Whoops!

Forgot I had a blog HAHAHA

So here! Have some pics from Dragon*Con 2012! I went as Adelaide, as always. But it's been so long since HiNaBN's updated, and I just... get tired of the same costume with nothing new to go off of. Adelaide will always be my favorite, but she's more of a closet cosplay now.

And human!Pinkie Pie from My Little Pony

...with Doubting Salmon as my Twilight Sparkle

And revamped steampunk medic

And that was D*Con 2012! Shout out to my ducklings who got engaged on their 3-year anniversary of meeting at the Con. You know who you are, lovelies ;)

Lolita Week

So this week has basically turned into a week of lolita-wearing shenanigans. This is what I wore today:

I made everything I'm wearing. The apron jumper skirt was an idea based off a Victorian Maiden design here in solid color, and here in floral prints. A couple differences: I didn't do a pleated skirt, replaced the back corset lacing with ties, and added a 3-layer bustle. Because I have an butt, which I sometimes forget, the skirt ends a little short in the back, and honestly was a little short all around, which is why you can see my petticoat peeking out. But damn, if I didn't feel awesome.

My hair accessories came from Claire's, because really, that store is fantastic. I tend to stick to less dramatic hairstyles, and I typically abstain from products and putting my hair up, since the process always takes more than a half hour and I ran out of time this morning anyway. So it's a good thing I like braids. Just a simple french braid to one side and I'm good to go. Also wore green tights and initially white maryjanes, but I don't usually wear heels and I walk around an urban campus all day, so they had to be replaced with green flats.

And surprise!

My new boots came in :)

Yellow Redeux

So the first thing I ever sewed on my own was a yellow sundress. It was a bad choice of fabrics, but my heart was set. So this past summer I remade it, this time with a liner of the same fabric to reduce see-through-ness. What came out was this:

worn with the short-sleeve lolita blouse I made here

The dress itself isn't lolita, and although it can fit a petticoat, it doesn't look very good doing so. But there's this idea of a "Casual Lolita" that I've really started to fall in love with. It's like lolita, but you don't necessarily have to dress to the nines every time you go out, which makes it a lot easier to dress in something lolita-esque pretty much every day. This is a fantastic idea to me, because I love the fashion, but more often than not I am a lazy slob who throws on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt to go to class in the mornings. This is somewhere in the middle of those two, and it's something I think I may start doing more of.

And this was my finished ensemble for the day! That black bolero is the only jacket I've gotten around to making so far, so I wore black flats to help tie it in a little. My bag never matches anything I wear, but it's so me I think it doesn't necessarily matter, especially when I go so casual with the fashion like this.

This is gonna be my lolita week, so watch out for pics of the things I made over spring break!

It might be too colorful even for me...

So I love this coat guys. The only thing that really irks me is that because the liner is sewn to the outer fabric, the coat can get stuck in odd shapes, most of which make my wide hips look even wider. If I could go back and do it over, I'd take some spray adhesive to that coat, for real. So here, have some crap shots from my bathroom mirror.

So most of those are ridiculously blurry. Oops? This is why I can't be my own photographer. It just doesn't work.

I've got 12 mismatched buttons, some of which are in shapes, unlike the coat from the movie. I'd advise using buttons that are all about the same size, so you're not like me and go from a gaping button hole for that giant yellow button to a tiny one for the flamingo right after it. It looks a little weird when the jacket's left open.

So yeah, that's my Penelope Coat :)

WANTED & what I've been up to

PERSONAL POCKET-SIZED PHOTOGRAPHER

Because I never get any pictures of me in the stuff I sew. I'll take a crap shot of the Penelope Coat when I wake up, I guess. It's better than nothing. Now, the most important news!

This last week was Spring Break for me, and I used it to sleep and sew. What did I sew, you ask?

• 2 long-sleeve blouses
• 1 apron jumper skirt (inspired by Victorian Maiden, but no pleats cos I'm lame)
• 1 short sleeve dress, which may or may not require a shirt since I accidentally the neck opening too big
• 1 long sleeve black bolero jacket

 And I recently fixed the zipper on my empire-waist lolita skirt, so really, I'm just rolling in the endorphins from being awesome right now. Got some ideas for some of this fabric I inherited from various sources that's just been sitting around, waiting for me to use it. Man, it's like I was bit by the fashion, creativity, and get-stuff-done bugs all at once.

Penelope coat, part 2

Now for the pattern.

The most important thing to do before you even choose a pattern you want to use as a base is figure out how the article of clothing in question is put together, and what it looks like from all sides. This is my schematic that I taped up on my wall next to my sewing machine so it was easily accessible and look! Some references right there as well so I don't have to pull out my laptop every time I hit a stumbling block. Lots of things got added to this as I went along and realized that some things were just not going to work or could be done so much easier another way.

I also had to realize that this coat is from a movie. Some details just don't fly in the real world. Like, I cannot have my coat that close to the ground. It will get nasty walking around in an urban downtown environment, and the hobos I walk past on my way to school would probably take it as a personal challenge to step on it as much as possible or something. And I added pockets because, hello. I need pockets. Since the lining is sewn together with the outer layer all the way around the coat (meaning no gaps), having pockets between the two layers sometimes means the fabric bunches up oddly around my already large hips, but that's easily fixed by smoothing it down.

#2 and the bottom pattern piece on the right are for the coat; the top piece on the right is for a princess seam on a dress.

My base pattern is Butterick 5425, which is the same pattern I used for my Winterfresh coat. The seams along the front are almost princess seams, but not quite. So I used a pattern for princess seams on a dress to figure out how to modify the one for my coat. I was a little off, and as I noticed with my Winterfresh coat, I had to shorten the width of the shoulder seam by about an inch and a half (on the shoulder side, not the neck), but it all came together nicely.

Now, see how in these pictures, the coat is shorter in the front and longer in the back? All that means is I have to angle the hem. And that's a matter of simple math. If I know my pattern typically ends a little below my knees, then I add 3 inches (or however many you want) to the middle back seam, and angle it up through the various pieces to the side seam, which I will give the arbitrary value of zero. And from there, I angle the cut of the pattern even more, until I get to subtracting 3 inches from the very front panel where the coat overlaps. Make sense? It seems simple, doesn't it. That is, until you mess up by mistakenly angling one of your pattern panels the wrong direction. But since it's the bottom hem, all I had to do was fix the angle and try to make it even on both sides.

I initially cut out the sleeves exactly as their pattern suggested, but added length on the bottom to form the triangular bits (I think I measured it at 5 or 6 inches on each side, I don't remember), which would give you this:

But no. No, that is not what you do at all.

You see, shirt sleeve seams originate at the very middle underneath your armpit. That means, with your arms at your sides, the seam falls along the inside of your arm, facing your body. Those triangular pirate cuff things? Supposed to be down the back of your arm. Take a gander; see if I'm wrong.

She also has that trim going down the entire length of the sleeve, and I was like "...Oh hell no." So my orange trim is only around the triangular portion. That said, I had to redo my pattern for the sleeves. This took some creative thinking, since I'm not very spatially inclined, despite evidence to the contrary. What I came up with is this (in it's mock-up fabric):

For clarification, the dip there is the armpit area, and the hill is the part that covers the outside/topmost part of your shoulder. For you anatomy folks, that hill is the most lateral portion of your shoulder, as compared to, say, your sternum. That little hook looking thing at the edge of the dip portion of the pattern is something I added for stylistic effect. Feel free, in recreation, to cut it straight and say to hell with my fancy ways.

I'd planned on using bias tape to sew the lining and outer coat together at the hems, but this would leave the two layers without any other connecting points, which means room to move around and cause trouble for me by not matching up properly, bunching oddly, etc. To solve that, some of the "decorative" bias tape lines are sewn only to the purple fabric, and some are sewn through both the purple and the lining, to keep thing in place. So the decorative lines on the purple fabric-only came first, and those are the back princess seams, the not-actually seams-that-remind-me-of-Texas-and-cowboy-shirts at the top of the back, and the lines that form boxes around the pockets (and here you will notice that I deviated from the movie coat too, once I get the finished pictures up). Then came the decorative lines through both layers, and for that I had to make sure my seams for both layers lined up, which involves a lot of time, a hangar, patience, and being willing to look like a crazy person in front of your roommate's visiting family and/or pretending you're a ghost with a sheet over your head. Those seams are the princess seams at the front and the mid-back seam. I messed up on matching up the mid-back seam, but I will live with that mistake and own it.

Then I finished with all-around hem, of which I have already told you my woes, and mismatched buttons and button holes. For future reference: don not vary greatly in button size. Because then you have different size button holes, and it looks somewhat strange when your coat's just sitting there unbuttoned with one really big button hole next to one little one.

And finished pictures to come, once I actually get someone to take pics of me. For the record, I've been wearing this coat around campus for a couple weeks now, and I get tons of compliments. And it is awesome.

Penelope Coat, part 1

Let me start off with materials.

The purple is sportswear twill, which is a heavier fabric good for coats, but not the wool blend I wanted. You just can't find wool blends in attractive colors. I knew I should've bought it when I found it over a year ago! And then the lining is a plain cotton print. I picked it because 1) I like floral patterns, and 2) it had traces of all the colors that would be present in the coat, and I also happen to think the slight green to it really emphasizes the purple. Not that a purple and orange coat necessarily needs any extra emphasizing.

The pattern I used calls for a little over 6 yards of fabric, ostensibly of each because the lining is almost the exact same as the outer layer of the coat. This will be different depending on if you get 45" or 60" bolts of fabric and will vary if you tweak patterns like I do. I got the very last of this fabric at the store, and it  barely counted as 6 yards, so I said FUCK GRAIN LINES and just cut the pieces out however they best fit, so even though I fucked up the sleeves the first time around and had to cut them out again, I still ended up with somewhere between half a yard and a yard left of the purple fabric. So in a pinch, or if you don't know what grain lines are, you can make this coat in about 5 yards of fabric.

Upon further inspection of references, this gem popped up, you know, after I'd already bought my fabrics. But you know what? I don't really like the print they used for the lining in the movie coat. I'll take my granny floral prints any day.

The bias tape I used was carrot orange, because the regular orange looked fluorescent against the purple. I want to be able to work this coat, not blind and horrify people with it. But apparently, carrot orange is not a popular selling item. I grossly underestimated how much I would need and ended up buying some from Hancock Fabrics online, and then made my own when I was about a yard short at the very end. Let me explain.

For this coat, I needed both single fold bias tape and double fold extra wide bias tape. The double fold was for the hems - i.e., all around the bottom and edges of the collar and sleeves, and it's extra wide so that it matches the size of the single fold when I lay it out flat to sew onto the seam lines. And so the single fold was for this "decorative" trim on the seam lines - i.e., the princess seams, etc. By the very end of this coat, I was missing about a yard of double fold bias tape that would go at the very middle back of the coat along the bottom hem. So I took Quilting Tape (which is like SUPER double wide bias tape) and made my own and finished it. Like a boss. So, I think, altogether, you'd need about 3 or 4 packages of the single fold bias tape, and 3 or 4 of the double fold. Keep in mind there are 4 yards to each package of single fold, and only 3 yards to each package of double fold.

Next up: how to modify your pattern, fuck it up, and then get it right. Hopefully without too much of an incident.

Penelope Coat

So my next big project is this coat:

It's from the movie Penelope, featuring Christina Ricci and James Mcavoy.

I read somewhere that the ladies in charge of costume design were told to make a coat that looked like it belonged in a fairytale first of all, because that's what Penelope is, and secondly like someone took everything they thought would look cool and put it into one coat, with crazy colors and imperfect trim and somehow it all works. These ladies finished the coat literally right before they put it on Christina Ricci's body and sent her off to start filming, praying that it would fit.

I've already started, so of course after I've got all my materials, more close-up pics show up on the web. I'm making it mostly accurate to the movie coat, but there are some things that just have to change, either because I didn't have good reference shots to begin with, or out of necessity. My lining is different, but really, whatever. Second, it may be fine for someone to run around a movie set with a floor length coat, but that's actually dangerous and infuriating in real life. Especially if you're like me and live in a downtown urban environment where you really don't want to know what you just stepped in on the street. So my coat is shorter. Some of the orange trim to the seams are different, mostly because I didn't have good refs but also because I couldn't be bothered, and the buttons are going to be different but just as mismatched as the original.

So if you're still reading this, let's see how this goes, shall we?

D*Con updated

Well, so. Four months later, here I am! I don't have an excuse. But I did get a tumblr right before finals last semester. That's... pretty self-explanatory, really. Life, where did you go?

So here's me as Adelaide at D*Con, with the obligatory Connie in Worth's coat:

I've only got one pic of my steampunk outfit, and I'm sitting down with my badge and my cellphone all hanging out in the picture. I'm kind of retarded like that.

I made a gunbelt with spots for test tubes instead of bullets! :D I messed up one part of the actual gun holster, but I was so fucking proud, I can't even. And then I was supposed to have khaki/tan shorts, but they wouldn't stay sewed together, so I borrowed a friend's orange skirt. It worked out rather well, I think.

And then there's the joint cosplay Salmon and I did: a friend's artwork of horoscopes. Salmon chose Gemini, and I chose Scorpio. The original artwork and characters belong to Lyndz, or asiaoddhours on DA.

So much blue.

Cat. I'm a kitty-cat! And I dance, dance, dance...

I made removable (zippable?) covers for my proposed floor cushions tonight. The first one turned out a little loose. It may get fixed, but I can't be bothered right now since it functions and whatnot. The second, though, is BEAUTIFUL and TIGHT, and just generally awesome. And for those of you who just can't get enough, here's a close-up of my ungodly, eye-bleeding cat fabric:

The colors are way more vibrant irl. It looks like it belongs in a circus tent, or at the very least a color blind nursery. Isn't is just lovely? :D

Lily de Mauvoisin

So: MomoCon! MomoCon is a free convention in ATL, GA on GA Tech campus, so. Needless to say, it is not very far away, and this was my third year in a row. All my lovely Hannafags from Dragon*Con this past year, and LOTS of other people besides came, all dressed as HiNaBN characters. BUT THAT IS FOR ANOTHER POST.

The 4 D*Con-ers (myself included) decided we'd go have a picnic in Oakland Cemetery the Friday before MomoCon. Two other people came along with one of them (mostly I think because she couldn't get rid of them), but we still had lots of fun. Since it's a con, and we never actually need any excuse to dress up (but there's one anyway), we decided to swap original characters. I... do not have any. The two girls who don't live in GA swapped characters, and Salmon went as her character Adam. I thought it was lame that I couldn't think of what to do, but then I remembered this little gem that Salmon commissioned for herself from Lyndsey on dA:

 Her name is Lily de Mauvoisin, and she was Adam's first wife (feel free to hit me and correct me if I'm wrong, Salmon). That dress is in NO WAY historically accurate, but I do have a hoop skirt and I'd just ordered me some fancy white lace-up boots, so I thought, What the hell, why not? So! I snuck around LIKE A GREAT BIG SNEEKYPANTS to make sure I could actually pull this off (and really, that was silly, because I can always pull anything and everything off if I try), and I had the whole skirt portion done minus the lacing in the back by the time spring break was over.

Now, I used McCall's 6097 for that skirt, with some ornamentation on the front contrast portion, and I made it unnecessarily complicated by trying to make it look like it had layers to the skirts without it actually having anyway, when no one notices these details but me. Then, I was going to go with the top in the pattern, but I felt the bodice in the commission art would better translate to a buttoned front, based on how the shirt splits in the front (although now, looking at it, I could probably get away with saying the bodice just comes to a point). So I went back to my standard lolita pattern, drew the lines in from the contrast portion of the bodice pattern from M6097, but kept the back of the bodice the same, minus the lacing, and somehow managed to finagle the top out. The sleeves... well, let's just say the sleeves had no pattern, and are really just giant circles with a lot of elastic bunching it together. I was so afraid they weren't going to be long enough, and I had no more time or money for more fabric. BUT! It somehow managed to all work out beautifully in the end.

So I added in my mother's blonde wig (which I didn't realize had glitter in it until we got to the MARTA station and Salmon was like, "WHY ARE YOU GLITTERING ON ME? WE ARE NOT THOSE SORT OF VAMPIRES."), and I ordered the feather fascinator/hair piece from someone who's work I really trust on Etsy. I made the bow on the front of the bodice with double wide ribbon tape stuff (idk, I got it from my mother's bag of tricks), and the hair bows on alligator clips that went on my shoes. I also decided the night before, somewhere around midnight, that I wanted a plain petticoat to go under the hoop skirt and over my knee-length bloomers (which are not very opaque at all, and btw, totally made those for this dress too), aaaand I ran out of white thread just as I started to sew it together. And then I ran out of the light purple I had been using for the rest of the dress and had to use yellow. And then I gave up with the waistband portion, and it looks TERRIBLE, but you don't ever see it anyway :P

Salmon has affectionately captioned this photo "Huge...tracks of land!"

Lily and Adam (me and Salmon): a spat between partners that has been going on for centuries (I'm totally trying my hardest not to crack up laughing there)

Sitting in hoop skirts is hard :( Here you can see my extra petticoat, and my boots

My boots :)

And there you have it. You wouldn't recognize either of us walking down the street based on these pictures, since we are that good at disguising ourselves (or at least Salmon is), so I'm not apologizing for giving away my non-existent secret identity with a mass overdose of pic-spamming.

Christmasssss!

So, for Christmas, my friend made me this Adelaide plushie! Oh god, you guys just don't even know. She even painted the box. I felt so lame in comparison.

My gift to her was this:

Conbat backpack! Unfortunately, this is the only picture I have. I keep asking her to take some for me. ALAS, poor Conbat. I knew him well /sob

Anyway, both characters are from Hanna is Not A Boy's Name, which is an amazing webcomic and you should go read it now. Like, seriously. Go.

Christmas Dress

So for Christmas, I wanted a red dress. Not just for Christmas, but that was my deadline. And what dress did I want? This one:

 You may have seen it before. It's been on my list for a while now. Anyway, I used the same pattern I usually do for my lolita dresses (Butterick 6352), plus the bib and sleeves portions of the Simplicity Threads pattern 3684. I started out by cutting out the panels for the dress.

The fabric I used was just some regular old cotton, 45". This pattern, if you do it right, can be situated with two of the panels on each long, flat side of the fabric. I cut away from the waist to the bottom in a triangle shape for the flare that lolita skirts tend to have. As I've mentioned before, this old pattern is heavily modified, and not all of it is correct. I've got it cut right where I'd want my skirt to fall: about my knees. But because I'm adding two layer of ruffle, I measure how tall I want my ruffles to be, and I cut that off of the bottom.

I do, of course, make sure I cut in a rounded edge, since I forgot to do so when I initially cut out the pattern. Next I cut out the strips that will later become ruffles. When using my 45" fabric, I take my tape measure and mark in chalk three more or less even spaces, like so:

Since, folded in half, the width of this fabric is about 22", I usually mark just a little larger than the 7" and 14" points. I set these aside for later. And then I make the bib! Using Simplicity Threads 3684 bib portion of the pattern, I cut out a white bib and use white double-fold bias tape to make the horizontal line on both the front and back portions, then add ribbon and attach the front bib to the front of the dress (which is already sewn together at this point), and the back portions plus the zipper to the back of the dress.

And then I attempt to add the collar and sew the sides together so that I can try it on. It is at this point I now realize I made my first mistake: I did not take out any fabric from the back neckline of the dress to make room for the back portion of the bib. This royally screwed up the collar, so I improvised by taking in triangles at the side seams. Otherwise, it fits alright.

In the Threads pattern, there is a short, puffy sleeve and a long, button up sleeve. I took the long one, slimmed it down a little (I wasn't originally planning on making it button up - all of that would be fake), and figured out where the short sleeve one would have to be in order to make a full sleeve. So I made the puff sleeves, then attached the longer arm portion of the sleeve, and then attached that to the dress at the armholes.

Then, you add the ruffle. It's a long and tedious process, ruffling that much fabric, but it can be done! SO I attached it to the bottom, and then attached a second layer above it.

And this is what you end up with! But wait, there's more! I went out and got some button for the bib, and then made a bow out of the leftover fabric using this old pattern I received that was initially intended for hair bows, but used it anyway.

I know you can't tell here, but it's on a giant safety pin, because I couldn't find anything else before I wanted to wear it.
Aaaaand that's all there is to it.