Sempstress

I was working on a couple of festive purple deerstalkers for a children’s show (as you do, of course, when your boss says, “Wouldn’t purple deerstalkers be cute for these girls?”), and I noticed that the pattern I had started from (not for a deerstalker) genuinely thought I was going to make a 6 piece lining.  Now, that would be an awesome way to line a hat, don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t feel like fussing. There’s an easy way to line any sort of domed hat that doesn’t sit absolutely tight to the skull…  Interested? Read the rest of this entry »

…without anyone looking at the finished tab and asking if you were drunk and wearing mittens when you sewed it. I mean, everybody “knows” that if you want to bind rounded tabs you just have to use bias tape. Like, duh. But be honest with me – how well does that action really work when you try it? Between you, me, and the interwebs, when I try to machine bias onto a rounded tab in one swell foop, it usually looks poo.  But a miracle happened last week, and my brain kicked in.  There’s a little bitty-bit of magic from millinery that makes the difference between the top corset (the drunken-mittens approach) and the bottom corset (so much nicer…). And it’s fast, people. It’s faster than fighting the normal Battle of the Bias… Read the rest of this entry »

So here’s the trouble with tutus… They are made of many, many layers of tulle*. And tulle, these days, is made of hate. I don’t want to sound all judgey-pants, but it’s true. Your average fabric store tulle is made of nylon, a fiber which suffers from a constant string of cheap, tragic affairs with single electrons. By the time you have 6 layers of nylon tulle mounted on the basque (that’s the shaped waist-band bit), you’ve actually sewn yourself a fluffy little Van de Graaff generator. A tutu-in-progress is amazing – you can actually watch threads fly from the floor towards the tutu where they permanently bond with with tulle. Effective for cleaning, perhaps, but not so good for the tutu which should ideally not look like some sort of worm-farm.  Just in case you, dear reader, ever find yourself herding tulle through a sewing machine, here are a few tricks I’ve picked up from a couple years of sewing dance concerts at the shop… Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes, bad things happen to good costumers. Like, your sister is throwing an 80′s party the next evening and you bomb out finding anything that can be mangled into some reasonable approximation of Cyndi Lauper so-unusual-excellence, and every bit of vintage you can find is a size 4. Now, that’s maybe not to traumatic if you actually are a size 4. I wouldn’t know, because as it turns out, my left thigh is a size 4. But I found the jacket of my dreams, and it was merely 4 or 5 sizes to small. What’s a girl to do? Gussets. Gussets will save you here. Read the rest of this entry »

So you spent a jillion dollars a yard on some fancy-dancy ribbon for your costume? Bad news – it will only ever look like ribbon… Unless you layer it. Read the rest of this entry »

Ok, Internet, we need to talk something through… Remember back in the old days? Remember when it was all carefree fun and games? Oh, those wild younger days, when any old picture was a good picture? Put bodice on a hanger, chuck it on a closet door, and hey! Great! You put a picture on the interwebs! You contributed! This was back before the googles even searched images. Heck, we actually just called it “google”, back then, and there was a fight going on about whether to google or yahoo for searching. I feel ancient. Now it’s all “omg, use a neutral background when you photograph your demos!” (Oh, interwebs, did you forget that whole beggars/choosers dichotomy?) I’m not arguing that we should lower our standards. I am saying that not everyone has a professional photography setup just lying around, the space to dedicate to one, nor the money to get one. Since I’ve been Señorita Discount Home Improvement lately, I figured I could make a photography setup on the cheaps….

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A lot of sewers are afraid of bifurcated nether-garments. They look more complicated than skirts. I remember wearing bike shorts under costumes for years because I was afraid to attempt a bloomer. And that is an odd conundrum, because I had been making corsets for years. That’s just the power of the pant. But sister, don’t fear the bloomer… There’s a Really Easy Way(tm). Read the rest of this entry »

File this under “Reasons missa is going to milliner’s hell” for 100, Alex. This is the WRONG WAY to recover a hat. DO NOT DO THIS. It’s bad bad bad Wrongy McWrong. It’s really bloody fast. But it is wrong, and will probably get you mocked by anyone who knows what they are doing. You have been warned…  ;)

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So I made a sedate little dress with just a teensy hint of a bustle for Stephanie last fall to go under this here little blue dress. By “a teensy little bustle”, I mean something that sticks out roughly 24″ behind her. You know, no bigs… So what’s going on under there?

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Nothing makes a pant look as fantastically olde-timey as a fall front. Unfortunately, a real fall front is a pain in the patouty to sew (trust me), and it’s not something that can be added in after the fact in any sort of historically accurate manner. Fortunately, if you’re not 100% concerned about authenticity, it’s easy enough to add a mock fall to existing pants…. Read the rest of this entry »