I Dream in Chevrons

Hey guys! I'm gonna go ahead and throw my friend under the bus here**: My new post was delayed because it's gone up through the blog of the band I'm in, The Merry Wives of Windsor. So I'll put the first part here and then to get to the juicy sewing stuff you'll have to click through: 

Written on the flight from LAX to ORD as our intrepid hero mistakenly poured an entire mini bottle of vodka into her tiny airplane cup, Overestimating how much space she had around the ice. Forgive me; this may be less than coherent. Also there’s such little space, I’m typing like a goddamn t-rex. All hands to boobs and whatnot.

Edit: this was later cleaned up a bit by a sober and exhausted Clara who remembered this was going on the MWOW site and not her personal, saucy blog.

The Status is not Quo

So much has changed these last couple months since I last updated The Stitchin’ Bitch. In particular, I auditioned and got into a fancy-schmancy folk/celticish/drinking band called The Merry Wives of Windsor. They are seriously a chill-ass group of ladies that I am blessed to lend my voice to. I’d highly encourage checking them out if you haven’t already clicked the link. Do it. Doooo iiiiit….

Okay guys, to read the rest of the post click here (or on the picture, I'm having issues getting the link to work.)

**Okay Claire didn't actually delay anything that long, she is a sweet and awesome person and I'm a lazy ass who has a lot of draft posts that I'm too lazy to get to. I owe her a margarita... or 3.

Can't Touch This

Lets Talk Panties

When you start making historical costumes, sort of the first thing you wind up doing is having to learn about historical underpants.

in a nutshell

The important thing about underthings is that if you aren't wearing the proper ones, nothing lies properly on top. Just like how sometimes a gal's chest just looks different when she's not wearing a bra under her shirt, she's gonna look weird wearing a bodice without a corset underneath.

I'm looking at you Sarah Jessica Parker. HOW DID YOU GET AWAY WITH IT, DAMNIT?!

This is my subtle plug to DO YOUR RESEARCH. (My peers at school understand how I feel about this) but also, MAKE YOUR UNDERPANTS.

Because we all need to have them under our dresses, every re-enactor costumer and their mother has their way of making bloomers... and usually they're all the same. Look there are only so many ways to make a pair of pajama bottoms. That said, I recently needed to make my own version of... harem pants? something like them genie pants... politically-incorrectly-named-arabian-nights-pants and this seemed like the best way to go.

How to make bloomers/pajama pants/haremish pants/what have you, they're really fucking comfortable

First, you will need:

• Fabric, I'm about 40 inches from my waist to the floor and I knew I wanted these roomy so I went with about 2 yards of fabric at something like 72" wide. These were for an upcoming costume and possibly clowning or something later so I made mine out of copper striped silk taffeta. I don't recommend silk taffeta for this project.
• Your sewing machine
• the appropriate threads
• Elastic. (mine is 3/4" knit non-roll) I generally prefer non-roll because why not?

1. Get ready for your endeavor by putting on your favorite comfy pair of pants, you'll be bending around and stuff so you gotta get comfy. Doughnut pattern optional. You can make yourself a drink now if you'd like.

   

   As usual, take a drink and ignore the mess.

2. Lay out your fabric (I forgot to take a picture of this)
3. Realize you don't have a pattern. That's fine, you have your pattern very close to you...
4. Take off your pants and fold them in half, these are going to be your pattern. What you really need is the curve in the crotch. The curved edge should be pointed out and the straight end will be on the fold.
   
5. Mark the curve of the crotch area with a pencil. Mark everything else. The length can be anywhere from your knee to your ankle depending on what you're actually doing. Since these were going to be "harem pants" I ended them at the ankle.
6. Cut out your pattern twice. You'll wind up with two of this shape:

   

   Stolen from another DIY for this. You should basically have this shape.

7. Fire-up your sewing machine and realize you don't have the right thread for this project. Pick out the closest approximation you can.

   

   Close enough.

8. Start by hemming the bottom of your pants pieces. You should be making a channel for your elastic band to go around to close the ankle. If you're making pajama bottoms and don't want them closed down there, skip the wide channel and just do a regular rolled hem. Or get yourself a surger. Those things are fucking awesome.
   
9. Realize you can't find your fucking snips even though you were using them like, 20 god-damn minutes earlier and you expressly told yourself not to misplace them because you knew you were going to fucking need them in a few minutes. Resort to using your teeth. Then move on to whatever other cutting implement you can find. I suggest nail clippers. Take a drink you Macguyver, you.

   

   I used sewing shears before resorting to an exact-o knife.

10. cut your first piece of elastic to the length of your lower calf, or knee or ankle, where you want the end of your pants to rest.
11. Locate the one safety pin you know you own because you used it to close your cardigan yesterday. Once it's found, resolve to go out and buy more. You'll forget this resolution the next time you get to the fabric store.
12. attaching the safety pin to one end of the elastic, thread the elastic through your channel making sure not to lose the other end in the channel. If you do, you'll have to pull the elastic out and start over again. Cussing will be involved. Take another drink. As you thread, the fabric should be gathering around the middle of the length of elastic.
13. Sew the ends of the elastic down at each end of the channel and just save yourself the trouble of trying to do this when you get to sewing the leg together or else you'll repeat step 12 more than you need to. Trust me on this one. I know. This is why there aren't pictures of this step.
14. Sew the inseam of your pant leg (yes that's what you were working on) up to the curved bit. DO NOT SEW THE CURVED BIT TOGETHER. I used to do this every time I made a pair of bloomers. I still do.
15. Marvel at the fact that you just made a pant leg and hey it looks like pants! Take pictures of yourself with one pant leg on and realize you can't use them in your blog because you're still technically pantsless and you're not supposed to show up pantsless on the internet. (Unless you choose to in which, more power to ya.)
16. Repeat steps 8-16 again. Drink twice.

    

    I stupidly forgot to get pictures of most of these steps so here's something
    I drew earlier...

17. Dance break. Congratulate yourself on how good of a seamstress you are. Cuss a few times when your bobbin fucks itself over again and threaten to pawn your sewing machine. Take it back when you re-thread it twice and it starts working again.
18. Flip each leg so that their right side is facing out. This is important because we're gonna sew the crotch.
19. Sew the curved bits so that they make one BIG smiley face perpendicular to your inseam. The reason you flipped these right-sides out is that for me, anyway, you're sort of coming at it from the waist hole.
20. Speaking of waist holes, make another channel for the elastic at the waist, leave a little hole for the insertion of elastic.
21. Cut and thread your elastic again. Have a mild panic attack when you can't find the safety pin. Everything is fine, it's under your sewing machine.
22. sew down the elastic and close the channel. Give everything a tug and you're finished!
23. Put them on and see if it all fits. Take a bunch of pictures of yourself:

Discarded doughnut pants...

                                         

And there you go, something like harem pants. these are a little poofy and I might not have used silk taffeta for them if iI could think of a better fabric. I might like.. put marbles in them or something to weigh them down but we'll see when they're added onto everything else. I'll post about that later.

Now you know how to make sexy bloomers (if you're into that) or you can wow your friends with homemade pj bottoms for the next gift giving holiday! Due to the nature of faire, I tend to go through two pairs of bloomers a year. (One pair will give out during northern and I'll replace it and the other pair will give out after southern. At least they're staggered.)

I hope this made sense, have fun with that, bitches.

Productive in a Way (The Midnight Dress Part II)

I'm considering calling the dress the Queen of the Night dress. Only because I like the idea of naming the dresses after characters from operas.

So with the bodice cut it was very simple to sew the thing together. I'd done it before. There's something very comforting about seeing all that stuff come together nicely.

As usual, I'm somewhat lacking in supplies

I have to run to my car tomorrow to get the rest of the ribbon for the channels but otherwise it's going all according to plan. I'll be trimming the point at the base as I stitch the lining to the satin. I've decided grosgrain ribbons are the best pre-made channels EVER because it just takes, so much more effort out of sewing channels. Simply topstitch. (Yaaaaay fairy god-sister advice!)

Dealing with satin

This doesn't even convey how much fabric

the bodice's pleasant simplicity was frustratingly contrasted by some skirt woes. The satin I picked was frustrating to deal with, if you stuck a pin in the wrong way, the pointy bit would grab the ONE thread in the way of it and just try to pull it out. The whole thing was a bit of a mess. I'm only slightly regretting opting for 8 yards of skirt because I have to hem that shit. Unfortunately, my sewing machine has some problems that I can't quite diagnose because I just don't have the experience to know what the hell is going on down there... So the hour of hemming looked like this (take four shots):

Shit, balls

Crap monkeys

cum dumpster

EXPLETIVE 

It's something about the bobbin. Either way, it was 8 fucking yards and I started running out of curse words.

UUUUUGH

 I'm having concerns over whether I'm going to be able to gather the skirt... unfortunately the only other option I can think of is cartridge pleating and I can't prove it's going to work. I guess we'll find out.

Next time, HOPEFULLY everything but the finishing.

Once Upon a Time...

A little about me:

My name is Clara and I’m a 21 year old design and animation student living in California (northern or southern depends on the season). I am a full time student which means I take at least 12 units per semester and am working on my final semesters here in college. I work part time at Renaissance Faires around California as well which is partially how I got into sewing and how I found Serenata- a women’s musical group in which I sing Mezzo Soprano.

As a kid, my mother (a clothing designer) never let a Halloween go by without an amazing costume and as I got older, I developed a love for costume design but lacked the necessary skill. Through faire I was presented a sort of sink-or-swim opportunity to learn how to sew. Because of the environment, I’ve developed a love for historical costuming and found a community of people who would support me in an endeavor to create new clothing and costumes -from to historical to practical.

I love fairytales, folklore and stories. The best way to shut me up is to tell me a story and most of my communication is through storytelling. I come from a storytelling family and to this day, I surround myself with storytellers in all shapes and forms. My bookshelf is filled with anthologies including the Thousand and One Nights, Grimm's Fairy Tales and the Book of Virtues and I grew up with these and know them probably better than any other work of literature to date. In an extension of this, I love comics and video games and a lot of what people would consider nerdy. A lot of my sewing is fueled by a desire to bring the  fictional costumes and designs that come with these worlds to life.

I’m quite talkative in real life with a tendency to provide my roommates and my friends with (in my opinion) informative and entertaining lectures about whatever has got me going that day. I have a tendency to fall in love with a topic and research the hell out of it. This is the primary reason I created this blog: I wanted a place to put all my costume research as well as the creation photos I take to document the work I’ve done. I also do a lot of drawing, painting and crafting in my spare time (what little of it I have) and hopefully these pieces will make it here as well- not all costumes need to be sewn, after all. This blog will also hopefully document my triumphs and failures as I learn how to drape and alter on my own (with a lot of help from some fairy god-sisters) and potentially be a place for you to laugh, and cry and curse along with me.

TL;DR: I'm a research nerd, I like stories and I'm a nerd-nerd. This blog is for costuming/research and whatever else comes with the territory. Welcome and enjoy!