Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Eons of Fashion at the St. James Tearoom


About a month ago, a friend of mine, Tana, was asked to put on a fashion show for a local tea room, The St. James Tearoom.  The request was to cover fashion from Roman through the 1920s in about 1 hour.  Tana said yes she would be happy to host such a large fashion show and then promptly called me and other costume type friends for help.  Tana and I founded a group locally called Head-to-Toe Costume Society of New Mexico to encourage all kinds of costume making and wearing.  The lovely people in this group supplied outfits to supplement what Tana and I had made ourselves and also provided  most of the models.

Clothes waiting for round 2
This whole evening was a bit of a rush, but so much fun.  It was really cool to see how my outfits look on others and to see all the cool things others had made.  Some of the fittings were rather funny, for example, the 18th century Men's coat was actually made by me for me, and my shoulders are much narrower than the man wearing it in the fashion show.  He spent the whole time he was wearing it with his shoulders scrunched up since he was worried about ripping the coat.  He and all of the models were all wonderfully good sports about the whole thing.  Everyone was so much fun to work with! 
I have tried to be selective in the photos I share, but if anyone is interested the whole set of images can be seen here.

We were dressing in some of the small rooms in the back and almost all of the models had to change! Tana was asked to limit the number of models so only those of us with outfits that took way too long to change into were spared.  A few people even had to wear their Victorian corsets under other outfits just due to lack of time.  Here is the rack ready for people to grab their round 2 of clothing.
 



























Thursday, July 16, 2015

Steampunk at the Natural History Museum

One of the lovely ladies (the green fairy in the pictures) in the local steampunk group suggested an outing to the Albuquerque Natural History Museum.  We first met for tea in the park across the street and then all went over to the Natural History Museum for photos and fun.  I love the Natural History Museum and was so excited to attend. I decided to wear the new Victorian skirts that I worked on for HSM 2015 practicality challenge and the corset from the first month of HSM 2015 foundations challenge. Although not visible much in the photos I did floss the boning channels of the corset since I made it in January.  I bought pith helmets for myself and my husband, which we still need to personalize but they were fun to play with.  My husband wore his new Dr. Who vest.  The whole costume thing for this was a bit of rush job with both my husband and I cobbling things together from what we had on hand, but it has given us inspiration for costumes to work on latter.

This whole event was a blast, it was so much fun to wander around the museum and take photos with the dinosaur skeletons.  Anyway, on to the pictures.