Corset and feathers

With only three months and a few days until Dragon*Con, yesterday I got worried and decided to start making my corset. I printed out the pattern and carefully adjusted it to my measurements, which took a few hours. Here's a picture of the pieces (on paper) ready to cut.

Then I took half an hour to read through the entire tutorial so I wouldn't have any nasty surprises, neatly gathered up the paper pattern pieces and put them with the $25 a yard coutil fabric, and got online and ordered a custom-made corset through etsy.

So that's sorted. Now I can focus on the parts of my costume that won't make me cry. Maybe once I have more experience I can try making my own corset.

I hadn't really thought about the specific details of my costume, but this weekend I sat down and trawled through Pinterest and started making sketches. When I found this site, I knew I wanted to do something similar. If you scroll down the page, you'll see a quick tutorial on how to make the cloth feathers that look so good in that costume. I decided to start with them, but I didn't have any appropriate cloth.

So I went to buy fabric. I should have taken someone with me to hold my purse and say, "Are you sure you need that?", because I cannot be trusted in craft stores. Suffice to say, I have lots of cloth now.

Unfortunately, I hadn't read the tutorial very closely. I thought the feathers were made of stiffer fabric, like upholstery fabrics, because they looked stiff. Turns out the crafter used plastic to stiffen them but made the feathers mostly from cut-up blouses. But by the time I realized that, I'd already bought a lot of upholstery fabric remnants (fortunately for only $1 or $2 a pop).

I like the way the crafter layered her fabric to make the feathers. I decided to use only two layers, and cut my fabric in rough feather shape.Since I don't have a sewing machine, I used two plies of embroidery thread and did a rough cross-stitch pattern to join the fabric. I didn't try to make this look neat; I wanted it to feel organic. I also didn't sew down the middle because that's not how feathers grow for most birds.

Fraying the edges was more difficult than I expected. I couldn't make my feathers look like ones in the tutorial, I'm not sure why.

The red feather looks like a piece of bacon. You can also see my rough costume sketch if you're interested.

I thought the lack of fraying might be due to the cloth I was using, so tonight I tried the plain cotton. I made three more feathers and they turned out better, although I think that's due more to knowing a bit more about what I'm doing. The feather shapes are better, mostly. It's still hard to make them fray. But I like the way they're starting to look. Here's a pic of all six feathers I've made so far, along with a crow feather and two I-think-they-are-owl feathers (I hike, and whenever I find an interesting feather on the trail I pick it up). Looking at real feathers next to my fake feathers makes my fake feathers look, well, fake, but I still think they'll look good as part of my costume.

We'll see how that goes. We'll see.

Oh, and I bought an antique ironing board. It cost less than one yard of coutil.