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.

Bloomers

I finished the bloomers I started last week. I'm happy with them, although the next pair I make will be from a more sophisticated (and complicated) pattern. I used this pattern to see if I could do it, and obviously I could. Since the front and back panels are identical, the front is a bit baggy and the back rides up. But they're cute.

(I took that picture with my phone, and I pulled on the white socks to hide that my legs are so pale, but they look kind of odd with the bloomers; I'll probably be barelegged when I do wear these, under a long skirt of course.)

I'm going to be focusing more on sewing in the next few months. My goal is a full steampunk outfit for Dragon*Con, and suddenly I realize I only have three months to complete it! The corset has to come first, partly because it'll take me forever and if I mess up I have to start over, partly because it'll determine the final fit of my other clothes. So within the next few weeks I'll start posting step by step how I make it.

But for now, I have a small victory: yes, I can sew bloomers.

First steps of two projects

I forgot to post yesterday, so this post will go over two very different steampunk projects that I've started. In both cases I've got a long way to go.

First, I finally bought an antique brass blowtorch. I love it so much I can hardly stand it. I mean, look at it!

I bought this particular blowtorch because it looks so much like a weapon to start with. I have plans to mod it a bit--nothing drastic, and certainly nothing permanent; I want to be able to remove all the modding if I like so I can appreciate the blowtorch's elegant simplicity all on its own.

Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of supplies yet. I do have this heavy copper wire that I found at work (really, I did actually find it--it was on the floor and I was about to pitch it in the trash, thinking, "Why don't those construction guys ever clean up after themselves?" when I realized I was holding copper wire and ooh shiny want). I tried wrapping it around the "barrel" of the blowtorch, but it's such thick copper that it's not very bendy and I don't know if I love it. I'll probably remove it once I find something else to replace it with. But I also had some jewelry wire that's thin and very flexible. It looks much better. (I especially like the little coil stuck into a perfectly sized hole in the cap where you pour the paraffin inside; I made it by wrapping the wire around a pencil.) It looks much better, although it's so very bendy that it's not going to keep its shape. I need to find a wire that's the same diameter but a bit stronger.

One of the things I'm hoping to do with the blowtorch, if I can manage it, is install a bright blue LED and a reflector down into the barrel, with a switch I can toggle with my thumb. But I have never tried wiring anything ever in my life, so it's going to be a steep learning curve.

So that's one project. The other is a pair of bloomers that I bought the cloth for several weeks ago. Today I finally decided it was time to start on them. I'm still about halfway through making the nightgown that inspired this stupid garage makeover in the first place, but I've stalled out because the embroidery is taking so long. The bloomers should go much faster.

Here's the cutting table--formerly a dining table that no one in the family wants, and which was holding a TV before I moved it out to the garage--being used for its new purpose. It works quite well. The groove between the table and the leaf isn't as deep as a real cutting table's, but it does the trick. In this picture, I'm cutting the muslin.

And here are the pieces (and the muslin) after I cut them. I had to move the lamp, but it's easy enough to move back when I'm done.

To get the full impact of the pictures, you should imagine me carefully cutting the cloth while wearing Animal PJ bottoms and a Clan Shaw t-shirt. And orange flip-flops. And keep in mind that the garage door was wide open, like this (bonus Jekyll picture).

A Lampshade!

I have an awesome lamp with mermaids on it, but no lampshade to go with it. I used to have a brown paper lampshade, but I have no idea what happened to it.

I've been looking for a lampshade that's the right size and type, and finally found one a few days ago. But it was white. Like, shiny clean brilliant white. It looked very funny on the old lamp, although it was otherwise quite nice.

So yesterday I thought, hmm, maybe I could dye the lampshade. It's linen. And I realized that I could stain it with tea.

I had just returned from lunch out, where I'd had an enormously sloppy, wonderful hamburger at a little diner near my town, and more to the point I'd just drunk approximately ten glasses of iced tea (I may be exaggerating slightly). But I brewed a fresh cup of hot tea, for science.

After I'd drunk about half the tea, I figured it had cooled enough that I could use the rest on the lampshade. First I dunked the tea bag in the tea and used it to paint the shade. It worked great, but for some reason tea bags are not meant to withstand such treatment and it started to tear immediately, leaving behind wet tea leaves. So I got a paper towel and dunked it in tea instead--but it didn't work at all.

Fortunately I'd been drinking tea all day, so I dug around in the trash and found two bags from earlier. I soaked them in tea, then used them to finish the lampshade.

It looked messy when I was done, but a much better color. I set it aside to dry overnight.

Today I spent some time carefully cleaning dried tea leaves from the linen. I could easily have made the shade darker by doing a second application, but I like it the way it is. It gives a good light.

Oh, and I also found a photo of my granddad as a kid, taken probably in the mid-1920s. Isn't it adorable?

That's it for the shelves

At least, I hope that's it for the shelves. I'm tired of fussing with them.

First, I bought six more bricks to make the brick-and-board shelves taller. I got buff-colored bricks to mix in with the red ones, since I wasn't completely happy with the red. But I'm not completely happy with the mixture either. But they'll do, and the shelves are stable, a good height, and will be very useful. They also help hide the Christmas and other decorations in bins under the table. And hey, the mismatched bricks just echo the mismatched wall panels, right?

While I was shopping for bricks (I don't know why I'm not considered a more interesting person, really) I went to get another shelf bracket, one that matches the two I already had up. As predicted, having the third bracket a totally different type--metal instead of wood--has driven me crazy. Maybe that's why, when I couldn't find the bracket at Lowe's, I drove across town to another Lowe's. The second Lowe's had it, thank goodness.

So I stained it yesterday when I got home from work, and I also stained the three smaller brackets in case I want to put up another shelf, which I might but not right away. I made my usual mess.

And this afternoon I took everything off the shelf, unscrewed it from the third bracket, unscrewed the third bracket from the wall, and put a new nail in to hold the new bracket. That didn't take long. Then I found the wood glue and glued the new bracket to the wall. Then I leaned against the new bracket and hummed to myself and stared out at the yard and thought deep thoughts about how I really ought to buy some clamps so I wouldn't have to lean against stuff I'd glued to keep it in contact.

Once I was pretty sure the bracket wasn't going to unstick itself when I let go, I left for a while to do other stuff. I'll talk about the other stuff tomorrow because I'm not done. The bracket seemed to be okay when I checked it later, so I went ahead and put the shelf on. I glued it down, although I have no idea if the glue is going to stick properly because A) no clamps and B) I was bored and didn't stay to hold it in place.

But the shelf looks much better now that all three brackets match. It's not going to hold heavy things or I'd have put up stronger brackets. Mostly it'll hold old bottles and sewing notions, because the table underneath it is my cutting table.

Small update, small shelves, small everything

It rained again this weekend. I like rain, but this is the third weekend in a row. Please, sky gods, give me a sunny weekend soon!

I had to work yesterday morning anyway, and after that I went to see Iron Man 3. It was late when I got home and I'm still getting over a bout of bronchitis, so I didn't do any work on the garage Saturday.

At one point in Iron Man 3 (hopefully this won't spoil anything) there's a scene where Tony Stark is in the middle of nowhere and has to break into a garage to make repairs on his suit. The garage in the movie is full of stuff he can use. If he broke into my garage, he'd still be there trying to figure out how to make repairs with a leather punch, cheap nails, a bunch of interesting rocks, five or six sets of windchimes, and some short twists of copper wire (which I stole--I mean found--at work where they're doing construction).

This morning I got up to more chilly rain, and I kind of felt like staying in bed all day. Instead I went to Home Depot and bought bricks, because I am just that exciting.

They're actually edgers, meant for edging flowerbeds and stuff like that. But they're the right size for brick-and-board shelves, which I decided to use the particleboard shelves for rather than trying to wall-mount them. I bought a dozen bricks thinking that would be enough. Instead, as you can see these are the smallest shelves ever. I'll have to get more bricks next time.

(oh look, you can see my leg in the mirror. Those jeans really don't fit anymore)

While I was in Home Depot, I also bought three more wall brackets. I thought I'd use one to replace the mismatched bracket, then have two left over to mount another small shelf later. Garages need shelves! But apparently I bought the original brackets at Lowe's and these are not quite the same size.

I almost went back to the store. But it was still raaaaaining and the cat is trying to kill me (he loves to get up on the pergola and can't always get down). Since I had the ladder out anyway to rescue Jekyll, I cleaned out the house's gutters in the rain. And after that I really didn't want to do anything else except eat blueberry muffins and drink tea, which I can do with the best.

Oh, I got two interesting little hooks and put them up this weekend too. It didn't exactly take me long. Here's a picture of one of them (the other is near the door and is a slightly different key shape). Hey, does anyone know a good place to buy lampshades? Obviously I need one. Paper lampshades used to be ubiquitous at antique shops for just a few bucks each but I haven't seen any in the longest time.