Victorian Mourning Gown begginings

My friend and I are attending an event in Colorado, a Victorian Wake at the Miramont Castle in Manitou Springs in a couple of weeks.  The Miramont Castle is really fun to wander through and I could not resist the chance to attend the Wake.

Of course this means I needed a dress. I have always wanted a Victorian Mourning gown so this was the perfect opportunity.  I have a Pintrest board for inspiration here.  Although I have decided not to copy a particular dress, my favorite is this dress from the Met Museum here.  I love the false front/split skirt look and decided I need this for my dress.

To start with I needed patterns.  I am using several from Truly Victorian that I will modify as needed.  I have always had good luck with their patterns.  I will definitely make the bodice and the base skirt, but I have not yet decided on the butterfly bustle yet.  It would be so lovely, but I worry about the train in the crowd.

The skirt plan: I will make this skirt with the bustled back and ruffle. I plan on only adding the ruffle to the sides and the back of the skirt.  The front of the skirt I plan to make in different silk to appear as an underskirt and will add narrow partial front pieces of the main silk as a false opening. 

TV261-R 1885 Four-gore Underskirt

 If I have time, I would like to make the detachable Butterfly Train.  I just dont know if I will have time before this event and again trains and crowds are bad together.

TV361 Late 1880s Butterfly Detachable Train

 For the bodice, I really wanted the triangular neck opening, so I have decided to use the 1883 Tail Bodice.  I plan to use the short tails and 3/4 sleeves for this particular dress.

TV462 1883 Tail Bodice

For fabrics, I bought silk from Dharma Trading company.  I had originally wanted  to use silk velvet, but they were out when I went to order.  I settled on the 19.5mm Black Charmeuse as a substitute.  Although this is one of the heaviest silks they carry it is still super light weight!  More light weight than anything I have made Victorian with before.  This makes me nervous but we will see how it goes.  I also rummaged around in the stash and found some other silks for accents that should work well.  For example, this sheer silk below to fill in the false front in the skirt.

Sheer silk with lining

To start with I cut the front panel of the skirt out of some of the stash silk.  This silk is see through so it is lined with black cotton.  I treated the sheer silk and cotton as one  piece and darted it as per the pattern instructions. I then prepared some double sided Charmeuse silk pieces for the false opening.  I then stitched all these pieces together to be treated as one for the front of the skirt.  For the start of the decorations, I made tubes out of the black Charmeuse and made bows.  The bows are hand stitched to the skirt to keep them from moving, but the tubes are left free  until they meet the false sides to give the impression of being separate pieces.  Here are a couple of pictures so far!  I took pictures both with and without the flash.  No flash is truer to the colors, but the details or lost.  The flash image shows the details much better.

Skirt front no flash

Skirt front with flash

Steampunk Spectacular 4

Train!

Last weekend I was lucky enough to attend Steampunk Spectacular, a local steampunk event.  I love this event for a couple of reasons.  The first is that it is really laid back and relaxing and the second is that the location is spectacular.  It is held at the Mine Shaft Tavern, which has a real train, old mining equipment and a cool theater for the shows. Oh and the food at the tavern is excellent as well.

Theater

The atmosphere at this event is always amazing and I have a good time every time I go.  The small town that the event is held in, Madrid New Mexico, is also really cool.  
There are lots of small shops, including an amazing little chocolate shop, to peruse.  A good friend of mine joined my husband and I this year for her first steampunk event, although you would not know it was her first from her very cool costume.

Anyway, here are a bunch of pictures!  None of these pictures were taken by me, they were uploaded to the event facebook page or to a local costuming group facebook page.  If the owner of the photos wants them removed, please send me a message and I will remove them (ditto if you are the subject of one of these photos).

First some images of myself, my husband and my friend. My husband and I wore our new leather masks and I wore my new light up flower crown.  I was really pleased with the mask, although they are really hard to see out of, and very please with the lights for the flowers.  The motion control really worked!  I wish I would have had more time to finish the rest of the costume, I really want a corset that matched and I did not like the shirt I made.  I would also like to make a skeleton turtleneck undershirt to go with the stockings I am wearing.  I suppose I will need to work on the details more for next time!

Now for photos of other people's cool stuff.  There were so many cool costumes and people.  The performers included the Clan Tynker, who are a family circus act and always a blast to see.

A light up flower crown

Worbla Flowers

To go with my sugar skull plague doctor mask, I wanted a flower crown and I was thinking it would be really fun if the flowers could light up.

To make the flowers able to light up clearly I made them out of  transparent Worbla thermoplastic.  This stuff is really fun to work with.  You simply heat it with a heat gun and shape it.  Basically, I cut shapes like you would out of felt to make roses and heated them to shape them together.  I made both large and small roses, 4 of each.

Circuitry

My husband has been learning to add more complex electronics to our costume props so he thought it would be cool if the light up flowers would change colors based off of the movement of my head.  He designed programming and circuitry to do this.  The head motion is sensed by a triple axis accelerometer, the programming is uploaded to an Arduino mini, the lighting is done by 8 Flora RGB Smart NeoPixels, a cheap switch and the power is a 9 volt battery.  In the picture to the right, the small square board is the accelerometer, the larger board is the arduino.  Both of these pieces are much smaller than the 9 volt battery.

He used this same set up to light up a crystal in the top of his steampunk cane.  The major differences are that the cane used a NeoPixel ring and that the calibration was different.  He can turn the cane upside down and my head cant turn that far.  Basically the motion of my head causes the lights to change color and the calibration makes even small movements change the color of the roses.

hat base side

hat upside down to show dart

hat front

I made a hat base out of 2 layers of felt and one layer of really stiff, heavy Pellon interfacing.  Basically this is a very elongated oval.  I darted the back to make it fit my head.  I then wired the edge and covered the wire with bias tape.

hat back

One the base was made I stitched all the circuitry to the hat and hid the circuitry with faux rose leaves.  I then stitched the clear flowers to the hat base and accented the base with small red and large white roses.  The three roses at the back hide the arduino, accelerometer and battery.

Hat front

hat side

hat top

 Here are some pictures is low lighting with the hat lit up.  The hat does all the colors of the rainbow and more....but the circuitry is very sensitive and it was hard to find the right angle to show all the colors.  This hat is so much fun to wear and the NeoPixels are so bright!

Leather steampunk masks

I am working on historical sewing and on embroidery.  Unfortunately, these projects must be secret till their reveals so I cant post about them yet!  I am dying to share them......but I will be good and wait till they have gone to their new homes...

In the mean time, I have always wanted a steampunk leather plague doctor's mask.  I also love celebrating Dia de los Muertos and sugar skulls. For some reason these things go very well together in my head so I decided to do a sugar skull themed mask.  My husband decided to do his literally as a plague mask and be sickly green.  His mask reminds me of the 'ick face' green poison stickers, although everyone I say this to does not remember these.  I swear I am not making up these stickers! 

To make the masks, I bought a pattern from this etsy site Steampunk Masks. The pattern is a digital download and there is a video to help with construction.  I will say that some previous leather working experience is a plus, this mask was harder than my previous leatherworking projects but not too bad.  You need to be really really exact on the holes since there is very little play in the pattern.  There are a lot of pieces so the construction took quite a while, but the effect is so worth it in the end! 

To create the masks, we cut out the pieces and then edged them to make the edges really smooth.  Then I painted mine with leather paint, Eco-Flo Cova Color paints.  These paints are water based and very easy to use.  The only downside I found is that it took many coats to get a strong color in the pale colors; white, yellow and orange.  Since this paint is water based, I had to seal the mask to make it water proof.  Together with multiple layers of paint and sealant, my mask was really really stiff!

 My husband stained his with green leather stain.  Rather than use a damp cloth, he used a dry cloth which resulted a streaked texture to go with the plague idea.  The masks were then stitch and riveted together.

I am really happy with how the masks came out.  The only issues I have is that I would like the mask to cover a bit more of my face and they can be hard to see out of.  It is a mask with very little fitting so the vision issue is not surprising and not something I will worry too much about.  I may rework the pattern for next time to get the mask to come closer to my ears, the next time I make one. 

HSM Challenge #7 Accessorize

Diadem flat, before comb addition so you can see the detail

Technically this is not sewing, so it only sort of counts for the HSM challenge but it is a project I have been dying to try.  I have always wanted a regency diadem, but was a bit intimidated of the detailed metalwork.  I have experience with metalwork and the details in the metal just take so long.  Then I saw the brilliant post by Mistress of Disguise! A full tutorial to make a regency diadem! She had the amazing idea to use lamp banding to create the very detailed part of the diadem.  Since this challenge was to Accessorize, I jumped at the chance to make one.  I am not going to post any kind of step by step pictures since the full tutorial provides very lovely and detailed photos and I only modified a few small things.  I did use my jeweler's saw instead of snips to cut out the brass frame.  This was because I used heavier brass and I did not want to have the break in the frame necessary for scissors.  Other than that, I used my dremmel to cut out the lamp banding flowers so I could save the neat edges for another project.  The rest of the project I just followed the tutorial.

Diadem ready to wear

I am so in love with the tutorial provided by Mistress of Disguise and so happy with my new jewelry!

I highly recommend trying her tutorial, this was far easier than I expected.  Also, if you want one and don't feel like making one, Mistress of Disguise sells them on her Etsy.