Gaslight Gathering 2016 con report

Gail Carriger and myself as Alexia Maccon

Last weekend I was lucky enough to attend the Gaslight Gathering, a steampunk convention in San Diego.  I have been to a number of steampunk conventions and this is definitely one of my all time favorites.  The people were wonderfully friendly, the location was beautiful and eclectic, the panelists were entertaining and there were so many make and take workshops that the event was never dull! 

We decided to go because Gail Carriger was the guest of honor! She has long been a favorite author of mine and I was super excited to meet her and to hear her speak about her books and ideas. In honor of her, I made a gown based on the cover of the manga from the Souless Series (I will post more on the making of this dress in future posts). I wore the dress on the first day and got to take my picture with Gail! She is an absolute delight and one of my favorite con guests ever.  Gail took pictures with fans, talked with all of us, was charming at her book signings, attended much of the convention, spoke with anyone who wished to speak with her and was elegant on top of all of this!  She even posted pictures she took with those of us who dressed as characters from her book on her blog.  Gail is amazing as an author and an utter delight as a person!

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Besides the perk of Gail Carriger's presence, the con itself was absolutely amazing.  There were ~30 make and take workshops, some of which were free and all of which seemed amazing.  My husband and I took 3 workshops: Build Your Own 7ft. Wide Retractable Wings!, Copper Charms workshop (with copper clay) and Learn To Solder: Lightup Bug Workshop.  I will grab pictures of these things as we unpack and post pictures of these as well.  The workshops were delightful and I wished we had found time to take more of them. There were also many con panels that were great fun.  Some favorites were Gothic Literature and Its Influence on Steampunk and the Short Steampunk Film Festival.  There was live entertainment, including SPLASH II! Water Ballet Encore, an all male steampunk water ballet by the Steam Punk League for Aquatic Shenanigans (S.P.L.A.S.H.).  There was also a Tea with theatrics in which we flew around San Diego in a dirigible and got lost in time with the crew of the Lupita and a lovely ball with both live music and a DJ.  A whole room full of steampunks did the Time Warp! And of course a wonderful vendor room full of fun things to buy. There was also teapot racing and 2 fashion shows.  If you wanted something more relaxing, the con showed movies in the evening.

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My husband and I purchased the VIP tickets and I can say they were well worth it!  There was a nice selection of cool things in the gift bag including art by Brian Kesinger, a lovely t-shirt and light up icecubes for later prop making.  The VIP lounge was well stocked with good snacks and stuff to drink and staffed by very nice people.  It was also a very cool room for those of us whose costumes were hot!   VIPs also got early access to workshop sign ups, which was a very nice perk. 

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In addition to all this wonderfulness there were many many people in amazing costume.  I took some pictures, but in searching on the web I found so many amazing costumes I missed!  This whole event was a delight and I really hope we are able to attend again!








Here are some more photos from the con.  First some photos of what my husband wore.  He kept things simple on Friday and Sunday with a vest, hat and cane.  On Saturday he wore the Poison Doctor outfit with his new poison finder prop.

 I wore the Alexia Maccon dress on Friday.

The Alexia dress is great fun to wear, but it is a bit limiting!  I tried to take a picture sitting in the replica time machine and the skirts barely fit!  The time machine was amazing however, the lights work, the dish spins and it is all controlled by the dashboard.

And 2 outfits on Saturday, although I only got photos of one.  I wore the Anime inspired outfit in the morning due to needing my fingers free for the Copper Clay workshop and the Dia de Muertos outfit in the afternoon.  On Sunday I wore my vampire gown.

 Here are some photos of some of the other lovely and amazing costumes and props we saw at the con, but as I mentioned before there was so much amazing things to do and people that this is just a small amount of the cool things we saw there!  A note to the subjects of these photos, if you see yourself and would like the photo removed, just let me know and I will remove it! Also, if you would like a link to your own blog here let me know and I will add it!

Steampunk Dia de Muertos skeleton shirt

I am preparing costumes for Gaslight Gathering in San Diego in October, the theme is "All the Steamy Things That Go Bump In The Night" .  Given this theme, I felt that the Dia de Muertos Plague outfit would be perfect.  The picture to the left is the last time I wore the outfit and there were a few things I did not like.  The first is that I have Dia de Muertos style skeleton leggings on, but my arms, hands and chest are bare (or covered in mesh only).  So I decided to make a bodysuit/shirt that had integral gloves and a short turtle neck to reduce the amount of skin that shows.  I bought some soft knit material and used a tight T shirt to make a pattern.  I added a short standing collar to make the shirt a turtle neck and provide at least some neck coverage.  I then traced my hands onto the knit and stitched around them to make gloves. I left lots of extra fabric at the top when stitching the hands. Once I knew the hands fit, I added a basic sleeve pattern to the top of the gloves.  The sleeve and gloves were cut as one piece to minimize seams. 

leggings

Once the shirt was sewn, it was time to paint. I wanted to mimic the style of the purchased leggings shown to the left. So I purchased fabric paints and cheap brushes from the local craft store and set to work painting the shirt. To keep the paint from sticking the front and back together, or sealing the hands shut, the hands are stuffed with latex gloves, the sleeves have plastic bags in them and the shirt was placed over cardboard.  Painting on knits is really hard!  The fabric stretches in odd ways that makes keeping the lines even almost impossible.  However, overall I am pretty pleased with the way the shirt came out.  The paint does crack a bit if you stretch the shirt too much, but I think it will work for at least a few wearings.  Now to fix the shirt issue, since I was not happy with the previous shirt!

shirt front

sleeve and glove

shirt back

Steampunk poison doctor accessories

With the Poison doctor coat complete, it was time to add some accessories.  I figured as a poison doctor, he should wander around dispensing poisons to people.  To make the poisons portable, I got some used glass vials left over from my work and cleaned them thoroughly.  While  I loved the look of the glass vials, the caps were either grey plastic or white plastic and really really ugly.  I decided to hide the caps with polymer clay.  This is probably only my third project with polymer clay so I am pretty happy with how they came out.

Large bottles filled

The white caps were hard plastic and as long as I removed the soft inner lining could be place directly into the oven.  So I simply molded the clay directly onto the caps.  I tried to follow the plant theme, and used leaves, wood and vines as my inspiration for the polymer clay.

Largbe bottles from the top

Since the poisons referenced in the embroideries on the coat are both plants (hemlock, wolfbane, ect) and elixirs (Extract of wolfbane, Invisibility elixir, ect), I decided that some of the bottle should contain plant material and some should contain liquid.  Since the larger bottle are much easier to fill, we filled them with assorted plant material from our yard.  We then baked the plant material to dry it in the oven.  Once the plant material was dried, we glued the tops onto the bottles to prevent any accidents.
The small bottles were then filled with liquid.  In this case the liquid is distilled water with food coloring added.  These bottles were also glued shut to prevent spills.

Small bottles from the top

Small bottles filled

The brown bottles had soft plastic stoppers that would not survive baking, so I used a polymer clay cookie cutter to make some brown and green leaves.  Once the leaves were baked, I glued them to the top of the bottles.  As these bottles were dark, I did not put any contents inside.



Once the bottles were ready, I used craft foam and tape to create leather holsters for the bottles.  The idea was to make each holder unique to add some variety.  Once the pattern was made, the leather was cut out, edged and stained.  The staining was deliberately left streaky to go with the shady nature of a poison doctor.  We also stained a belt blank with the same green stain to match and used a random gear belt blank we had lying around.  Both holsters are entirely held together with rivets, entirely for aesthetic reasons. The holsters slip over the belt so the belt can be worn without them if needed.

 

Steampunk poison doctor coat

Almost a year ago my husband and I made leather steampunk plague doctor masks and then wore them to a local convention called Steampunk Spectacular. I was very happy with how the masks came out, but always felt that we really needed outfits specific to the masks.  I begun an outfit for myself based on the Dia de los Muertos skeletons to match the sugar skull mask, but had not begun an outfit for my husband.  His mask reminds me of those Mr Yuk stickers that used to get stuck on poisonous stuff when I was a kid, so we decided he should be a poison doctor and provide poisons to people.  To emphasize the poison tie, I decided to machine embroider the entire coat with poisons and evil elixir designs.  I purchased the Apothescary and the Pretty Poison design packs from Urban threads and set to work embroidering the base black linen.  The coat design was based off of Rasputin's black robe as the idea of a mad poison doctor also reminds me of Rasputin. To keep with the Mr. Yuk theme, all the embroideries were done in greens and golds.  To give people an idea of how these designs come out, here are images of each design.  Since each design was to be used multiple times, I altered the colors between runs, to give you an example. 'wolfbane' is shown twice, but once with an emphasis on yellow and once with an emphasis on green.  All designs were used at least 3 times on the coat and the designs are 6-7 inches in their widest dimension.

Even with the embroidery machine, the embroideries took about 20 hours to complete, but I really love the detail and dimension they add.  The embroideries were done on the cut out linen (edged with the serger to stabilize the fabric during embroidery) and were done with wash away stabilizer.  Once the embroideries were complete, I washed the coat to remove the stabilizer to keep the coat from being too stuff.  The coat is then lined with lime green cotton and edged with light green bias tape.  Once the embroideries were done, the coat went together fairly quickly and I am overall pretty pleased with how it came out. 

Coat Front

Coat back

Coat side

Historical Sew Monthly May: Holes or in my case fixing them

I know this entry is woefully late, but I did in fact finally finish it!   I am however too late I feel to post on the facebook page, so I am only posting it here!

When the May challenge came up, Holes, I immediately thought of Landsknecht fashion of the late 15th and early 16th century. This time period and fashion style is one of my all time favorites and I immediately wanted to make something completely new.  Then I remembered the dress sitting in the naughty pile.  I dont know if other costumers have a naughty pile, but this is where sewing projects or outfits go that did not go as planned and now require some work I really dont want to do. Examples of this are usually that the sleeves are wonky and I really dont want to redo them.






In the case of this dress, I put the whole dress together out of linen (black) and wool (blue).  The blue wool is woven, so I washed it with hot water and dried it in the dryer on hot.  This shrunk the wool, but also thickened it and strengthened it so it can handle the open cutwork.  The fabric looked good, so I designed the cutwork and carefully cut out the design in the blue wool.  I then hand stitched the white bands (left over linen from a previous project) to the bodice and pieced the white and black bands for the skirt. I then handstitched the blue bands over the white bands. 

Since I have made several of these dresses, the pattern was already worked out, the banding went very quickly.  I decided to see if lacing was a functional option for the the fronts of these gowns, so I stitched eyes (the eye part of hook and eye sets) to the inside of the bodice opening.  The eyes were off set to allow spiral lacing and also went into the dress very quickly.  All in all, this dress took about a week of working in the evenings so I was very chuffed with myself!  I then wore the dress to the Maryland Rennaisance Faire.  When I returned, I noticed I had ripped some of the blue wool and thought "Wow, I must have really caught the skirt on something sharp!"  I repaired the rip and ignored the whole incident. Fast forward about 6 months (and a cross country move) and I wore the dress again to a local SCA event.

This time I felt the skirt catch and rip!  When I got home, I found multiple rips in the blue wool that occurred at a specific place in my design.  I realized that my choice of cutwork design plus the wool being thinner than the wool I usually use meant that there was a systematic weakness in my design.  Really, there should never be too open shapes that close together with the grain straight between them as you can see in the ripped image to the left.  I realized I would either need to replace the lower cutwork band with a totally different fabric (this is totally a correct for the style solution), deal with repairing the rips every time I wore the dress or hand stitching down around the cut outs to stabilize them.  I did not want to do any of these things and I was frustrated with myself for not seeing the design flaw that I threw the whole dress into the naughty pile!


The dress stayed in the naughty pile until this challenge.  You see, I love the color combination and I love the way this dress looks and moves when I am wearing it so I decided that fixing this dress should be my goal for the May challenge.  I decided I loved the color combination and the lower cutwork band so replacing it was not a good option.  I also decided repairing the rips as they happened was not a good option either, so I decided to hand stitch around each cutwork motif by hand.  First I repaired the rips and then each motif took me 40 minutes to stitch. There were 16 motifs, so the total time was about 11 hours of hand sewing.   Here are images of the newly handstitched motifs. There are 2 different motifs that alternate on the lower band.

While this took a really long time, I am so happy to be able to wear this dress again!  I am even thinking of making a special chemise with blackwork or smocking details on the sleeves to showcase the dress!  Here are some detail pictures of the final dress.

The Challenge: Holes!
Material: linen (black and white), woven wool (blue)
Pattern:self drafted from woodcut images
Year:1510-1530
Notions: metal eyes, thread (poly), cotton cording
How historically accurate is it? Maybe 70%, the pattern is accurate and the cutwork is based on woodcuts.  However the dress would have most likely been all wool, the thread would have been linen, the eyelets hand made and the cording silk, linen or wool so there were compromises on the materials.  Also, while sleeveless is document-able, it is rare and I dont have an image with both cutwork and sleeveless on the same dress. Finally, of the outfits for Landsknecht we have color descriptions of, this would be very tame and may not have been the best choice on my part.
Hours to complete: Initial construction was ~20 hours and this current batch was 11 to fix the holes
First worn: In the current incarnation, not yet
Total cost: none, all this was stash