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.
 

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.

Nightmare before Christmas Tea

A new tearoom has opened up in Albuquerque, the Ivy Tea room.  The Ivy Tea room has themed seating areas inspired by childhood favorite movies such as Alice in Wonderland, Clueless, Hocus Pocus, The Great Gatsby, The Secret Garden and my personal favorite The Nightmare Before Christmas!  The Nightmare Before Christmas is one of my favorite movies ever so I made a reservation for a visit with a friend.  Of course now I really wanted a new outfit to wear. 

The night before the tea reservation, I searched through my UFO pile and found an almost finished Chemise dress made of shear material detailed with copper skulls.  I thought this would be perfect for the theme, so I sewed the remaining channels for elastic and ran some elastic.  The whole process took about 2 hours to finish up the bits on the dress.  The dress fits very comfortably and I am pretty happy with the fit, but the first thing I noticed is that I was very hot in this dress after less than 20 minutes! Given that it is summer here, about 95 degrees, and the tea room is in an old converted house with potentially limited cooling, I decided I need to scrap the idea of wearing this dress to tea. 

So on to plan 2 the morning of the tea reservation!  I found some black cotton gauze (much cooler than the synthetic from the chemise dress) in my stash and whipped up a quick sheath dress.  The gauze wanted to stretch a bit when I sewed the neckline, so I added a couple of quick pleats to the finished neckline by hand. 

I still really wanted something that fit the Nightmare Before Christmas theme, so made a quick caplet out of some skull lace, bias tape, ribbon and lace trim from my stash. The caplet is basically a square with a hole cut in the center for  the head.  I bound the edges of the neck hole with bias tape and then edged the square with the lace trim.  I had some stashed ribbon with a graveyard scene left over from a previous project that I also wanted to use.  Originally, I wanted to lay the graveyard ribbon right along the lace trim edging, but I did not have enough ribbon.  So I improvised and laid the ribbon is a square between the edge and the neck hole.  The size of the square was entirely dictated by the amount of ribbon!.

I also found a black widow button in my stash as an accent.  The black widow reminded me of the mayor from the Nightmare town.







To finish off the outfit, I pulled out the choker and feather fascinator I made with the ribbon the year before. With all these pieces I was ready for tea in the Nightmare Before Christmas area!










The tea room was really lovely and the food was amazing.  The themed areas are more inspired by than based on a particular movie, but I really loved the whole experience. My friend and I had a great time and the staff was very friendly and helpful.  The staff is happy to rearrange things as well if a larger party space is needed.  I am so happy to have a new place to go for tea!  Here is a picture of us in the Nightmare Before Christmas area.

HSM for May: Practicality a simple set of Victorian Skirts

I was wandering around the internet trying to decide what I wanted to make for the May Practicality challenge when I ran across the skirts shown to the left.  I love these skirts and I love the pockets, they are so functional and yet stylish at the same time.  Even better, these skirts were one set of 3 that were the subject of a very well written article by Sunny Buchler for Your Wardrobe Unlock'd (for those with subscriptions, the article is here).

Sunny did a wonderful job fully analyzing these skirts and there was so much information to aid me in creating my own, yet I still managed to mess the skirts up pretty badly.  I have gone back a forth a couple of times on if I wanted to post about this attempt or not....but with all the talk lately in the online costume community about the myth of perfection, I figured I would go ahead and post anyway.  This was a good learning experience for me, particularly since I am still pretty uncomfortable with the construction of Victorian clothing.

The brown skirt set is from 1869-1874 and I love that the pockets on the front are no only functional but show staining that suggests they were actually used.  The original skirts were wool, but I had some brown twill laying around that I felt would be perfect.  I also decided to vary my skirts a bit from the original and add a 3rd color trim as a method to use up a ton of oyster colored bias tape that has been sitting around my stash forever.  I was inspired to do this because the pockets on the original were piped and I also had matching oyster colored piping in the stash I could use on my own pockets.

Sunny's analysis was absolutely wonderful!  She provided information on the number, size and type of pleat for every position on the skirt.  Using her article, I easily made the underskirt.  The underskirt is kept fairly flat in the front with only one very shallow and wide pleat. The majority of the fullness in the skirt was kept to the back.  The sides of the skirt had knife pleats with a set of stacked pleats in the center back for fullness.  The is skirt is really very satisfying to wear as it moves beautifully!

Underskirt Front

Underskirt Back

  The overskirt is where I got myself into trouble and I should have realized it earlier in the process before construction.  I remember thinking I would probably not have enough fabric for both skirts and that I would likely have to piece the underskirt significantly.  When I made the pattern pieces and laid them out somehow they fit.  I should have realized this suggested that I made the pattern wrong and I should have remeasured the pieces and compared again to the original article.  I missed adding the measurements for the fact that the overskirt also had layered pleats in the back and only added enough for single pleats. Now the overskirt is way too narrow across the back bustle area.  As a result, the lack of room across the back pulls the sides of the over skirt back and creates a very narrow front silhouette.  As you can see below how narrow the skirt is from the front and the pulling across the back.

Both skirts Front

Both skirts Back

I do like the way the pockets came out, although I attached them upside down from the original (oops!). And I do like the way the buttons came out.  I was a bit leery of hand covering large buttons and if they would look OK, but I do love them. 

I have since fixed the pattern issue, but I cannot get more of the twill to match.  The brown set of skirts will need to stay too narrow, so they will not be appropriate for Victorian wear.  I think I will keep these skirts for Steampunk, but I plan to make a new set of skirts using the corrected pattern for actual Victorian wear.  I guess I can say that my May Practicality challenge produced a pattern, if not actual skirts! And I learned quite a bit from this experience.