Happy Halloween

No Halloween shall be complete without my favorite antique October accessory:

 

Sofia is visiting us again.

Sofia has only ever travelled as far as our home in Norfolk,  but she Will. Not. Stop. speaking about how any day now she’ll ride away to London, crash a ball at Devonshire House and make Lord Byron fall madly in love with her, and they will run away together to Italy, where they will cohabit in a ruined Catholic abbey and spend their nights writing epigrams and solving riddles with the ghosts of deceived nuns.

 

On Wednesday last, she tearfully pressed upon me this portrait of herself to remember her by.

I wish she’d just GO already. I swear I’ll wear the damn brooch every day if it will get Sofia and her laudanum bottle out of my second best bedroom.

 

It's October.

 

 Tis the season...

Aniline Halloween

Aside from making a pair of Zombie Monkeys, I thought it would be nice to do something American-Girl-dollish for Halloween.

Addy doesn't do zombie, so we compromised with a fashion plate or two.

Like the skirt trim in this one -

Image via

La Mode Illustrée

And the bodice in this one -

Image via

La Mode Illustrée

I used the American Girl Addy School Outfit for the base pattern.

 I sewed the blouse from Swiss cotton, and  mixed it up a little with embroidery down the front.  A Halloween skull earring made a seasonally appropriate brooch.

The skirt and bretelles were sewn from a chequered orange silk - a pair of fabulous trousers my sister wore in the mid-90s - and trimmed in a soft satin ribbon. 

I wanted a longer jacket, like this one -

Image via

La Mode Illustrée

Unfortunately, my velvet had been stored folded. Between the creases I had just enough bits to eke out the regular zouave jacket from the AG pattern.

The electric orange soutache is what I could find in the Wyalla Spotlight store before we left Australia.
Sure, it's only just on the demure side of neon, but it simply screams Halloween.

As for the hat - behold the rehabilitated cracktastic hat of 80's doom!

 All it took were a crystal spider and a gold skull and we've gone from horror to October chic.

Tutankhamonkey and Monktenkahmum

Meet Tutankhamonkey and Monktenkahmum. 
They lurched their way into the house around about Halloween and decided to stay.

Tutankhamonkey is a birthday present for Mr Tabubil (last year's birthday.  Don't judge.)
Monktenkahamum is a farewell present for a friend who adores Halloween with an almost unholy passion. She left Chile well before he was finished, but he will get to her by New Year, even if he's got to lurch the whole way.

I used the Monkenottukhamun pattern by q.D.PatOOties.  Her own link appears to be down, but her etsy store is HERE and you can find the pattern HERE if you would like to make one of your own.

As you can see, the pattern is pretty simple.  But those bandages - 

Grubbying up the fabric was a headache and a half.
I didn't have any paints on hand, which really didn't matter because I wanted an organic sort of stain.  Basically, I was a twit.
I tried coffee. I tried tea.  I tried soy sauce.  I tried fish sauce and oyster sauce -
Everything washed out clean.
I let the stains dry - for days.  They washed out. 
I set them with salt.  They washed out. 
I set them with vinegar.  They washed out. 
I can't get a damned sauce stain out of a single shirt ever, but could I get one to stay when I actually wanted it to?

I could not.

In desperation, I wet the cloth and dragged it across our balcony railings to sop up the greasy Santiago dust, because this dust sticks.  We have a couple of pillowslips that were left to dry on the backs of balcony chairs that hadn't been dusted in four days, and those pillowslips are streaked and grubby forever - the sorts of linens you hope like hell don't accidentally slip onto the pillows in the spare bedroom before your guests arrived.

This time round, the dust washed out.
I wet the cloth again and used it to swab the grotty bits around the bottom of our outdoor flowerpots.
The dirt. Washed. Out.

After two weeks of moaning, hair-shredding and an increasingly befuddled Mr Tabubil ("Yes, I'm swearing in harmony with myself.  No, you don't need to know why.") I achieved a fabric that was mildly dingy, and at that point, I gave up.  Marking the grimiest spots with chalk, I cut the most careful casually-raveled bandages you've ever seen.

And draped.  

The draping was rather a lot of fun, actually.

The monkeys rewarded me with a matching set of musty grins (seriously, antique drains were nothing to it) and Mr Tabubil thinks they're awesome.

Alice of Wonderland, Despoiler of Halloweens and Scourge of Cobwebs Everywhere

When you move to a new continent, your life seems to start over in all sorts of unexpected ways, and sewing tends to get shunted to the wayside. Last september, about when I was getting back into the swing of things, I suffered a nasty wrist injury that left me unable to do any sort of fine motor activity for almost a year, and right when i was recovered from that, we were buying and renovating an apartment, and instead of stitching, I was watching walls go up, and instead of choosing pretty fabrics, I was choosing paint colors and laying tiles. 
            Now the renovations are almost finished, and the boxes are being unpacked, and it's Halloween, so I'm sewing again.  
          I began sewing this dress a couple of years ago for an Alice of Wonderland party, but I never finished it. I was dressing as the titular Alice - a rather bashy, brutal sort of Alice, with a contract out on the head (complete with frozen glass eyes and a zipper to make a purse) of the Cheshire Cat. On the morning of the party, before the final seams were sewn, the party's hostess called in floods of tears.  She'd found her beloved cat Horse lying in the back garden, dead from a snake-bite.
            We were all shattered. My costume stayed unfinished. There are some things that nice people just don't do. 

Three years later, Alice of Wonderland, Cheshire Cat Hunter, received her last stitch.  And she was a most appropriately Halloween-y sort of costume - absolutely loaded with horror and dread, and the day after the party, in the cold light of morning, what fifteen assorted people cannot understand is how European Civilization survived half a millennium of hoopskirts. 

I couldn't pass a decorative cobweb without trying to take it away with me on my pink petticoat - as well as whatever the cobweb had been attached to, which was usually a chair, which meant that whoever was sitting on the chair came too.  I nearly took down the buffet when I swooped in gingerly for a pineapple kebab - the host had cleverly swapped out the tablecloth for more cobwebs, and when three people reached out to catch me, i found that the pork platter and a bowl of punch were strung out on a cobweb lead line, teetering on the brink of total party disaster.   
            I was banned from the living room the second time I passed the coffee table - my swinging skirts were setting glasses of punch flying. That second pass had taken out the refills of the ruins of the first, and as I fled, disgraced, the conversation turned from how the hostess had illegally given herself a bye into the semi-finals of the Pictionary tournament, and moved onto candles and farthingales and pocket-hoops and how on earth the Victorians had managed to survive the fashion for the bustle.  Those inventive Victorians had lit their houses with kerosene lamp and gas burners at the ends of clumsy rubber hoses. Swinging hoops are bad enough, but a bustle you can't see coming or going.
            I had fondly imagined that, musing so, the other guests would thank heaven for small mercies and call me back, but instead I was banished to the corner of the dining room and set counting the votes for the costume contest. The seal on my funk was set when I found that people had been writing opinions in the margins of their ballots - my Alice dress had narrowly missed out on the prize for "most genuinely  frightening costume" because people were worried that someone would have to present that prize to me in PERSON.

And the evening's true ignominy? The final seal and funk? 
Reader - it was MY party.

Happy Halloween!

The Cracktastic Hat Bounces BACK

 

My little halloween-y hat, last seen looking like something Maria Shriver Schwarzenegger's bridesmaids would have worn, languished for a year, stripped and undressed.
Over this past weekend, I picked it out of my 'To DO, you great Procrastinator, you!' pile, and redecorated.
            Black feathers, ribbons, a spider-brooch with the brooch-ery stripped off, and voila!
It's still reasonably cracktastic: I'd thick-headedly attached the original decorations with hot-glue, and this time around had to use enough froof-ery to cover the hot-glue scars, but if you can't go bonkers with the frou-frou on Halloween, when can you?
            This little hat does not exist within a vaccum - it belongs to a halloween-colored outfit that I completed just before the move.
            Consider these photos to be in the nature of a teaser - complete outfit coming soon!

The Inadvertent Hat of Cracktastic 80s Wedding Fabulousness

Late last night as I finished sewing the orange ribbon roses for this hat I had one of those moments of horrible realization - my little 1860s doll hat: intended to be all Halloween-y and macabre-like, had turned into a wedding headband - from 1986.
            Out of a special wedding double-episode of a daytime soap opera, where the groom wears a dove-gray tuxedo with a pink cummerbund, and the whole bridal party is high on hairspray and coughing up opalescent glitter.
              This hat is the perfect accompaniment to the sort of tulle-and-sequin explosion that they used to design specifically for thrift store windows.
            You know what I'm talking about -  all brassy plastic pearls and and white illusion netting and monstrous puffed shoulders, with a matching beaded tiara sagging dismally from the neck of the coat hanger, and the whole ensemble getting dustier and sadder every year, as its swags of spiky plastic lace turn yellow in the sunlight and brush the dust away from the racks of clip-on earrings that just make the window display, don't you think?
            The orange hat-band and the orange gauze streamers and the beaded wire sprays and the ostrich feather- they've all got to go.  I'll keep the roses and the feather spear and go out and find some black ribbons.  And a spider.  Possibly a mouse skull, what do you think?