Fire And Ice - Part I

Yesterday evening I was handed an invitation to a birthday party with a theme: Fire and Ice.

There's not much that's gold or white in my red-desert wardrobe, and I'm not one to dance all night dressed up in a pasteboard sun or a ski suit, and I'm up to my ears sewing presents for new babies of good friends, so I reckoned that I'd go to spotlight, pick up some shimmery white bits of fabric and a white wig and tart up a pair of jeans and a shirt to look like I was covered in frost.

            But THEN - I remembered the BALLGOWN.

            About a year ago, I ducked into the local thrift store looking for brass buttons and had an unexpected WOW moment - a very tall and very plump person had made herself an A-line ballgown skirt and scoop-necked blouse out of scarlet silk duponi - and donated it to the thrift store, who had priced it $5.

            I love this shop. I have an unexpected WOW moment there at least once a month.

So I pulled it out of the stash and cut it up and started draping it on Sally and - I think that this is it.

It's very Schiaparelli, isn't it? With the bustle and the pouter-pigeon front?

The flowery bits are the leftover scraps of silk roughly ruffled into flowers - I'll interleave them with gold scraps - all shreddy on the edges. 

            There's only one little hitch - the party is on SATURDAY.

            But I think I can pull it off.

It took half an hour to cut up the skirt and an hour to drape the dress. And it's DOABLE, If I don't care too much about the inside finishes, which I don't.

 

Schedule:

 

Tuesday - finish the damn elephants and sew up the red apron front.

Wednesday -  have Mr Tabubil help me pin up the bodice - and then sew it.

Thursday - Sew the bustle skirt back, and sew the apron front and the bustle back to the waistband of the original skirt.

Friday - Make the underskirt - which involves all of  one french seam to turn the gold into a cylinder, a rough hem (I wonder if I can leave a train at the back - or will I just rip it to shreds?) and three or four layers of stiff cream-colored net (a la Spotlight!) attached to an elastic waist band.

And maybe a bustle pad - we'll see. I rather like it the way it is, all flat and Schiaparelli 1939.

Then, lastly - use all the silk scraps to make ruffle-roses (predominantly red, with only touches of fraying gold poking out) to hide where I've had to shorten the waistband, and to tart up the rather dull neckline.

Currently the bodice is pinned so that the excess fabric flares out as panels on the outside. Should I seam them out or should I leave them like they are - to add a bit of fun?

Happily, the red silk over-skirt is exactly the same as the one I'd planned for my very-on-hold steampunk outfit, so on THAT, I'm getting back in the game. I started making the steampunk outfit 13 months ago, but tried to fake the 1880s with an A-line Vogue skirt pattern - and screwed up the corded petticoat and blue pinstripe underskirt so thoroughly that Mr Tabubil had a major giggle fit and sent me out to buy an actual pattern, which i did, but I'd sort of used up all my motivation, and the fabric migrated to the bottom of the stash, where it could live forever, I thought.

I may be wrong!

Not a Sewing Post

Jenny, a friend of mine who runs the quilting store Rose Hall Quilts, is hosting a Biggest Morning Tea to benefit the Australian Cancer Council.
            Jenny has spent a whole year planning this event, and it is going to be one heck of a shindig. Originally it was intended simply as a get-together-with-a-cause for the quilters of the gulf region, with a silent auction of pretty cups and saucers and old fashioned silverware (culled from estate sales and thrift stores by her quilting minions over the past months) to raise money for the council.
            And then, eight weeks ago, the morning tea exploded.

Arriving at her house for a sewing session one Wednesday morning, I found her feverishly labeling books of raffle tickets, and looking seriously harassed.
            "Tabubilgirl!"  She bellowed. "It's metastasized!  It's gone CRITICAL!  The Biggest Morning Tea is now frigging ENORMOUS!"
            I took the flyer that she thrust at me.
            "It started when Lucy told me I had to have a plant stall.  'A PLANT stall?' I said.  'This is a morning TEA!' Then she told me how much money you can make from a plant stall in this town, and then she told me she'd run it, so all right, we have a plant stall.
            Then Chrissy asked if she could be in charge of the catering.  I said 'Great!'  and asked her if I could still contribute a few boxes of Pink Ribbon Tim Tams - I LOVE Tim Tams dunked in coffee - and she got really SHIRTY and said 'NO!  I'm talking about the baked goods stall!'
           'The Baked GOODS stall?' I said.  And she said 'YES!' And she told me how much money you make from a baked good stall in Australia, so fine, she can collect people to bake for her - no worries! She can run the baked good stall. I'll do the coffee. 
            I asked her how much coffee and biscuits I should provide - I was thinking about enough for 50 people - and she told me to cater for TWO HUNDRED!! THREE HUNDRED even!!!  And now we've got trading tables, with CWA ladies sewing purses and knitting baby clothes like they're on fire, and we're having a quilt exhibition, which means I now have this huge pile of quilts insured for ten thousand dollars EACH sitting in my spare room, which makes me very uncomfortable, and now there's a raffle for another quilt (NOT a ten thousand dollar one) and travel vouchers to Adelaide and I don't even know what else, with an ARMY of ticket sellers fanning out across the entire peninsula and my wholesale suppliers have been sending me the most amazing quilting supplies as donations to the cause and the whole thing is getting out of hand and I'm starting to panic. 
            I mean, it's only being held in my back yard!! Do you reckon we can get the pool hall and the BBQ shed and the shop shed and the granny flat cleared out in time? (editors note: in the Gulf region, people LOVE their sheds. You need at least three in your backyard to be taken seriously by anyone.) There's 150 folding chairs and six portable gazebos on order, but maybe we need more space? D'you think we can move the quilting exhibition out of the house and onto the verandah? What if it rains?!?!  Where will we plug in the pie-warmer?"

In summation, I will be baking.  Lots of 'American style cookies, please!" for the baked goods stall.
            It's really quite something. Cancer is the one really democratic charity.  There's nothing political or geopolitical about it.  It's as inoffensive and feel-good as the Make a Wish Foundation.
            Everyone can get behind Cancer, and my god, they certainly have.  Jenny's suppliers are sending her hundreds of dollars worth of fabrics and threads and quilting templates as raffle prizes and local retailers and travel agencies have been getting into the act -

Saturday, May 7, 11 am, at 5 Woods Terrace, Whyalla.
It's going to be quite the shindig.
If you're in town, please do drop by.

The Great Blue Baroque Dress

This blue rococo-ish-gown is one of the first doll dresses I ever made.

The fabrics come from a wonderful little fabric shop in Boston's Chinatown.  They sold remnants of designer fabrics - not much, just a meter or two of each, but every remnant was a) Spectacular, b) just enough to make one really fabulous doll dress and c) Priced at genuine remnant prices - $5 or so.

One weekend I found this lovely crinkly polyester satin and a embroidered  black net and thought…huzzah!

And dashed off to the trim section of the store to pick up silver laces and trims...

The overskirt was originally intended to be a polonaise, which is why I made it so long.  I basted the net to the satin and cartridge pleated 54 inches of fabric into the waist, and we loved the look of it so completely that we couldn't bear to pull it up into loops.  It had gravitas.  And flow.

The Back:

 

The Front:

We made this dress the same summer The Patriot - Mel Gibson's Revolutionary War movie - came out.  I'd just made the dress so mum and I absolutely HAD to see the movie - I remember hugging her and both of us squee-ing with pleasure when we saw the ribbon necklaces that the ladies wore - they'd clearly based their costumes on MINE!

And I love the stomacher.  I really really love the stomacher.

And the hairpiece - although I don't have a proper photograph of it - it is an ostrich plume with a wired ribbon rosette and white feather tufts - and a vintage marcasite brooch pinned to the front.

The bodice front doesn't quite match up with the stomacher - chalk it up to early sewing experiences.  This dress has aged amazingly well - it's still one of my favorites - if not THE favorite.   It's exuberant!  All bright and colorful and joyful!

Yummy Details:

And once more, just for fun:

Wired Ribbon Flower Purse

Because every doll needs a handful of frou-frou when she goes to a party!

Front Side:

Back Side:

Mr Tabubil plays Papparazzo

Silk Mitts

Naturally, now that I'd made a cape and muff I needed a pair of silk mitts to match. The muffs are made from the same white tissue taffeta as the muff casing, fused to a soft woven interfacing for stability during the embroidery. (In retrospect, it would have been more sensible to embroider 'em on a hoop before I cut them out).

For fastenings I settled on corded embroidery cotton strung through eyelets. Which meant I had to learn how to sew eyelets. 

I played with awls and embroidery floss until I had it figured enough to wing it.  The first four eyelets on the left-handed mitt were reasonably scrappy, but at number 5 the technique fell into place and if the rest aren't exactly exactly oil paintings, they are perfectly serviceable and respectable enough to hold up their heads in polite company and I am extremely proud of them!

(Yes, I know she's wearing a regency era dress.  Let's not quibble, okay?)

Green Cape and Muff(s)!!!

I'm supposed to be working on my circa.Civil war projects, but everyone in the costume blogsphere has been having such FUN at the Costume Accessories Symposium at Williamsburg  that I just - couldn't. I needed an off-day.
            And 'Clear out the stash' projects are intrinsically virtuous, right?
            And I'd been meaning to make a muff for AGES.
            And then after the blog Time Traveling in Costume went and posted that AMAZING description of the muff-making workshop, things just sort of felt as if they were MEANT.
            And if you're making a muff, you need a matching cape, right?
            Something like this?

I pulled out trusty Vogue 7923 and cut it down a little to match the dimensions of my fabric remnant - and sewed the cape out of my new green cotton velveteen -with all the wretched purple piling stripped off- with Spotlight's best gold polyester crepe for the lining (I had to go and buy that.  And then go and buy it again when the first lot seized up into matte plastic immobility when I steamed it.  Sometimes I really don't appreciate living so far from a decent fabric store!)
            For the muff - white muslin and fibrefill.
            And for the muff covering - a strip of gold silk, some 3mm silk ribbons, a few roccoco-ish pieces of trim and -

C'est voila, n'est c' pas, como no? Que piensas?

One muff wasn't nearly enough so I made another -
I really loved the one that the Time Traveler made for herself with all that rococo braid, but patterns that look lovely at full scale just don't translate to a doll 18 inches high.

So I threw out my preconceptions, dug out the silk ribbons and made this instead.

And it feels very swish indeed!