great linen as it’s so open weave which makes it too soft and drapey, but was fine for a non-visible lining layer since the linen canvas was providing the strength).

I would have liked to handsew the whole thing, but not with a 2 week deadline! So yeah every inside seam was machine sewn.

Sexay pattern matching on the back! Historically I believe they wouldn’t have cared in order to conserve fabric but I had enough fabric that it was a non-issue.

My sleeve draft was straight from the Queen’s Servants aside from shortening it just a little bit because I be short. I used the Wide Sleeve, which was only the intermediate option! (There was a Tabard Sleeve which was even bigger!). I just cut them using the full width of my fabric and not adding unnecessary piecing (which would have been required in period due to silk fabric being a much narrower width. But they also had pretty and strong selvedges which could have been whipped together whereas I would have had raw seams with piecing. tldr; it’s not possible to be 100% historically accurate because of things like this).

Long sleeves are looooooong. Also my sewing table is a corner of the living room hence things like toddler cars.

This is giving me ideas about some kind of steampunk fantasy cropped bolero with giant sleeves

Even going for speed as much as possible the handsewing sneaks out of me – see the basting on the stitch lines (since both the damask and the linen canvas looooved to fray and I wanted to know where the stitch line was meant to be) and doing a herringbone stitch to hold the seam allowance down inside.

Skirts were drafted straight out of the queen’s servants choosing the narrower skirt option with a train (although about 7″ shorter since I need a 37″ skirt and not a 42″ skirt. I hate nothing more than grading up a skirt pattern which is longer than my yardstick ughhhh. The front was lined with gray cotton sateen and the back with a silver silk blend (I think that’s the content) because I didn’t have any linen of the right weight and drape in the stash.

Yes, my pattern weights are rocks that my 5yo had brought into the house at some point in time.

I was so close to not having to piece any of this gown, but my fabric came in 3 pieces and I wasn’tn about to cut into a new one for that tiny skirt corner. So that is the one bit I ended up piecing on (with pattern matching since I had enough extra for that).

Here is where I deviated from the Queen Servants construction information. They have a long section about making wool batting into cylinders and stuffing your pleats with them. I made the narrower skirt draft from the book and it made such tiny pleats there was no possible way to add cylinders of batting, (although the book never specified that their pleat method was only for the widest skirts so there was some initial consternation here). Instead I just added a bit of quilt batting into my back pleats to pad them out.

They also had incomprehensible instructions about how to attach the skirt to the bodice. I went full victorian and turned my raw edges into each other, and whipped the finished bodice bottom to the finished skirt top.

Hard to tell but those are pretty tiny pleats. And there was only enough fabric to have them be flat box pleats, definitely no room for stuffing (and I think I had 5 pleats compared to the book’s 6. Sometimes you just need to do what the fabric wants).

And story time about my fur! My grandmother owned a mink coat which my mom inherited. Give that we all lived in southern california, the mink coat stayed in the closet for decades. When my sister went to college in Chicago, she had the coat tailored into a vest which she would actually wear. I called dibs on the offcuts, so the sleeves then stayed in my closet for years waiting for a project. And then this one finally appeared! Mink is a documentable fancy fur for edging gowns of this type.

Can you believe how small some of those seamed sections are? That’s a quarter inch wide piece of fur they pieced in.

I pulled out my cutter and strop from leatherworking and carefully cut this into strips, trying not to push too hard (because ideally you just cut through the leather backing and not so much the fluffy side). Of course everything did end up coated in fuzz and I used a handheld vacuum on the table in between cutting each strip.

I tried to figure out the “correct” way of handsewing fur onto a gown, and whaddya know there really are no resources out there for doing this. So for the front opening I did a running stitch right sides together, flipped the fur over to bind the edge, and whipped it down on the inside without folding it under (because leather doesn’t fray).

Sewing the leather strip down juts outside the seam allowance before cutting off the seam allowance and flipping the leather around the raw edge

Fur doesn’t like turning acute corners but it’s also so fluffy you can’t really tell how messy the stitching is

Same procedure for sleeves as neckline, but a sewing machine. Also I used the fur as a facing (so flipped all the way to the inside) as opposed to a binding. I wish I had enough to go higher up the sleeve!

For the sleeves, I was seriously running out of time. Walking foot and leather sewing needle to the rescue! (The walking foot had been purchased to sew some knit jersey shirts and the leather needle was from long ago attaching leather trim to boots for my Rey costume. All parts of the hobby are useful and converge!). Unfortunately despite careful math to make the length of trim be correct, the fur tends to bunch up a little bit meaning I was about 2″ short on the trim and had to carefully (and begrudgingly because it was getting late at night) add on a little extension piece). I think I finished the whipstitching on the inside of the sleeve around 10pm which is past my bedtime these days.

And miraculously, this dress was done within two weeks to go see the Tudor Exhibit at the Legion of Honor with the Greater Bay Area Costumer’s Guild!

whoops all my photos in front of the exhibit name have my eyes closed

To get the bonnet and frontlet on, I taped up my hair and used big pins to pin the bonnet directly to my braids (I should make some kind of under-coif one of these days). The frontlet is pinned onto the bonnet in a hopefully attractive fashion. I need to do some more digging into portraits because I think at this point they start getting a little bit fancier (before evolving into what becomes a gable hood [if you stick a buckram structure underneath] or a French hood).

I love this dress so so much. If you don’t know the period it’s kindof a strange look (aka shiny bathrobe) but it really feels like clothing of the era and not a costume when I put it on.

me so pious. (I mean this was the appropriate era of dress for Katherine of Aragon’s wedding!)

And some of my musings on historical accuracy with this dress – sometimes I care a whole lot and sometimes I really truly don’t :p For example, I was agonizing over the fact that my sleeves and neckline were trimmed with fur, but my hemline was bound with velvet. While this is entirely plausible (as we have evidence of dresses hemmed in velvet as well as fur), it was never documented to see them at the same time on the same dress. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough of either the velvet or the fur to use entirely one or the other. I thought about cutting up a beaver fur coat I nabbed from goodwill in order to have enough, but I really wanted to use the mink (both for the connection to my grandmother, and because mink is documentable as a trim used for this era of gowns.

I also agonized over the sleeve lining. Again looking at what was documented, a matching silk satin would likely be used if the sleeve was bound with velvet. If fur was used, the gown was lined entirely with fur (although sometimes a cheaper fur was used for the inside and a fancier fur like mink was used where visible). Of course, since I live in Northern California during the era of climate change and not England during a mini ice age, lining the gown entirely in fur was right out. And I used what I had in my stash, which was a coordinating taffeta, rather than rush ordering any expensive silk.

On the other hand, my skirt is lined with cotton sateen in the front and a silk/cotton (I think) sateen in the back, and one of the cotton sateen pieces is the wrong side out because I didn’t want to deal with piecing. 🤷

To end this, being contemplative in the columns:

Bibliography

Johnson, Caroline, et al. The Queen’s Servants: Gentlewomen’s Dress at the Accession of Henry VIII: A Tudor Tailor Case Study. Fat Goose Press., 2016.

Posted in Medieval, Renaissance, Tawny Transitional Tudor Gown | 8 Comments

Moiraine Sedai blue gown pictures

Posted on October 12, 2023 by avantgarbe

Finally me and my photographer friend A Life Condensed were back at Jordan Con together. I originally planned to buy her 5-image mini photo package, but then she sent me back SO MANY GOOD PROOFS that I had to buy the full set of 10.

So no commentary, just the amazing photos she took of a 6 month 100+hour costume!

(Also, it’s astounding that this forest oasis is actually the back of the hotel in Atlanta.)

“*The Source is the river; the Aes Sedai, the waterwheel.*“

“*You don’t listen to the wind. It’s the wind that listens to you.”*

Ok a wee bit of commentary. After entering the Jordan Con costume contest for the first time in 2015 and nearly every subsequent year after that, getting every variation of award except the top, I finally FINALLY managed to score the Best in Show award!

Posted in Fantasy/Scifi/Cosplay, TV show Moiraine Damodred | 1 Comment

Moiraine Damodred Leather Bolero

Posted on October 9, 2023 by avantgarbe

It’s time! The whole reason I learned leatherworking!

This all started with Hazariel posting a video on Youtube of her leather Moiraine bolero. While I pretty much ignored her construction process, she did offer something invaluable – a free pattern! That gave me a base to alter and start fitting.

I started with paper to get the general gist of what what happening, and to my shock it was already pretty close (and I have extremely narrow shoulders, so I’m still baffled as to how close this was).

the front, with just a bit of underarm gapping

The armscye needed the most altering to bring it in closer.

I took in a few “darts” in the paper to narrow the armscye, although I really wasn’t sure how much wearing ease this thing needed. For my first real mockup, I used some heavy foam interfacing since I already had some, but if I didn’t have any then foam would have been a fine substitute (you need something very substantial to mimic the weight of leather).

Left and right sides, experimenting with where I should pinch out the excess.

I redrafted the collar (first to be way shorter to accommodate my lack-of-neck), but also I have no idea why the provided pattern had that odd curve to it. I’ve never seen a mandarin collar have that shape.

And then I needed to figure out the stamping pattern.

This involved HOURS of poring over grainy screencaps and super dark scenes to try and figure out what was going on. Here’s the problem – there are two main boleros shown in the show. One is the undyed sample bolero used in a behind-the-scenes video where it’s possible to see incredible detail. And then there is the one actually used in the show.

The main way to tell the difference is the sample one has additional couching over the shoulders. This doesn’t end up on the main one.

behind-the-scenes version – note extra couched cords on shoulders

Some of the other differences:

The sample one has triangles punched out fully, where I think the final bolero has them as stamps, but not full holes.

The sample one looks like it’s whipstitched along all edges in some versions, but the final one just uses a cross-hatched stamp on the edge which ends up looking like stitching from far away.

So the final order of embellishment from outside to inside of the bolero is:

diamond shaped holes (a very standard kind of leather punch. 6mm is also a pretty standard spacing distance for hole punches, so I bought a 6mm punch set).
equilateral triangles (which did not exist anywhere as a punch, and I had to buy one special from etsy)
a couched cord. The actual one used a hole on each side of the couching, but for ease (aka lazyness) I went with one hole because that meant half the number of punches necessary
a stamp of 4 concentric circles with a pearl chip in the middle. Turns out concentric circle stamps also don’t exist, so I ordered this custom from etsy as well (to avoid doing 4 separate stamps for each circle)
another couched cord
a stamp with lines in a shell shape applied randomly to add some texture

In order to make sure my spacing between all those elements was good and to get some practice, I made some arm bracers in the same pattern as a wearable mockup.

Ok I forgot to include the shell texture as background on these

Then I cut out all my leather pieces and began the very slow process of doing the punching and stamping on each. For pieces that attached, I was very careful to match up my pieces to have a matching number of holes (man did I miss working with Dieselpunk patterns which do all this work for you…)

Dying time! I used navy dye with just a smidge of black to darken it. I think I ended up doing three coats. I covered my dress forms in a plastic bag and pinned the pieces on to dry in the right shape, since leather curves and shapes very easily when wet and will stay that way when dry.

Then each piece had the edges waxed and burnished. I applied resolene to the inside (a liquid plastic) to seal it so the dye wouldn’t come off on my dress. On the outside I used mink oil to finish and condition it while keeping it shiny.

Couching on the cord took hours of meetings. I should have used a narrower thread (like a buttonhole sewing thread) instead of the heavy waxed leather sewing thread because it was too thick and I had to use a plier to pull it through the hole each time (and it was a pain to thread the needle).

At the corners where the cord ended I punched an extra large hole and just poked the cords through:

Here’s the progression of embellishment on the same shoulder piece from beginning to end:

outer holes are punched, you can see faint lines where I drew in where the triangles and couching holes will be punched

round hole punched for outer couching cord

triangles and cross hatch ovals stamped on

circles are stamped on, the center of each is punched out where a bead will go, and the textural stamp in the middle

big jump forward for a piece that was dyed, had the edges burnished, and the cords couched on

last step, make it extra shiny with beads

The pearl beads caught on absolutely everything. I wonder if the tv show had a version with painted dots when Moiraine had her hair down, because I had to unwind hair from them at the end of the day!

Sewing pieces together in progress.

Somewhere around this point I hit the “this looks absolutely awful and I hate it” stage, but once the shoulders and beads were on it turned back around into “!!! did I actually make this?!?”

Next up, professional photos, because if any costume deserves it, this one did.

Posted in Fantasy/Scifi/Cosplay, TV show Moiraine Damodred | Tagged moiraine damodred, wheel of time, wotonprime | 3 Comments

Moiraine Damodred Wheel of Time blue dress

Posted on August 29, 2023 by avantgarbe

…I’ve made a lot of Moiraine dresses.

(tldr; Moiraine Damodred, Aes Sedai of the Blue Ajah, a very popular character from The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan).

The first Moiraine dress was my first “advanced” sewing project and it predates this blog (to the point where I’ve started taking it apart for fabric).

The second was a book-accurate Moiraine, aka a historically accurate 18th century robe a la francaise, with a non-historical petticoat and stomacher that I swap out for historical ones depending on the event.

So when Amazon Prime produced a Wheel of Time tv show, I hadn’t planned to make another Moiraine gown. And then this series of events happened:

Her formal dress is interesting, but the main feature of it is a leather bolero and I know nothing about leatherworking
Hazariel comes out with a Youtube video of making the bolero, and it looks…strangely accessible?
… I decide I’m actually doing this, proceed to watch dozens of hours of leatherworking videos, spend a ton of money at Tandy Leather, and make a leather pouch as my practice piece.

But this post is actually going to be about the dress, because that’s a lot more straightforward.

To start – yes, I know Bernadette Banner made the dress. It was strange to see my Historical Costume hobby suddenly collide with my Wheel of Time fandom hobby. It was great that she made it first, because she included a whole bunch of screencaps in her videos, which prevented me from needing to pore over grainy dark screens on my own (seriously Amazon, did you own any set lights?)

The dress is not too complicated (although I made some choices that made my life more difficult later on). It is a high neck princess seam dress where the front panel extends to the floor, an attached gathered skirt underneath, and some hip fins.

(the costume designer describes Cairhien dress as a cross between Chinese fashion and 18th century France. This dress bears no resemblance to either, and I can invite you to my rant on the tv show costume design choices another time if you wish).

It was fairly straightforward to change my two-dart moulage into a princess seam dress, while extending the front panel to be floor length (with a slight flair at the bottom). If you want to do the same, I can’t recommend Patternmaking for Fashion Design by Helen Joseph Armstrong enough.

If this was going to be a sleeveless dress I would have taken in the fabric under the arm, but since this is getting long sleeves I left the extra fabric to keep some movement.

A large separating zipper is extremely helpful for fitting a back closing dress yourself

Please note there is literally not a single image of this dress sans bolero, so we don’t know if these are shoulder princess seams or armscye princess seams. I went with armscye because I find that aesthetically more pleasing.

The fabric is some shade of blue, but it changes in every shot. It also seems to have been tie-dyed in some way. (On the behind the scenes the costume designer references Shibori dyeing techniques which are beautiful. This looks more like what I did at summer camp than professional shibori dyeing, but once again I digress).

Since I had already spent redacted on leatherworking supplies, I didn’t really want to spend $30/yd on blue silk taffeta, so I decided to take a chance on dying some white silk taffeta I acquired for $7(!)/yd from Fabmo.

Double double toil and trouble, in my stockpot from Ross. 7 yards was really pushing the limit of what this pot could handle.

Drying in the bathroom:

And the final results!

Unfortunately, this is after ironing. Silk taffeta really hates water, and it pretty much gets these indelible wrinkles after being submersed in hot water. We’re gonna hand wave it and call it a purposeful textural element to try and mimic the tv-show tie-dye?

The fabric was only 36″ wide so I needed to get creative about pattern placement (and only cut single layer).

The princess seams in front and back reminded me of Victorian dress construction, so I flatlined the each piece with blue cotton sateen (leftover from Captain America), serged around the edges, and sewed it together (treating each flatlined-pieces as a single piece).

The show dress closes with an invisible zipper.

(Nothing exemplifies how little budget this show was given compared to Rings of Power than this. You don’t see any invisible zippers on Galadriel’s dresses).

I didn’t want a zipper on my dress, so as a nod to the books, I had the back close with tiny blue pearly buttons (as many many dresses in the books do, despite this not being a particularly good choice for back-closing dresses since it’s not very strong. Robert Jordan was an excellent author, less so a seamstress!)

I didn’t want the buttons to deal with any tension, so I constructed this like bridal gowns with decorative outside buttons – there is a strength lining layer with a separate closure underneath, and then the outer layer just lays over the top.

I cut the back pieces and side back out of the cotton sateen an extra time, and treated all the layers as one at the side seam and shoulder seams:

The inside layer closes with an extra long zipper, so that I can (theoretically) zip up this layer by myself while still fitting over my hips. In a bridal gown you’d probably see this with hooks and eyes (which would have made the skirt way easier, had I thought that far ahead…)

The outer back layers covering up the zipper, and will eventually close with loops and buttons.

And then it was time for sleeves.

I’ve learned my lesson about sleeves and hand-basted one in for the first try on:

It laid weird!

And my careful seam matching did not line up!

So unpicking it and basting it in even more carefully this time, making more certain to align my princess seams with the sleeve seams at front and back:

I also chose to hand-sew the sleeves in, because every time I do it by machine I get puckers or catch a bit underneath and this ends up faster in the end.

Also I think this picture is from the hour long train ride on one of the few days I went into my actual San Francisco office

Starting to look like a dress! (looks like I added the collar somewhere in there as well. Why is it I keep making outfits with mandarin collars when I hate how they look on me?!?)

And then hip fins which also seemed simple, but were a bit of a hair pulling exercise. At first I stuffed one with poly fiberfill, because it’s what I had. This ended up being too bulky and bumpy and making the fin not lie smoothly (see the right fin below).

Luckily a friend of mine got very into quilting during Covid, and happily passed me some scraps of her quilt batting to use!

Fiberfill on the right, two layers of quilt batting on the left

Then it took me hours of futzing and minute tweaks to get the fins to lay at a nice angle that *looked* angular and not too horizontal at the front, along with making them match each other. It definitely involved arc-ing them and not matching seam allowance with the side pieces. Yay for dress forms that let you mess with 3D draping!

And a shot of the insides. Fins are sewn on, the seam allowance was herringbone stitched down to lie flat. You can see the boning on the seams and the hidden inner back layer.

Then it just needed a skirt! I cut rectangular panels and hemmed them, and leveled the skirt by pleating it down higher or lower on the inside. I discovered some parts of the silk had been too balled up in the dye pot and didn’t take color, but I did my best to cut around them, hide them under the front panel, or where necessary put them in the back where they would hopefully be less noticeable. The skirt is unlined to give it a lot of movement and lightness.

I hate knife pleats (I’m a cartridge pleat gal) but I wanted the flatness of them. I did a divide-and-conquer method pinning at halfway points until I got to small enough sections to do some pleats (totally not measuring in any way).

Here’s where that choice to have the two back layers with the long zipper caused me problems. If I attached the pleats to the inner layer, the zipper wouldn’t have been covered at center back. But the inner back layer was too long at the side seam, so I ended up hopping the fabric from the inner to the outer layer where I had a seam in the skirt fabric. If the inner layer had been an inch shorter this would have been a non-issue and I could have easily just attached everything to the outer layer. Lesson learned.

No pictures apparently, but once I had all the pleats pinned to my liking I folded the top down on the inside, and very carefully whipped that fold to just the lining of the bodice, not going through to the outer layer (and snipping and redoing stitches in multiple places where it turned out I had caught the silk…)

Last up, sewing a bajillion buttons onto the back.

Isn’t this better than an invisible zipper?

Dress was done, and it’s time for the scary part, but also the only reason I made this dress. Leather bolero time!

Posted in Fantasy/Scifi/Cosplay, TV show Moiraine Damodred | Leave a comment

Wearing History Leslie skirt

Posted on May 2, 2023 by avantgarbe

This is technically a 1950s pattern, so we’ll sneak it under the historical/vintage umbrella yes?

So I rarely buy patterns; these days I mostly draft my own or work off existing ones I have. But Wearing History came out with a 1950s pattern that for some reason ate my brain, and I decided to buy the PDF:

This made very little sense for me to buy for several reasons:

I’m pretty sure I haven’t worn a skirt since I started working from home permanently when Covid shut down offices in March 2020
This skirt is clearly designed for someone who has some distance between the bust and the waist (I do not) and some kind of hourglass figure (I do not. I am in fact shaped like the World’s Fastest Hourglass).
The stash fabric I had in mind for this was a heavy wool crepe, and I started working on this in the middle of the summer.

Oh well, you have to go where the sewing muse takes you, regardless of thinks like “sense”.

Even though this pattern was very simple, I made a full mockup because I have a bad habit of half-assing modern clothing, and then having it not fit (wearing ease scares me. Just let me fit things skin tight over a corset for consistent sizing ok?)

The two changes I made before making the mockup were:

shortening the waistband height by 3/4″ (I think. It’s been a while). I asked the pattern maker where this skirt was supposed to sit, and the hip gathers are supposed to hit at the natural waist, while the rest of the waistband sits *above* the waist. Well that would stick the top of the waistband straight into underbust territory, especially as I’ve been living in nursing bras since February 2022 which don’t provide as much lift.
shortening the length of the skirt overall. I’m 4’11”, me and tea length are not friends. That’s an instant invitation into frumpy-stumpy-ville.

Bonus, shortening the skirt meant that I was able to get it out of ~2 yards of 60″ wide fabric (especially since I used a cotton/silk satin as the waistband lining, instead of a self lining since I had some notion of wearing this with a cropped top).

The muslin showed that I needed to take a bit of width out of the top of the waistband, because I am 100% shaped like a cylinder (and not the upside-down-triangle shape provided here. Remember, the waistband here is actually sitting above the waist, and the original 1950s pattern probably assumed a girdle).

Next picture shows blue thread tacks marking the spot of each button, and the orangey-brown wool crepe cut out for a pattern piece.

Wool crepe is an interesting fabric. On the one hand it’s quite friendly as it doesn’t fray a ton, and wool is extremely malleable and easy to iron out wrinkles. On the other hand, this is a *heavy* crepe. To actually press things like seams you need a clapper, otherwise it just bounces back. The thread tacking was also out of necessity and not just couture-aspirations, because no chalk or pen would leave a marking on it.

I made self-covered buttons because nothing was going to match this. After that, it was pretty quick to sew together (after I came to my senses and made regular buttonholes, and not bound buttonholes. You don’t make bound buttonholes the first time you make a pattern and don’t know how it will turn out…)

Then it went onto my dress form to hang for a couple days, because something like this will absolutely stretch on the bias, and you want all the hem to stretch out from gravity before hemming it.

I went to try it on, and siiiiiigh it was too big. As I mentioned in the previous post, when making a skirt that is supposed to fit at the natural waist, you can’t have wearing ease. Otherwise that wearing ease just makes the skirt sit lower. (Note, this was the first skirt I discovered this on. But I did not internalize the lesson and then literally made the same mistake on the sparkly formal skirt too…) And since I had already topstitched the waistband this would be a HUGE PAIN to fix, plus I was completely out of the matching thread except for a bit left in the bobbin.

And that’s when this skirt went into the naughty pile because at that point I really needed to start working on the corset of that gothy fae outfit previously discussed (in May 2022).

In the beginning of November 2022, the gothy fairy outfit was done, and I had a brief window of time before needing to work on my JordanCon costume! I decided to finally fix and finish this dratted skirt to wear out to dinner in New York for Thanksgiving (which is a yearly tradition with my family). Wool crepe is actually a weather-appropriate fabric for New York in November.

Which meant opening up the waistband where I had whipped it over the seam allowances, opening it up on the sides, taking the waistband in ~1″, pulling the gathers tighter in that space, and then sewing it back on. I did so quite grumpily! As I’ve said in previous posts, part of the benefit of shapewear is that it keeps your waist the same size when sitting/standing/eating etc, which makes a difference for how tight to make a skirt with no stretch that you want to sit at the waist. In order to sit comfortably in it, the skirt feels a little too loose when standing up.

Then it was time to deal with the hem (which did sit very unevenly at that point due to bias stretch). The pattern instructions call for the front to be faced and then the hem folded up, which ends up with 4 layers at front with a single fold, and a whopping 6 layers if you double fold the hem. This would be bulky on most regular fabrics, let alone this super bouncy crepe. Instead of doing that, I used rayon seam binding to cover the raw edge and whipped it on. (It might have made more sense to fold up the hem and then whip the front facing over it, but I had topstitched the edge already which meant it had to be folded first). The double fold also doesn’t work well on an A-line, because you have to ease in the fabric at the top of the fold. Since this is wool I could have gathered it up and shrunk it with the iron, but I was definitely past the point of making this as couture as possible.

why catch stitches on the bottom and whip stitches on top? I have no idea, I just felt like it.

I don’t subscribe to the cult that every garment must have pockets (they don’t look good in pencil skirts, change my view), but when you have a big gathered skirt there’s no reason not to add them! I also made the facing out of a silk/cotton scrap left in my stash because I had some notion of wearing this with a crop top and wool crepe doesn’t feel great against the skin.

And after all that, I finally wore the skirt in February 2023 during a work product summit where every actually flew out and I sat in an office building 3 days in a row for the first time in years!

yes this picture is in my baby’s room, I was in a rush before heading to the train.

I’m pretty pleased with how this turned out! This makes something like the 5th [relatively] modern item in my wardrobe! I still have some notion of making the full length version out of something like a green hammered silk satin for all those formal occasions I totally definitely have on the calendar…

Posted in clothing from this century? | 1 Comment

A leather hip pouch

Posted on May 2, 2023 by avantgarbe

Wait what?

So yeah, I added leatherworking to my arsenal of crafting. It had a reason – I decided to make Moiraine’s formal outfit – leather bolero included – for the JordanCon costume contest. But rather than start with the competition entry as my first piece, I needed something to practice with first.

I basically watched Youtube videos and demos until I got bored – aka I felt like I knew what the next steps were going to be.

My recommendations:

Weaver Leather has amazing intro videos broken down into very basic topics
Dieselpunk has detailed videos demo-ing how he makes his patterns step by step.

So I bought this Dieselpunk hip pouch pattern, proceeded to spend way too much on supplies (this is not a cheap hobby), and got started.

My very first punch into any leather!

Here I was punching just on a cutting board on my costco craft table, and sometimes it would take a couple hits to get everything to go through. For my next project, I spent the money on the Tandy poundo board and quartz slab to put under what I was punching, and moved the setup to my heavy wooden dining table, and that helped a lot.

All the pieces cut and punched:

there is something very satisfying about seeing all these pieces together and ready.

This took forever because I could only work on it during the day, because I wasn’t about to risk waking up children while pounding punches with a hammer.

Then I dyed all the pieces. I didn’t actually use the right product for this; I had something called “leather antiquing gel” in my dragon-like-hoard of a craft-stash and figured that would work as leather dye. It did work, but it’s not really meant for a full dye job which is why it looks pretty streaky. We’re just gonna call that a feature to make it look “rustic” and buy the correct dye next time.

Remember to wear gloves when dying leather, for you too are made of leather.

My favorite step – sewing the pieces together (I think it’s pretty obvious by now that I enjoy hand sewing. And this is handsewing on easy mode since all the holes are there for you alread).

I was all set to have this done SEVERAL DAYS before a GBACG event, when I realized I had screwed up a couple things:

the straps I cut to go around my waist and hips were orders of magnitude too big. The pattern just said “cut to measurements” but didn’t specify subtracting the length of the buckle pieces attached to the bag.
I had fully missed cutting out a small strap piece. So had to get that cut/punched/dyed/edges burnished/waxed and rivet it on.

My last minute setup – pounding rivets in the master bathoom with a baby monitor because that’s the most soundproof room relative to my sleeping children:

Sliced off the end of the belt and using it as a template for the holes in the now-shorter belt:

And the finished pouch!

Forget pockets, this thing can hold so much

Just in time for the GBACG Witcher event! I threw together a vaguely fantasy woods ranger outfit, since the event included a sword fighting class.

The only me-made part of this is the pouch, the fake leather leggings and harness are both from Amazon, the shirt I got off ebay ages ago for vaguely Victorian undershirt, and the hat is from the Southern California Renaissance Faire.

So if you too want to learn leatherworking, the internet is a fantastic place! I seriously went from zero knowledge to making something just by watching videos over the course of a couple months.

And now I have way too many leather projects on deck fighting for time with my sewing projects. Such is the crafty life…

Posted in Fantasy/Scifi/Cosplay, Leatherworking | 2 Comments

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