Snow day work

I fit my client (soon-to-be-sister-in-law) in her mock up yesterday and today I am working on the pattern changes and drafting a sleeve.  All while Snowmageddon is blowing down around us.  Which is typical of New Brunswick this time of year.

Photos later!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Wedding progress

 Now that inventory at my work is done (you want a long painful process, inventory a large fabric store, we have to count every notion, and then every bolt of fabric and they weigh the fabric. Its a huge job and very, very tiring).  I've made some progress on the wedding dress patterns for my soon to be sister in law.  I have her basic block drafted:

And converted it to a Princess seam:

And its been mocked up, ready to be fitted while she is home visiting for Christmas.

The next step is to fit it, make any changes needed, mock up the sleeve and draw on the design for the top :)

Big announcement for the 2013 Heart Truth Fashion Gala!

We are very proud to announce our headlining act for the 2013 Heart Truth Fashion Gala is none other than Canadian singer/singwriter, 5 time Juno award winning, Chantal Kreviazuk!

Look up The Heart Truth Fashion Gala on facebook!

I can't wait! :)

I got featured!

By the people at Creative Designers.com!  So cool!

Wedding bells are a ringin'

Not for me of course, but for my brother and soon to be sister-in-law.  Who has asked me to make her wedding dress, something which scares the pants off of me, but I choose to embrace my fear and hope to everything good in the world that it works out and she dosn't hate me forever for ruining her wedding.

This is a picture of a dress from somewhere on the internet that she liked, only her wedding colours are silver gray, burnt orange (so she can have tiger lilies in her bouquet) and emerald green.

So after some talking and sketching this is what we came up with:

 A similar style to the above dress, but in her colours and with a nice train.  She has yet to see this, so here is hoping she likes it.

In the mean time, I was chosen along with my sister to be a bridesmaid, and my sister-in-law-to-be is a kind woman who let us choose the colour and style of our dresses as long as it matched the wedding colours.  My sister found some nice green/orange linin to make hers (which is a vintage vogue pattern) and I chose green and gray, because it is the colours of House Slytherin of course!

(Actually it's cause Orange does not look to hot on me.)

So here is my tentative sketch of my dress:

Which I did with markers and pen at work during a rare quiet period this week. I wanted it to be a dress I could/would wear after the wedding to stuff.  It'd be the green, with inserted gray panels with a black lace overlay (if she says that is okay).   It am tying to play off the style of my sisters dress which would be a 50's full skirt dress and the medieval style of the brides dress.  I think I pulled it off.

“The Force is strong with this one.”

 My clients photo of him in the finished Jedi costume, complete with light saber.

Some of my clients photos of her in the Sailor Moon costume from Halloween 2012!

She is the one named Sailor Moon!

Sorry for the delay! I was too busy finishing up this costume to post more progress shots, but here they are now!

So this is the collar sewn together , waiting for the sailor stripes to be put on.

Which I  chose to make in a 3mm wide white satin ribbon, which I attached with Steam-A-Seam (God I love this stuff!). It is neater then sewing it down and doesn't distort the shape of the ribbon (which sewing sometimes can).

This is the Manga version of the costume, which unlike the Anime (which had 2 stripes) has 3 stripes.

 And here is the collar, pinned to the costume.  It  will be held on with snaps, since my client wants to do Sailor Neptune later and this way, can re-use the base costume bodysuit.

 The next step was to make the bows. I draped them out of two rectangular strips of muslin first, bound in the center by a smaller strap to hold them closed.  This way I could adjust the size of the bow and length of the tails and the make paper patterns later.

The back bow is slightly bigger then the front ones and has longer tails.

I  made paper patterns of all three pieces for both bows and cut out the fabric. I then used the stiffest iron-on interfacing I had to stiffen the fabric (it is just 100% cotton) so they wouldn't flop.  The tails are made from a slightly less stiff interfacing so they would drape better.

They are held on with velcro to the suit, again so the client can switch them out for Sailor Neptune's bows later.

The last step was to finish the skirt, attach the collar and sew the cuffs to the gloves.  Which I did today!

Just needs a quick ironing and off it can go to my client tonight!  Huzzah!

Never running from a real fight.

Today was the day for sleeves and collars. I traced out a quick version of the sailor collar on muslin to check to see if the size was okay.

It ended up being 9cm (total) to short in front and the sides and bottom needed trimming.  So I added 4.5cm extra to the point the wraps around the front and then took 3cm off the sides (and tapered up to make a straight edge) and probably about the same amount off the bottom too.

Which made it look more like this in the end.

Next up was the sleeve.

Which ended up looking like this. 

 The flat one is the sleeve before gathering the top (which I had to do to make room for the shoulder to move around) and stuffing it for the poofy look of the Sailor Senshi uniform sleeves.  They are made from white spandex, and sewn with a small zig zag stitch, which will not snap and break in a stretch fabric like a straight stitch.  They are stuffed with regular stuffing for making stuffed animals.

And here are the sleeves pinned in place to the bodysuit.  They have since been sewn to the body suit and are much less lumpy looking :D

Next up: Sewing together the sailor collar, attaching ribbon for the sailor stripes, cutting out the skirt and stuffing the waist band and then finally making some GIANT bows (which is gonna involve some stiff interfacing).

Winning love by daylight.

The Jedi is done!  I hemmed it today and it can go to its rightful owner when I next see him (which will be Tuesday).

I spent most of a lovely sunny October day working on both costumes while The Avengers played to keep me company.

I have the sleeve and collar patterns drafted for the Sailor Moon costume. Which was fun since I didn't have an actual pattern for the body of the costume.  So what I did do was pin the body suit down and trace the shape of the body suit to get a front and back pattern.

Which ended up looking like this:

This is the front of the pattern, which I cut off below the bust since all I needed was the neck and armholes for my patterns.

And here is the back:

Then it was time to draft the sailor collar and sleeve. Which generally starts out looking like this:

A page or sometimes 2-3 pages of math equations to get the right sizes.  Never thought when I went into Art school I'd be doing so much math, but Surprise! You  have to to get a pattern.

One half of my sailor collar pattern.

And a shot of the sleeve in the process of being drafted.

Which eventually looked like this:

The sleeve was then shortened and split up into five parts to get a spread for the shoulder and shaping for the ribbed sleeve cap the sailor moon uniform has.  The lines on it are dividing it into 3 equal parts for stuffing later.

Aside from sleeves and collars I also made the armbands and choker today.

This is the armband before I sewed it and stuffed it full of stuffing!  The cuffs will later be sewn onto some pre-made while elbow length gloves.

And this is the choker. The Gem is a maybe. I have a larger one too, but I want my clients opinion before I tack anything down.  The choker  will close with Velcro.

And that is it for now!  Tomorrow I will cut out and try the collar and if all is good, cut into real fabric and get down to business!

Just wanted to apologize for the sporadic posting I've been doing.  I'm sure I've mentioned before that at first I was at school for costume design (and thus had a TON more time for making costumes) but then graduated.

I  have a job  in a fabric store, which, since graduating from school has gone from part time 2-3 days a week to a near full time schedule of 4-6 days a week.  This leaves me only a day or two a week to actually work on costumes and update my blog, Facebook page and website.

Please bear with me and keep watching is all I am trying to say. :)

Now back to watching The Avengers and making a Sailor Moon costume.

Adventure Time

My Best friend and fellow crafty person was up today for a visit from Saint John.  We decided to get crafty and follow a tutorial online for making custom comic book shoes.. Now these are far from done, but its a start.

It starts with a pair of shoes and an old comic book.  Now being the nerd that I am, I was not about to sacrifice any of MY comic books, but my friend still had a Free Comic Book day Adventure Time comic, and since I love Adventure Time, that suited me fine.

So here are the toes. Finn and Lady Rainacorn (and Princess Bubblegum).

The outside of the Lady Rainacorn shoe. Featureing a chimney cleaning gone wrong, BMO the computer, Marceline, the vampire queen and princess bubblegum.

And the inside of The Lady Rainacorn shoe. Mostly Finn, Jake, Bubblegum and BMO.

And the inside if the Finn Shoe, with Finn and Jake, the Adventure Time logo and BMO (again)

And the other side.  Which has mostly Finn and Jake, and a special guest appearace from LSP (Lumpy Space Princess) who is my fave.

I still have to add a few extra layers of sealer, and some ribbon to hide my rough edges, but I thought I would share our adventure in making comic book shoes.  My Friend by the way, made Sailor Moon shoes. :)

The tutorial we used can be found here.

Fighting evil by moonlight

The era of the Jedi is coming to a close, now begins the era of the Moon.

I'll be making this for my client for Hallo'ween.  The base will be a dancers body suit and I'll be making the skirt, sailor collar, glove bands, choker and the bows.  I'm making it all detachable, since the client would like to do other Sailor Moon Characters in the future.

Here are the fabrics (and some ribbon for the collar stripes).  The white is spandex. It's for making sleeves and extensions to the collar and crotch piece. The red is 100% cotton, I'll be stiffening it with interfacing or steam-s-seam to get the bows to stand up and not flop, and the red is a twill which will drape nicely and not be see through.

This is the body suit which I have already modded.  I raised the back collar up so the sailor collar would not hang low and wide, and unpicked the crotch seam (dancers suits are ment to go on and off through the neckline, but I like people to not have to take their entire costume off to use say, the washroom. It's all about comfort and practicality).

The back neck extension piece pattern, which I made by laying down the body suit flat, tracing the neckline and then moving up the top so it would work better.

 Once attached it will be hidden by the sailor collar, but you can see how low the original neckline would have been, had I not moved it up.

This is the extension to the crotch piece. It will be closed with snaps.

The attached snap extension.

This will eventually be the cuffs for the gloves.  It is a rectangle that will have stuffed areas to give the poofy cuff effect.

 Which will look like this:  which is a glove I did years ago for a Dark Mercury costume (from live action Sailor Moon) when I was still in my first year of Fashion.  It's crude by my standards now, but it shows the desired effect, and I won an award for it, so it couldn't have been that bad!

 And finally, The pattern for the choker. which is 2.5 cm wide by the width of my clients neck + an extention for a closure flap (velcro).

And for the skirt. The skirt is going to be a full circle skirt, which will have the volume needed to get the Sailor skirt look.  Some people do this with pleats, but I prefer not to myself.  This is half the skirt (obviously) and it will be closed with a zipper at the back.