From the Early Days

This is one of the first things I made for Anthea, cut from a torn velveteen pair of my pants and trimmed with homemade trim made from yarn.

The skirt is dead simple, made from two trapezoids, a triangle, and a hook and eye. There's no waistband, I just turned down both ends and hemmed. It largely exists to preserve her modesty when she wears the top half of the outfit. The overgown is the star of the show.

What makes the outfit is the contrast of the white on black. The trim inspired by a gown from Patterns of Fashion 3, particularly the curved back and the borders. For make it, I simply made crochet chains until I got the lengths I wanted. The frog balls are also crocheted, and the loops are bits of plain yarn with knots at the end.

Here, she also sports a cap and shawl. As a girl who hates the cold, layers are adored. The cap is called a sortie, and comes from the Godey's Ladies Book, by way of Koshka the Cat. To make it her scale, I did trial and error until it looked right. The shawl is a rectangle of knitted cotton in a basket weave stitch, with fringes at the ends.

Progress Report

Nothing too exciting going in terms of doll swing these days. Comic Con is approaching, and I'm trying to finish my human-sized costume for the event.

Still, some weeks ago, I drafted the bodice for Kozu's outer Renaissance gown and played with some sleeve designs.

 I initially waffled between straight sleeves and shoulder rolls, but the roll looks more interesting, doesn't it?

 I just need to redraft the roll so it doesn't look so wrinkly. This is especially important as I have some satin earmarked for the outer gown. 

Pants of DOOM!

I'm nearly done with the pants for the project Runway challenge. All I have to do is figure out the waistband treatment so it isn't oppresingly bulky. The instructions said that for making the 14th version, use 45 inches for each leg, which would translate to 10.25 inches for a 1:4 scale doll. The 15th/16th century version said to use 150% of the thigh measurement for each leg. I think at this point it is safe to say I miscalculated and did 300%, since I used the 18cm measurement I figured for each leg half, since that was that the pattern images showed. I think it's safe to say that I'll have to cut them down a bit.

On the bright side, I have the chance to take picture like this:

Project Runway, Woot

I decided to participate in Den of Angel's 12th Project Runway competition. I wasn't giving it much thought until Dollusional brought it up, and I thought it would be a good thing to be able to know someone also doing this, and have mutual kvetching sessions. Furthermore, it's running the full month of June, when I'll be between clothing swaps and might not know what to do with myself if i don't have a deadline project.

The theme of this Runway did trip me up a little. It needs to be inspired by Arabian nights, and I only have a causal familiarity with the Scheherazade tales, which are not detailed when it comes to clothing. I'm not in the mood to use Disney's Aladdin for inspiration, and the only outfit that caught my eye from the Thief and the Cobbler is Tack's clothes, which I don't want to replicate. What should I do?

Historical accuracy to the rescue! In other words, I hunted some Renaissance sites to see what they had regarding Near Eastern clothing and pulled up some articles and patterns that looked helpful. The cut of the clothes will be semi-accurate in regards to 15th and 16th century Persian clothes.

The theme of the outfit will be "rebellious princess." Tomboyish Heather seems best suited to model this sort of gear, so stuff will be loosely designed to fit her. The clothes will be made with rich looking fabrics to reflect her royal standing, and be designed to provide ample range of motion needed for any action girl.

One of the beauties of patterns from this place and time is that it's all triangles, trapezoids and rectangles. Very little cloth goes to waste, which helps as the stash fabric I chose is limited. Drafting has also been simple, though I realized rather too late that I cut the coat gores too wide. Sigh.

Finding a decent hat patter has been a bit of a pain. Pictures are too drapey to give me a good gauge for their construction, and I don't want someone from this time period running around with a naked head. It took several days and lots of annoyance, but I found a hat pattern that's straightforward, and does not get in the way during a hard hour's ride or brutal fight.

Links!
The hat
Everything else

When Geekdoms Collide

Of the video games I have a soft spot for, the Assassin's Creed series is one of them, especially from AC2 and onward. After Kozu made her arrival, first things I made for her was an outfit from Florence circa 1490.* This involved lurking the Festive Attyre and Realm of Venus pages staring at paintings and what other costumers did. I draped the bodice portion of the dress on Kozu, used calculations to pattern the camica (undershirt,) and the ginorea was made out of trapezoids and blind guessing as I couldn't figure the layout. The sleeves were drafted by me, and made reversible for multiple looks.

Since I was away from my machine at the time, the camica is entirely hand sewn the old fashioned way. I hemmed the parts individually and whipped them together. The same was done for the bodice of the gown. The long interior seams of the skirt was done by machine, but hemmed by hand and cartridge pleated. By my sewing math, the pleats ended up being spaced at .3 centimeters apart, which was a pain to mark. The ginorea binding and interior seams on the sleeves are also machine done.

As a final touch, I bought and styled a wig to match the side waves of the ladies in the paintings. Annoyingly, the wig I ordered was supposed to be "honey blond" and arrived closer to "platinum." Oh well. At least Kozu doesn't seem to mind.

Here are the pictures of Kozu resembling an AC2 background character. . Please ignore the hanging threads.

*At the time, I thought the game started in that year, and looked at paintings from that time. A great many moons later, I found out that the game starts in 1480. Sigh. On the bright side, there wasn't that much difference between the two years.

First layer accomplished

There is a running gag amongst the online costuming community about Costume ADD. I am no exception. Dolls can make this worse, as even tiny scraps can be turned into something for them, and they don't need an excuse to dress up. Then there's my fondness for historical clothing which covers many eras, and a plethora of pretty pictures for inspiration. I have a lot of projects that have yet to be completed.

One of my many grand plans is to create a doublet style overgown for Kozu, complete with kirtle, forepart, ruffs, and other things to make her look like a late Italian Renaissance noble. She will have multiple foreparts (something to peek through the split skirt of her gown,) and doublets which will be hand decorated with couched cord.

I started this project over a year ago, and I keep getting distracted. The doublets still aren't complete, and I decided to focus on one for now and worry about the rest later. The kirtle (underdress) isn't a very fun looking layer and I could not get excited about putting the bodice together. As it wasn't going to peek at all from under the outfit, I made it in plain muslin. Months and months pass before I finally hem the blasted thing, which must be done by hand due to all the tricky curves.

The skirt portion thankfully went by a lot faster. I took the farthingale pattern from The Tudor Tailor, stitched it together, fastened it to the bodice, and then added rows of cording to stiffen the hem. I'm not very sure how accurate stiff skirts are for this time and place, but I decided I liked the look. Tucking cords into the skirt isn't period either, but it was easy and got the job gone.

And now I have something to show:

Italian Peasant with Japanese Name

Festive Attyre is being a huge enabler with me. In this case, I decided that I wanted to make a late Italian Renaissance peasant outfit for Kozu. The designs ended up based off of two women from Pietro Ronzelli's Nativia di Maria. As per usual, as much as possible would come out of my stash.

The wig is very much not from my stash, and neither is the ribbon. I didn't have any ribbon of the right size that would look good for a lower class ensemble.

The main feature is the kirtle and sleeves, particularly the trim. I didn't deliberately go after the black and red color scheme, but that was the material I had that had good weight and drape, and that yarn looked good against it. The trim is made from lines of single crochet from a cone of yarn older than I am, and is hand applied. Except for the long skirt seams, this thing is hand sewn. The sleeves are separate and are mostly machine sewn.

Under the kirtle is the smock. Since I was short on linen scraps and the sleeves are tight, I just made short smock sleeves so I wouldn't have to worry about stuffing them in. At first I miscalculated how much of the ruffle I needed, so I had to partially dismantle it and piece in some more material. I was pretty much out of linen scraps type 1, so I went with type 2 for the last bit of length. Yay, mismatched peasant! Mostly handsewn except for part of the ruffle.

The apron is made of pieces of material left over from making a human sized apron. There wasn't enough from the big scraps to make the third panel, so I pieced it together for more budget saving peasant goodness. At this point, I no longer wanted to handsew, so the long sides of the panels and the piecing are all done on machine, though I used the blind stitch feature on the machine for hemming. The short sides are hand hemmed, but I took my dear time finishing that.

Here's a detail:

Weirdly, though I didn't want to hand sew this part, I jumped at the chance to connect the three pieces of apron with insertion stitching like the woman in the painting in a pink dress. I guess my brain decided that embroidery is not at all like construction sewing.

So this is the outfit from top to bottom. it took a lot longer than it should have due to project hopping, but I'm very satisfied with how it turned out.

Fake Fur Fun

Despite my many distractions, I'm still forging ahead with my Renaissance projects. A recent diversion was this pretty little link. Courtesy of Jen Thompson, I heard of these furs before, and know I wanted to try my hand at making one of the more ornate versions for myself. Cue a trip to the store where I spent too much on pretty gold beads and Sculpy, several tizzies looking for portraits featuring zibellinos for research and accuracy purposes, and fun with crochet.

Crocheting the critter was easy and relaxing, except when I had to pull out rows. Eyelash yarn likes to tangle with itself. Despite careful yet haphazard measuring, I was not pleased with the size of the first critter. I wanted something my girl could hold in her arm, and I created a lap blanket. As I still had enough yarn left, I made a smaller one. I also got some gold Sculpy. Initially I wanted to make a pretty white head and paw beads like in the first link, but the clay picked up a frightful amount of black lint.

Both heads started as triangles of foil covered in clay with features sculpted in. The eyes were pressed in with the help of a bead, and I embedded jump rings into the bottoms so I could later attach them to the zibellinos. the patterns on the paw beads were initially going to be historically accurate, but after a bad tizzy I decided it was simpler just to use my own design. These also have jump rings in the bottom. More beads were added on as claws, and the whole thing was fastened on to a new belt.

While it's not perfect, I'm fairly pleased with how it turned out.

 Here Kozu models her pelt, in a purchased outfit that makes the gold of the piece stand out all the more.

Accesories

Here is some things I whipped up this week, for an Italian Renaissance outfit. It's a complicated affair, as I want the clothes to be somewhat accurate, which means a lot of layers and handwork. This week I deviated from the garments to make some simpler bits. By this I mean I went into a research tizzy upon realizing that there are some common accessories in the portraits that I didn't have planned for the outfit, and was that all right?

The first issue was headgear, as many of the ladies have a tiara of pearls circling their heads. It felt a bit plain to just leave the head bare, and none of the other head gear appealed to me. Eventually I found this thread on Den of Angels, unearthed some old jewelry I hadn't worn in years, and banged out those two headbands.

Then a few days later came the tizzy of "What about the girdles? They show up a lot too." Some paintings show women without, but not enough to make me feel any better. Eventually I remembered that I do have a lot of pretty pearl beads, and maybe some other girdle making materials around. The ribbon I found didn't want to be strung, so I used a silk beading cord, some golden beads, a clasp and a lot of pearls and came up with the above. How do they look?