Caturday Post: Tamerlane The World-Conquering Sword Will Have This Chair

The Mad Person-Who-Stitches: Final Fantasy X Lulu's Skirt of Belts

The wiki article mentioned that Lulu's illustrator likes to give his animators a challenge.  Hence her skirt of belts:

If my Lulu were a ground dancer I could just make and weave the belts as shown.  (Which would be fun, and maybe I'll make a ground-only version another time.)  For an aerialist, that presents too much danger of snagging on the equipment, as well as being rather heavier than one wants to wear while doing inversions, not to mention the near impossibility of making such a loosely woven net of belts hold its shape under varying gravitational pulls. 

So I need to create the illusion of belts, but on an unbroken panel of fabric, and without buckles to snag on anything.  The skirt will be floofy pants, with the belts occupying the two center front panels.

Invisible nude mesh is my choice for the panel backing.  It's tough for its weight, but still very lightweight fabric, making me somewhat hesitant about using fake leather for the belts.  But my closest fabric stores didn't have any fake leather in the colors I needed, so I was saved the choice.  Instead, I did find a box of various raincoat fabrics.  I cut long strips, arranged them to my satisfaction, pinned the heck out of them, sewed them all down (tedious, very tedious!), and used grey dimensional fabric paint to draw "buckles" on them.  I have pictures of the first two steps:

first draft, before the strips were ironed

pinned and almost ready to stitch; just have to cut the strips that cross both panels.  That's my grandfather's old extra large lap desk underneath, being drafted into sewing-room duty. 

 More pictures when I start assembling the various parts of this costume. 

Say Yes to the Dress: I Don't Actually Know, I Just Want it Edition

This was part of Biltmore House's Fashionable Romance exhibit.  I don't recall what film it is from, but I adore it.  The lighting is a little odd, so the inset is actually grey, and the sparkles are more sparkly, but you get the idea.

Caturday Post: Scaramouche Arises From a Nap

The Mad Person-Who-Stitches: Final Fantasy X Lulu's Trim

Gentle readers, I have once again decided that my aerial partners and I shall dance as characters whose costumes, while representing an apex of sartorial splendor, are vastly unsuited to anything but virtual reality.  My job is to render these clothes to a reality suitable for aerialists.

In this post I deal with the lacey trim on Lulu's sleeves and train:

Ideally, I would do this with lace or embroidered iron-on applique.  However, this lace pattern is not, to my knowledge, made commercially, and I do not make my own lace.  I prioritized the pattern over the material, and chose to do the trim with fabric paint.  I used Tulip dimensional slick paint: it does dry flexible, as advertised, and it won't be entirely flat, but I can easily control the thickness.  

Step 1: make the pattern with pencil and paper.  Take the time to make sure you are happy with what you have, because after this it will be all tracing what you've made.  Lulu's trim is all two-part mirror image, so only draw half and then flip and trace the reverse for the second half.

Step 2: ink your pattern.  Sharpie markers are best, as you want the pattern to bleed through the paper for purposes of flipping and tracing the mirror image, as mentioned above. 

 Step 3: use temporary fabric marker to trace the pattern onto your fabric.  This is dark fabric, so I had to improvise a crude lightbox to be able to see the pattern through the fabric.

 

Step 4: fabric paint!  Get a bottle with a narrow tip to avoid the aggravation of brushes.  Make sure you have waxed paper or waxed cardboard under your fabric.  Work from top to bottom and from your non-dominant hand side to your dominant hand side to lower your chance of smudging your work.  Below is one sleeve:

I got both sleeves done today.  It took about 1.5 hours per sleeve, not counting making the patterns, which I did yesterday.  The (divided by necessity) skirt portions still needed some finishing before I applied paint; I'll do those later this week.  

 While scowling at my various image files of Lulu and sketching my patterns, I wondered about the possibility of writing a program that could take an image file of something like Lulu's trim, folded and curved as it appears on clothing, and apply transformations to turn the relevant portions into a linear strip with the correct proportions, magically increase resolution from frequently blurry screenshots, and print out a pattern.  My guess is that the first part is possible.  The second part, not so much: obtaining good resolution stills of the parts of the costume I need to study has always been a problem for my cosplay work.  

Say Yes to the Dress: Murderous Queen

This is the dress worn by Gertrude in the 1996 film adaptation of Hamlet. It is currently on display in the Biltmore House, as part of the Fashionable Romance exhibit. If I were going to aid and abet in the murder of my husband, combine the funeral with the wedding of my new husband, and then try to get my son assassinated, I would absolutely wear this.

What do you think, dear readers?  Is this just the thing for a queen needing to change husbands, or is it too purple?

Caturday Post: Tamerlane Levels Up

the top level of the new cat tower