The Pheasant Dress

Future posts probably won’t be as nicely organized or come in one big ol’ post but here’s what was basically my first project completed all by myself. I call it: The Pheasant Dress. For my friends on Facebook, I'm sorry, you've already seen these posts.

Quick Overview:

Materials: Orange/Rust brocade polyblend

“anemone” dupioni silk

brown linen

Total Time: about 1 month (I took a break for vacation but yeah)

Drinks: Strawberry and Cream Tea

            StrawberryHippocras (homemade ;D)

Noise: BBC’s Sherlock

OH, I should explain:

            When working on a project, my friend (one of the Fairy God-Sisters) tend to have one or two beverages that keep us going throughout the process. Often times they are… alcoholic in nature… or tea. Also, I usually put on a movie or a television show while working for the noise. Since they are part of my process, I’m including them here.

The story:

 I only have two Faire dresses. That said, I already decided to name all my faire dresses after birds. My first dress- a Florentine noble gown in dark brown dupioni called The Nightingale Dress. When I got into Serenata, I needed a Venetian gown and I was asked to make it in rust. My first step in choosing the design for the dress was finding a bird that was rust-colored to find a good color palette. Thus: a pheasant red-brown dress with turquoise trim. (isn’t nature inspiring?)

One of the beautiful and wonderful Fairy God-Sisters found me the fabric in the end buried in the rolls of Michael Levin's upholstery store in LA's Garment District. The turquoise I found online at The Silk Baron and the brown, I found at Joannes. I already had the white cotton chemise from previous costumes but that didn't stop me from buying more.

A little washed out but all the fabric together

I started the process by creating my underskirt, 6 yards of brown linen-ey goodness. Unfortunately Joannes didn't have enough of the pure cotton so I had to add panels of a poly brown... buuuut you can't notice unless you look really closely.

taken in my messy messy kitchen.

The next step was to start the actual dress, which I was terrified of. I started with what I knew which was hemming and cartridge pleating (which I find somewhat zen.)

that's 7.5 yards pleated

But after the easy part, came the bodice, the pattern I based off of my Florentine bodice which was based off of my Elizabethan corset, I just split it up the front. I boned all the seams with industrial sized plastic zip ties (heh, trade secret) just for some extra support.

Fitting is fucking impossible without a dress form. This will be a problem later. Just watch

Back to the machine for the blue:

Some shoulder action? eeehhh?

I wish there were full body pictures of the final result but I usually travel in a pack or am sitting, so a lot of times I'm obscured. The sleeves never got finished, unfortunately and in the end, I decided to make the top skirt an open front. All in all, I'm really proud of this dress. It was the first project I really did myself. Even my mom was proud of the piece (and she's tough to impress.) The colors photograph beautifully and I'm really happy with how they look against my skin. The dress has held up pretty well this run in spite of my hardcore gigging (I tend to wind up on the ground...) I've torn the shoulder a bit but that's easily remedied.

Fairy God-Sister omitted by request
Photo cred: Stephen C Johnson

Photo cred: Mary Anne Butler

A decidedly not-in-character picture. Also there might be food in my mouth
photo cred: Jesse Schroeder