Bee & Puppycat waitress uniform

 

Regency Round Gown

Regency era cotton day dress, made mostly to test out Laughing Moon's regency round gown pattern before I invested real money in nice materials. Verdict: good fit, historically accurate, and good quality pattern. If I come across some silk for a decent price I may remake this pattern as an evening gown.

Solas - Dragon Age Inquisition

 Commission of Solas, everyone's favorite lying hobo apostate elf. Sweater, undershirt, pants, belt, and shoes were included. The sweater is made of linen/acrylic blend 4x2 rib knit in a natural marled linen color with 1x1 rib collar. The undershirt is olive knit with basically an attached faux suede dickie. It zips up the back. (Very stylish.)

The collar fabric came from the same manufacturer as the sweater fabric so it matches perfectly, but it was very (very) thick. The collar is lined in the 4x2 because self lining it would have been too bulky. I also extended the brown faux leather trim to just below the seam rather than stopping right at the seam so I could get the rivet in. I went through a number of drafts and tweaks of that collar shape and I'm happy with what I ended up with, but it took me a little while to get there. Knit is not the most cooperative fabric when it comes to trying to shape it like this. I tested out various angles of rise and height, interfacing/internal structure...

The seam around the collar and around the cuffs is accented with a hand stitch, and the brown trim is one piece, no seams. Water soluble basting tape (both to turn under the edges and to hold it in place for sewing) was indispensable for this.

The pants are a linen blend, pieced and accented with a hand stitch and faux leather lacing. Not sure what's up with all those seams, but that is how they're designed.

I purchased an extra long belt on etsy and stitched on the accents by hand. They're the washers from black grommets.

The shoes are made from sueded knit backed with cotton rib knit to add dimension (the suede knit is thin, and backing it made it look a little more like woven straps) and self-lined in knit. They pull on like socks and have some elastic built into the lining to help them stay up. I attached a 6 mm shoe sole so they can be worn outside or on concrete. The toeless style is not the most comfortable shoe design ever, but sanding down the front of the sole made them a little easier to walk in and stand on.

odds and ends

A lined Star Trek Voyager totebag and a plushie Mass Effect Hanar (I'm not sure why Bioware hasn't made an official Hanar plushie, since they have an Elcor and three different Dragon Age plush, but anyway--). Made as part of a gift for the r/dragonage gift exchange.

Jane Porter - Tarzan

Commission of Jane Porter from Disney's Tarzan, including bustled petticoat. The dress is made from a matte synthetic satin, which mimics the look of silk (while being washable and more cost effective) and is much more wrinkle-resistant than cotton. The ivory and lavender accents are made from crepe weave.


The petticoat is a frankenstyled reproduction Victorian steel boned bustle pattern. The historical version of the dress this petticoat is designed to be worn with would be floor length and a bit more columnar in shape when viewed from the front; I shortened it and added extra ruffling on around the bottom half.




The costume is two pieces, dress and overskirt. The overskirt drape and polonaise are attached to the brown waistband and wrap around. I draped and redraped that overskirt so many times; I generally draft patterns flat and geometrically so getting this how I wanted it to look, length, width, and pleat-wise, took some work. The polonaise/back bustle thing is shaped with batting to create the smooth, Disney-ish shape (though obviously I did pleat it; darts looked weird).

I fussed around with the collar quite a bit and experimented with three piece pattern cut on the bias before going with a six piece pattern, cut on the grain. It was worth the trade off of adding seams to get a much smoother, more accurate shape without bias wrinkling.

The scallop trim is attached to the lining. In a minor miracle, the hem circumference ended up being perfect for my scallop width and they met right at the center back seam. As all scallops are these were a bit obnoxious, but for the first time ever I pressed them using a stiff template (same template I used to trace the seam line). I don't know why this never occurred to me before. It's faster and less tedious than pressing with a point turner.

Sakura - Naruto The Last Movie

Commission for tunic top, belt, bag, arm and leg bands, and headband (not shown). Tunic top is made from cotton with 2% lycra for stretch.

Top has a side zipper and closes along the neck/chest opening with hooks and snaps. 

Belt and bag are made from heavy canvas. Belt has a fleece interlining for extra dimension and shaping, bag is made with ultra heavyweight interfacing to keep a nice rectangular shape. The canvas worked well for this, but it is so thick that I had to use pliers to pull the needle through when hand finishing the turning hole on the belt. 

The bag has an interior pocket, but it's probably too short for a larger cellphone. (Fits an iphone, though.) Not sure what it says about me that I look at this design and just think how much snack food you could have at all times while in this costume. So much snack food. So handy for conventions. There are no belt buckles or closures drawn in the art, so all closures are velcro.

Dragon Age skirt

I didn't make any costumes for GenCon this year (just too impractical when I spend the most of the con sitting at a table playing RPGs, plus my hotel room was 15 miles away from the convention center) but I did whip up a DA-themed poodle skirt because why not. I'm really artistically disinclined, so my mabari is blatantly ripped off Sanshee's plushie design. (Which is really cute; I have one that lives in my sewing room.) And I have no computer graphics skills whatsoever, so I actually drew it with a sharpie, took a photograph of it, posterized it, and colored it in Paint in order to digitize it into an embroidery file. I guess if it works, it works, but knowing how to make vector images in photoshop would probably make this process easier.

I'm still figuring out stabilizer and hooping, too. I've run some smaller embroidery designs and had good results but on this big design some of the black outline is not properly aligned. It's aligned in the digital file, so this is a hooping/stabilizer error. Since I made it for myself I didn't bother making a new one, but I need to practice this a bit and maybe experiment with different stabilizers.

I also took a crochet class at GenCon (they have an entire line of programming they call "spouse activities," which I find a bit amusing) and I am still pretty bad at crochet. Ribbon embroidery went notably better.