With Apologies to the Costuming Communty...

You know, the ones who went to school for this shit (you'll understand down below.)

In which I spend far too long gushing over a fantasy show's costume choices:

So on Tuesday, my friend invited me to this Game of Thrones party at the SF Armory for that Saturday. As a full-time student, this is a problem. In general, costumes take a combined week of work but that is a week of having nothing else to do other than sew. With a full schedule of classes, making a nice dress that is worthy of that costume-porn they call a show.

Seriously, please look at those DESIGNS!!!!

Basically if you want to do a good last minute costume, you're shit out of luck. The show is just too damn good to half-ass one of Cersei or Sansa's dresses. For Godsakes, they have an official embroideress! THEY HAVE SUCH ATTENTION TO DETAIL THAT THEY GOT A SPECIFIC PERSON TO EMBROIDER THIS SHIT.

This work is gorgeous and terrifying and I want to embroider EVERYTHING now.

Was there a point to this?

Uhh what was I talking about? Oh yeah. Anyway, the dress problem. I was at a loss to decide what dress to make for the event that could be done quickly. I also had the challenge of making a dress or at least finding a dress for my friend as well. Thankfully, everyone's favorite character came to my rescue.

                                             

Emilia Clarke looks amazing in practically everything but the dresses she gets to wear as Dany are absolutely amazing. I've always admired the combination of metallic accents with gauzy materials and GoT simply loves doing this:

  

                             

This shit is my crack

                           

Anyway, I didn't have enough time for armor so I settled for one of Dany's easier to make dresses. (relatively) 

The pictures of her actual dress mostly show it as a pale grey crepe... linen maybe? (When I finished my dress I realized how wrong my fabric choice was. You'll see.) I I didn't set out to make an exact recreation of the dress, I just wanted a slightly similar look for the party so I'm okay with things not being exact.

The construction:

The day started with a trip to the fabric store to find the cheapest gauzy material I could find and was willing to work with. In the end I settled for a grey jersey with a layer of sheer... shiny... poly.... something vaguely lavender over it.

The right side of the sheer was SUUUUPER shiny so I chose to use the wrong side, simple enough.
 

I set to work sewing what was basically a long 2 yard rectangle of one layer of jersey and one layer of sheer together.

And it was a BITCH to do.

From there, I closed the ends of the rectangle together to form a long tube and across the top a ran a gathering thread to make it fit over my chest. Then I looked back at the pictures of the dress and realized there was more shape to the dress than I thought. I realized, if I wanted to make the dress look right with the crossed bust pieces, I'd have to take apart the fabric and re-cut it to fit a pair of bra-pads that I'd have to go out and buy. So I wracked my brain looking for an alternative solution.

Solution.

With a few seconds to think about how much I was going to regret it, I took the gathered dress-top and tacked it (pretty sloppily) my only nude bra. The result had the desired effect with the unfortunate side effect of being a little boobie-licious. From there I gathered the short end of two longer strips of leftover sheer and tacked them on to the outer end of each "cup." One of these fabric strips was threaded with an old belt-buckle I had purchased a while back as part of a my Scheherazade costume (more on that later) but wound up being too small. It's too small here too but I couldn't be bothered to change it now. Both tacked ends got crossed, and tied in back and this created the shirred chest treatment.

Not... Terrible? Seriously, I apologize to the professionals right now.

I used a thin strip and tacked it over the strap of my halter-bra and then cut two more scraps and tied them to my upper arms. Since there was some issue keeping them on, I hollywood taped them for extra hold. Overall because of my own size and the weight of the fabrics I chose, the whole dress is a little too puffy for my taste. That said, I think it's a pretty good... facsimile? Hey it worked for the event and that was the important part.

No, no it wasn't.

And then...

I still had to come up with a dress for my friend who had invited me to the event in the first place and gave me about 12 hours to purchase materials and make the damn thing.

And it still actually came out nicer.

 I essentially made a maxi skirt out of a taupe jersey to serve as a slip. I then took a few yards of pink sheer fabric and folded it in half, leaving a gratuitous amount for a train we'd then sew up. I turned the tube dress into a halter by cutting slit in the casing to hold the neck strap (which my friend had to be sewn into) and then I used some gold trim I found at Discount Fabrics for a belt. The back train was then threaded through a bracelet and sewn to the collar. The whole effect looked quite similar despite being so hastily thrown together.

conclusion

The event itself was mostly "meh." As someone who's been to a few big costume events and worked as many, I was generally unimpressed with the shindig. The set pieces they got were sort of half-assed and after the acrobatic troupe at the beginning, the whole thing felt like a glorified Bar Mitzvah... Which in the end wasn't that bad...

Considering, at the bar and bat mitzvah's I've been to, I was never allowed to get adorably schnockered.

So the night was saved, and after the first episode of the 3rd season aired, I was given a better insight into how Shay's dress was actually supposed to be done. So I will perhaps revisit that later. I still need to decide what to do with all this awful sheer purple/grey fabric but the bra is back to being a bra. Overall I'm going to say that I don't think I'll be doing a costume like this again for myself. I'm happy I was able to throw it together at all, although I think I would have been better off slapping a flower crown on my head and calling myself a Tyrell. It goes to show that sometimes you can't really cut corners and expect to be successful so y'know. You win some, you lose some.




EMILIA EYEBROW APPRECIATION GIF:

Next time, probably my new Italian dress. WHO KNOWS? To be honest, I don't usually remember what I put in this bit when I post stuff.

Speedy Alterations

About a day after Gaskells ended I proceeded to remove all the shiny things off of the Midnight Gown (also known as Pamina) so that I could convert it to a dress for Peer's Gotham event. The whole experience felt rather like being Jack and having to sell your beloved cow in order to feed your family/get on with the next thing. Except if Jack hacked his cow apart and the meat and wore her leather as a shorter, more useful dress.

(I've been watching a lot of the Escapist's Zero Punctuation and it's made me needlessly cynical.)

For the Gotham City Black and White, we were encouraged to go as the colorful citizens of Gotham so naturally, I defaulted to my favorite daughter of Gotham: Helena Bertinelli/Wayne otherwise known as The Huntress. (Btw, on that link you can choose which parentage you want to look up.)

A timeline of her costume sort of reads like a reverse strip-tease.
(This image should be read from right to left)

For those of you who don't know who the Huntress is, she has two different origins, both of which involve her parents dying a la Batman. Sometimes this parent IS Batman (the other one being Selena Kyle) and I find this sort of awkward but it creates an interesting relation to fellow Birds of Prey member Black Canary. (Another super heroine who's parents dumped the mantel on them.) Also, if you are a female who likes the idea of the DC universe and has a high tolerance for the male gaze, check out Gail Simone's run of Birds of Prey. I enjoyed it and you'll probably not see a higher concentration of the big-busted female DC supers in backbreaking positions for a while. (Marvel does bring a cute BoP challenge with one of their current X-Men runs.)

And because this is the current X Men  title is just called
X Men, it is really fucking hard to google.

Also we won't speak of the train wreck that is Huntress in Arrow. Just... no.


I'm not going to get into why I like Helena so much, I just do and so I needed a 30-50's inspired dress that could be made in less than a week and look good (in general, I like to have a weekend of break between sewing engagements so that I can actually do homework and sleep and stuff. It also keeps me from buying so much fabric.)

Diatribe over, time to sew

So the dress design was done pretty quickly and worked out pretty nicely. I incorporated the colors of Huntress' outfit and considered playing off the cross theme a bit too. In the end, I designed a little black dress with a purple sash. The cross motif would be played out in a fascinator and in a necklace.

There were plans for a purple garter, they got scrapped.

Anyway, once the poor midnight dress came apart the next fun step was hacking off the bottom of the dress. I had plans for that fabric. I had a fairy godsister help with the length and chopping and the whole thing got overlocked again because I couldn't be bothered to roll the hem again.

I worry for the things that the Fairy God Sister sees. And I'm NEVER
using that particular petticoat again.

Odd foreshortening but I was colored "entertained" with
my SF in Winter boots underneath the dress.

From there, I cut out all the boning and proceeded with the first bout of dyeing all the royal blue either black or purple. The thing about dyeing poly fabrics is that you have to boil the everloving shit out of it and I just didn't have a pot that big.

but it didn't stop me from trying.

be sure to use protection

So the dress was crammed into a sad little pot that I purchased at Walgreens along with hot water saturated with iDye in Poly Black. (insert rant about putting "i" in front of words to make them seem futuristic.)

I was somewhat confused by the instructions and my own fear to get dye all over my inexplicably white kitchen and so the first time I dyed the dress, I brought the dye to a boil which took 20 minutes, maybe, let it do that for a few minutes, and pulled the fabric out and washed it.

after hand washing, I compared it to a wet un-dyed piece of fabric

I was INSANELY worried the dye didn't take (with good reason.) So as the dress was drying, I ran out and bought more poly dye try again.

Take 2 (and a drink):

So the finished dyed dress was shit. It looked black in some lights and blue in others and was 100% fucking frustrating.

deceptive bitches

Seriously, the fuck?!

Anyway, learning from my mistakes is part of why I made this blog, so I set the pot up and tried again.

EVERYTHING was covered in foil!

tasty

The second round seemed to take muuuuuuch better.

I was surprised (although I probably shouldn't have been) that the poly dye didn't touch the canvas lining of the dress at all. The effect was actually kind of nice and also kind of looked like I had no idea what I was doing when I lined it and accidentally chose the wrong color fabric... which made me sort of sad.

The kitchen-daylight test is the most important test.

A great side effect that I tried to capture here but then didn't work out as well as I thought, was that the silver grommets I used wound up getting a bit of a rainbow-oily look over them which compliments the design of the dress pretty well.

as usual, take a drink and ignore the messy-ass floor.

With the dress finished I took the spare dress material and dyed it all purple, it came out this beautiful rich color that I proceeded not to photograph. I then fashioned a big-ol' bow sash with a snap in the back so I could easily put it on and take it off. I then proceeded to have it fall off repeatedly throughout the night.

I did accidentally make a Rorsharch butterfly out of dye though :P

I didn't get any pictures of the process of the fascinator but I basically cut a circle out of felt, cut a wedge out from the circle and used a fabric stiffener (Stiffy) to form the piece into a very shallow cone. I then just hot glued the additional netting and white grosgrain fabric in a cross shape over the felt.

All hot and sweaty post dancing.

The cross necklace was a charm I found at the craft store that I just attached to a ribbon, also dyed purple in the same mess as the trim.

Overall the project was pretty simple since it was primarily a dye job. I don't know if I'd do it again, mostly because I realized I did all this before I got a nice picture of the the Midnight dress before I destroyed it. I am happy because this is a dress I'm more likely to wear more often and it is pretty great with or without the petticoat. Who doesn't need another little black dress?

Next time: possibly a breakdown on a fantasy faire outfit and how to fail at costuming research. Possibly the beginnings of my new Italian dress.