Wednesday 4 November 2015

October EXPO 2015

I've had to take a break from updating regularly because everything got a little hectic for a while. I was scrambling to finish my cosplays for October MCM EXPO and keeping on top of university at the same time, this resulted in me waking up to work on my Marian Hawke cosplay before university, going to university and then coming home and doing things until midnight when I fell into bed. Let me tell you, spray painting armour black in a dark garden at midnight is no easy task.

The convention was really wonderful, very different to previous cons because of the people I was hanging out with. I've made a lot of new friends in the last year and I mostly spent time with them, basking in how wonderful they all are.

On the Friday I cosplayed Susan Sto-Helit (sometime called Susan Death) from the Sky adaptation of Terry Pratchett's book 'Hogfather'. I don't have any proper photographs of her yet because I want to finish the gigantic sword that I couldn't get done in time for the con. So instead, have a photo that my mother took before I left and a photograph from the con floor.

Yes I did the same pose in both.

Photograph by Ramptopsman (on facebook)

I had so much fun being Susan, I was very comfortable all day and I felt really quite powerful with the huge cloak sweeping behind me and the wig giving me so much extra height.

On Saturday I was part of an huge group of cosplayers from many different countries cosplaying from Dragon Age, all three games were represented and everyone looked absolutely amazing. There was plenty of singing since Ingrid has a beautiful voice and there are bard characters in the games and many wonderful songs, we filmed a cosplay music video, got Starbucks, took a lot of pictures and generally goofed around all day. It was absolutely incredibly.
I cosplayed Marian Hawke, the female variant of Hawke from the second game, and my little sister joined me as Hawke's little sister, Bethany.

Photograph by Starbit Cosplay

Photograph by https://twitter.com/SynbiosTael

Ruby (my sister) did so well with her Bethany cosplay, it looked so accurate and suited her wonderfully.
You can see photos of just some of our group over on my friend Ida's tumblr account, she took some seriously gorgeous photos of us and they're to die for.
We were also filmed for a video by Shades On Cosplay which can be found here on youtube.

On the Sunday I cosplayed Alak Tarr from the little known TV show 'Defiance'. Alak happens to be an alien so I had fun with stage make up to make my skin completely white, pink contact lenses and a white wig.

Photograph by Emiliadressesup

This costume was incredibly comfortable after wearing Hawke's armour all day the day before and I felt super cool wearing it. Alak is quite different to the characters I normally in that he kind of starts off as a bit of a... Tool, for want of a better word. But then character development happens and he grows as a person.

I was so happy with all my cosplays from this weekend, it's quite a novel feeling, to not be focusing on the things I want to change, update and fix for once.
This coming weekend I'll be attending Brighton Film and Comic Con but I don't think I'll write a post about it because I won't be cosplaying anything new.
Normal posting should resume soon, I'm pretty busy with university but I still have more to post with regards my stays and past projects so keep any eye out for that.

Tuesday 29 September 2015

1780s stays - part 1

This is going to be a small series because the process of making these has just been sooo long.

I started off by selecting a pattern to use. I wanted something that would work for the periods I'm most likely to create costumes for (1770s, 80s and 1790s) and so I chose a pattern from Norah Waugh's 'Corsets and Crinolines' for a set of 1780s stays. The stays from this period really don't seem to change very much until you get to the transitional stays of the mid-late 1790s so I figured they'd be fine for 1770s stuff too. 


I scaled up the pattern to full size using the little key you can see on the bottom left, made my first toile and it was way too big. I was expecting it to be too small because of how often we're told that people were much smaller back then.






I shaved a little bit off of the pattern at various points and then made another toile which was again, too big. The problem point seemed to be the centre front so I had to take a lot off there, I also shuffled the shoulder strap tabs on the front pieces towards the middle to give myself more room to move my arms around without them cutting in. Then I made my third toile.

A wild mother appears! 

And it finally fit. Victory! I wanted at least a 2" gap at the back so that I could cinch it tighter if I wanted too. My weight also tends to fluctuate ever so slightly, just enough that sometimes my corsets end up a tiny bit too big. Finally happy with it, I adjusted the pattern, cut it out of nice pattern paper and then cut it out in my final fabrics.




I added (I think) 2cm of seam allowance to each side and the top and (I think) 3.5cm to the bottom. In retrospect I should have added more seam allowance to the centre back seem so that I could add more boning and move the eyelets further over. 
For my final fabrics I used two layers of cream herringbone coutile and a peach-gold silk for my top fabric.

As my guide I'm using this post from Before the Automobile. This lovely lady's costumes are a complete inspiration to me and her 1780s stays are absolutely gorgeous.
I decided to follow her method exactly so that meant sewing all the boning channels and inserting the boning before sewing the pieces together. This was why I had to make sure the pattern fit me perfectly before I cut it out of the silk and coutile because once the boning channels are sewn there is no way to change the size of the pieces.

Next time I'll talk about sewing the boning channels.

Monday 21 September 2015

A very historical birthday picnic

Now I daresay this is the post in the 'chemise a la reine saga' that I've been most excited for.
The picnic was lovely, we had an overabundance of food and everyone made a real effort with their costumes. I spent most of the day marveling at how great my friends are and how much I love them. Okay, soppy stuff out of the way... We had lots of people oggling at us and many tourists took photos which was fun at first but after a while it got a little tiring, especially because very few of them asked permission. It was pretty entertaining to see how creative people got though (shout out to all the people that took fake selfies with us eating in the background).

Taken by my friend Maddy or Frida Khalo as she was that day.

We picnicked at the Royal Naval Colleges in Greenwich and I spent a fair amount of time wandering around the area collecting my friends so I got to listen in to lots of the muggle's (non costumed people) comments about my attire. A few people reconginsed who I was, something I was quite surprised about but the prize has to go to the six year old boy that turned around and remarked to his parents 'Look, pretty Georgians! I wonder why they aren't fainting?'. You go kid, you go.

Towards the end of the day my friend Bel took some photos of a few of us and they're suitably ridiculous but also suitably gorgeous (she is a wonder with a camera and more of her excellent photographs can be found on her facebook page Uskglass Cosplay) and so here they are, the more serious ones first so that I can tell you about my costume. 


Underneath my robe en chemise I wore a linen chemise, striped knit cotton stockings from Nehelenia Patterns, a bumroll (but not the very pronounced one I made for university) stuffed with rags, a cotton walking length petticoat and an organza walking length petticoat. I skipped out on stays because I hadn't finished a pair yet (I wouldn't have worn them anyway, I wanted to be really comfy) and my American Duchess Kensingtons. You know about the hat, wig and dress, the sash was a last minute edition and it's just made from very badly hemmed poly organza (read: I hate it but it did the job).

Check out that fun sunburn. That comes from lying in a field
for days on end reading 'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell'
whilst wearing my glass.


My friend Arthur came as Charles II and we had a joke about us being party monarchs. This spawned the photo you see above and also the following ones, perhaps some of the best pictures I've ever had the privilege to be in.

Top row: my sister as Anne Bonny, Emilia as Marie Laveau
Middle row: Hannah as Jane Austen, Arthur as Charles II
Bottom row: me as Marie Antoinette
Don't ask me why the Pimms bottle is there, no one knew.

And an even less serious photo.
I think theme parties are the way forward, this was so much fun and my friends are a bunch of very imaginative people. Besides the guys that you've already seen we had Van Gogh, Sir Isaac Newton, Salai, Da Vinci, Rosy the Riveter, Oscar Wilde, a musketeer and Frida Khalo.
I went home very happy and very eager to make and wear more 18th century clothes, I felt so pretty and comfortable all day.

My next few posts will chronicle my progress with my 18th century stays, I'm at roughly the halfway point with them so I thought I'd better catch up on some progress posts. 

Monday 14 September 2015

Hubble bubble toil and trouble

Cheesy title aside I'm pretty excited about this post.
To celebrate her birthday my friend Hannah held a Harry Potter themed dinner party. See, this is what happens when the Harry Potter generation grows up, we have dinner parties like fancy adults except we get to drink pumpkin juice and eat awesome Wizarding World inspired food whilst dressed like the fabulous witches and wizards we still wish we could be.

I got incredibly excited about this (as is my way) and before my family and I left for Wales in July I grabbed my buckram, millinery wire and some silk and set to work making a suitable hat.
My plan costume wise was to 'look as if I could blend seamlessly into the background of a Diagon Alley scene'.

My assembled materials

The first thing I did to create my hat was draft a pattern out of cartridge paper.


I then transferred the shapes to my buckram and cut out the fabric pieces using the same pattern. I added seam allowance to all the edges on the cloth pieces but only to the inside of the brim on the buckram pieces.



The silk I had decided to use was some that I purchased for crazy cheap and a warehouse clearance earlier in the year. It really deserves it's own post but essentially I got silks worth over £50 a metre for roughly £1 a metre and I'm still reeling from the experience.


Here you can see the lining being glued on, it's just a thin later of cotton to help prevent the buckram pattern showing through the thin silk. Just before I did this I whip stitched millinery wire around the edge of the brim.
I decided to glue my fabric on this time instead of sewing everything by hand just to save on time, I used copydex and it worked fine. If you can deal with the smell (which I'm fine with after using ridiculous amount of liquid latex for my final major project at college) and you're using a lining or middle layer (to stop it running through to the top fabric) you'll be golden.


 More gluing. and a peek at the inside of the cone.



Sewing up the cone and the finished seam. I think I used some kind of bastardised version of a slip stitch to do this but really it was all about shoving the needle through in the most subtle way possible and hoping.
At this point the shape was a little distorted but it evened out once I got it sewn onto the brim.



The cone sewn onto the brim and a look at how exactly that's done. The seam allowance becomes those tabs and then I stitched through them to attach the pieces to each other.



I sewed the silk onto the underside of the brim with a tiny slip stitch, the fabric was pulled taught when I sewed the head ribbon in, which is what I did next. It would seem that I then completely forgot to take any photographs. I used the same blue petersham that I bought for my regency bonnet and also lined it with the same blue faux silk, although that came after I'd decorated the outside.



I made a hatband from brown velvet, it's not my neatest work but it's mostly covered up anyway so I'm not to bothered. The buckle was a miraculous find in my one of my local charity shops, isn't it completely and utterly perfect?



I then decorated it with some paper flowers, three giant berries and some of the leftover (read: the raggedy ones) pheasant feathers that didn't make it onto my bonnet.



 I couldn't get hold of a hat pin in time so I tacked the curved side to the cone with a couple of stitches that disappeared into the join between the fabric on the top of the brim and the fabric on the underside.


Here you can see the petersham and the lining. You can also see the hairslides that I sewed in to help keep it balanced on my head. I had an awful time trying to keep it on but eventually managed something that sort of worked and although it was a little precarious it lasted until I took that hat off at around 11:30pm.

Below are some very bad, very dark Iphone pictures from the dinner.






And my absolute favourite photograph of the evening taken by my friend Mark...

Georgia and I taking care of the washing up, muggle style.

Sunday 13 September 2015

La Hérisson mark 2

A few months ago I tried my hand at turning my old wig from my Daenerys Targaryen cosplay in an 18th century (1780s-90s specifically) la hérisson or 'hedgehog' wig. Aaand it failed. Dramatically.


Under a hat and on the wig head it was just toeing the line of awful but on my head it was worse than horrendous. Think, cheap party clown wig and you're close.
I realised belatedly that I shouldn't have used a blonde wig. I honestly have no idea what I was thinking when I decided to butcher this one, probably something along the lines of 'blonde hedgehog inspired styles worked on Kirsten Dunst in 'Marie Antoinette' thus they will work for me too'. Whatever was going through my mind I was wrong. But, I learned from my mistakes, moved on and tried again. Luckily I have plenty of past their best wigs that lend themselves perfectly to experimentation.

Let us first look at my inspiration...

My main reference point.
A portrait of Marie Antoinette Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, 1783

Mr and Mrs William Hallett (The Morning Walk)
By Thomas Gainsborough, 1785

Fashion plate, 1790s

Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire
By Thomas Gainsborough, 1785-87

Fashion plate
1780s

From Journal de Luxus, 1791

The first step I took was to trim my brown wig to around shoulder length. When I started it reached around the middle of my back and since the blonde wig being too long was one of the main factors in its impressive fall from grace I knew to start off with a much shorter wig.
I then took small half inch to one inch sections of hair and rolled them around strips of cloth.



I forgot to take any photos of this bit the second time around so here's a picture of what the rag rolling looked like on the blonde wig. The brown one looked much the same except it had perhaps twice the number of rolls in there. This made for much smaller, tighter curls. The bottom section of the wig I left down for much of the process, going in at the end with four large, thick socks and rolling it into four curls. These gave a bit more life to the ponytail part that hangs down my back.


Once the curls where tied in I put my wig in the sink and poured a few kettles worth of boiling water over it. I left it there until the water was cold.


 I then took it out and towel dried it to get the excess water off before leaving it to air dry overnight.


Once it was dry I then carefully undid every knot and unrolled the curls letting them spring back on themselves. The boiling water melts the plastic hair fibres into a different shape and thus the curls are permanently fixed in place. The brown wig was perfectly straight when I started and once I'd removed all of the fabric strips it looked like this.


When I froufed (shut up, that's totally a word) up the blonde wig I had to do an awful lot of back combing because I left it so long, that ended up looking awful and the wig looked matted instead of curly. This time I merely separated the curls with my fingers and only lightly back combed a few of the sections on the back to keep them from hanging down too low.

Similar to the above photo but lighter so you can see more
of the curls

Yet more frouf!

And the final amount of frouf

 I left the curls across my brow more whole than their counterparts on the sides and back of my head, this was done so that the lines were cleaner and it was easier to tame. I also wanted that section to appear more wavy than curly. The large ponytail curls were the last to be undone I immediately tied them back to keep them neat.
With my fingers coated in LBCC Historical Apothecary and Cosmetics' lavender pomatum (a birthday gift from my parents) I combed my fingers through the wig. Then using a powder brush and hair powder from the same place (also a birthday gift) I brushed the wig with a fine layer of white hair powder. In retrospect I should have used more as it wore off qhite a bit throughout the day.

So, without further ado, have some 'still in my pajamas at three o-clock in the afternoon 
but wearing a fabulous wig selfies'.  




Here I tied the wig back with a silk sash in a lazy imitation of some of the fanciful ribbon dos ladies seem to sport in some portraits. I really adore this wig, I feel like it flatters my face shape and I felt incredibly beautiful whilst wearing it, even in my pajamas with no make up on.