Pirate Wedding - Skirt 4 BUSTLING

Man, there's a lot of stuff to do in the last few weekends before a wedding. Fortunately, that gave me time to mull over my overskirt and toss around bustling ideas in my head. It's almost done! I've worked it out!

What I finally ended up doing was:

1) sewed twill tape inside of the waist to stabilize the fabric.
2) sort of folded the fabric up to shorten it and laid it flat against the waist and sewed it in place.
3) pinched enough fabric on both sides to draw it to the back as a sort of bustle.
4) put a safety pin in place where I will sew ribbons to tie the bustle back.

I think it'll look good! It's longer in the front than I wanted, but I actually don't think it will look disproportionate, especially when I have the corset on. You can see the hem of my petticoat showing underneath the underskirt. I will need to buy some lace to trim it with so it doesn't look so weird.

I was also fretting about the small panel of goldish fabric on the overskirt, and how it looks so different from the more ivory colored fabric. And then I realized... JUST TURN THE SKIRT AROUND SO THAT THE GOLD FABRIC IS IN THE BACK AND COVERED BY THE BUSTLE.

So I just need to sew on the bustle ribbons and then a couple of hooks on the waistband. I should really learn how to install a zipper but my progress on this project has slowed down so much that I can't be bothered with that right now. The opening is on the side but tying back the sides into a bustle hides the opening, which is convenient. I also should put a proper waistband on, but the twill tape will do for now, and the corset will hide the unfinished edges.

I've finished my corset completely... The last part was putting the grommets in for the straps, which I have done!

Last thing to do is make the chemise. Which I really hope I can get done because after my wedding next weekend I will only have two weeks until my sister's wedding, and one of those weeks will be my honeymoon project of putting in a 144-sq ft garden in my backyard with my soon-to-be husband. So likely no sewing that week.

WAIT I just checked the calendar and I will have THREE weeks until my sister's wedding. No problem!

Ways to Bustle a Skirt

So I'm still hemming and hawing about my overskirt. It makes me nervous and anxious. I'm sure I'm thinking it's way more complicated than it actually is. This morning, I remembered that Google is my friend and decided to explore ways to bustle a skirt.

This etsy vendor makes circle skirt bustles and uses drawstring ribbons inside the skirt to hike it up. She also has one with a strap from the waist that can be used to draw up the fabric. Wow, $95 for that? Maybe I should set up an etsy store.

 This one uses ribbon ties on the OUTside of the skirt.

This tutorial uses drawstrings on the sides and pleated & pinned folds in the back.

That looks pretty darn good.

This one uses drapery tape. It looks a little too complicated, but starts out looking simple. But I like the idea of using drapery tape--I bet there's a simpler way to use it for bustling.

This isn't a tutorial on how to bustle a pre-existing skirt, it's how to create a bustle skirt from scratch, but it's so cool I have to include it here.

Here's a page showing all the different ways you can bustle a skirt. Very interesting! The Austrian bustle sounds like it might work for my skirt and looks like this.

That's all I have time for right now, but I have lots of food for thought.

Pirate Wedding - Skirt 4

I don't know what I'm doing. I thought it would be so easy to just cut a hole in the round tablecloth, stick a zipper and a waistband on it, and there you go.

I cut the hole out. That was easy. But when I tried it on I discovered that the tablecloth covers all my lovely fringed layers. I tried bunching it up, but it was too bunchy. The diameter is too big. I experimented many ways of bunching, folding, etc. and all the messing around with the fabric caused the hole to stretch, so now it's like 5 inches bigger than my waist line. Which made it harder to try it on and drape accurately because I was having to overlap the cut edges where the zipper would be, but then anything I did to make it drape would be skewed when I sewed the final thing.

Well, I finally figured out a way to bunch it while maintaining the waist line that I want it to be (at least I think... I thought I was doing an accurate waist line on the underskirt and it's about 3 inches bigger than it should be, so now I need to make some sort of a yoke to attach it to and just drawstring it. How do these things happen?).

I bunched it and pinned it with giant quilting safety pins. I feel like that's a step in the right direction. However, I feel like it's proportionally wrong. Like, it seems unbalanced in proportion to everything else. Maybe it's the angle of the camera/mirror? I don't know.

 None of this would be a problem if I didn't have the plain cotton of the bedskirt showing above my fringed embellishments.

I thought about ripping out all the seams holding the gathers together on the underskirt and just basically cutting and pasting my overskirt material onto it and then gathering it up again. But then I remembered that the underskirt has 4 yards of fabric. And there's no way I'm getting 4 yards of fabric out of the overskirt!

I think I just need to sew some twill tape to hold the waistband for now, and then sew some ties to bustle it up in the front. And then hopefully the angels will sing and the overskirt will be done.

Pirate Wedding - Skirt 3 - DONE

When I tackled the valance pinning again, I realized if I pinned the end of the valance so that it was flush with the one it was supposed to join up with...

And then folded back the excess so that it was even all along...

And then sewed down along the overlap, pulled the flap back and trimmed the overlap...

 and then rejoined the flap with the piece it was supposed to meet with... That it would WORK!!

Here it is!! Now I have to get working on the overskirt, which should be pretty easy. Cut a hole in the middle of the round tablecloth, stick a hook and eye in it to fasten, then it's ready to wear.

I didn't have it on the waistband yet when the pictures were taken, so it has slipped some in the back. It really does look better than this.YOU'LL SEE WHEN IT'S ALL PUT TOGETHER!!!!!


Look how lovely the overskirt fabric (i.e. round tablecloth) looks with the underskirt. I LOVE red and brown together!

Pirate Wedding - Skirt 3 - FFFFFFFUUUUUUU

I sewed the open ends of my skirt together, stopping about 10" from the top so I could slip into it easily. Then I pinned the new valance so it adjoins its twin perfectly.

Pinned it along the length of the skirt, certain that it was straight all along. Well, it was straight.

But it wasn't even with the top edge of the skirt. It didn't meet up with its friend at the end like it should have. I DIDN'T MEASURE IT ALONG THE WAY LIKE I ALWAYS DO. It started out 11.75" from the top of the skirt, and ended up 14"-ish from the top.

My project for the evening is to pick out two rows of tiny stitches by the light of the fireplace, so I will feel like a pioneer lady. Of course I'm being nit-picky about my sewing of this costume after seeing the horrible things being sold in the thrift store a couple of weeks ago. So I sewed the fabric on with a 3/8" seam, and then went back over it and sewed the very top edge of that fabric down right along the edge. It looks awesome. Not so fun for seam ripping.

Okay, it didn't take me THAT long to rip the seams. After I did that, I pinned the valance to the skirt again, carefully measuring from the top every few inches. When I got to the end... still a lot of "underlap". Damn it.

But the good thing is? I didn't get ragey. Yay!

Pirate Wedding - Skirt 3 - I GOT LUCKY

Update on Skirt 3. The valance I found to sew onto the skirt to overlap the decorative part of the bed skirt wasn't enough to cover the whole skirt. I knew it wouldn't be, the skirt has like 3 1/2 yards of fabric. The valance is about 60" long. But I thought that once the skirt was gathered it would be enough to cover the front, and then my overskirt would hide the back. Nope.

So I got another valance from the thrift store ($1.99). This one is 55" long. It was kind of a cream color, but the same kind of undulating hem trimmed with fringe. I thought for sure this would do the trick. Nope. There is still a yard of fabric that needs to be covered.

I could take out the extra yard of fabric, but I really wanted the full skirts. I think a lot of costumes look sort of meh if the skirts aren't full enough. Or, I could search the Internet to find a duplicate of one of the two valances already attached to the skirt. I tried, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Or I could try another thrift store and see if I could find another valance that was ivory or cream and trimmed with fringe, sew that on, and hope it didn't look too stupid to have three different fabrics overlying the skirt. Two, okay. Three, probably not.

So I trudged back to Goodwill hoping I could find another similar valance. I looked twice through their racks. Then I looked one... more... time, and a package on the top of the racks caught my eye. It was a valance. Cream colored. Trimmed with fringe. For $3.99. Good enough.

I couldn't believe it when I compared it to the valances already on the skirt. It is the PERFECT MATCH of one of them. That NEVER HAPPENS!!!!

I'm going to go finish my skirt now!

Pirate Wedding - Skirt 3 - Underskirt

For my pirate skirt 2.0, I went to the Goodwill just down the street. I found a lovely brown bedskirt ($8.99) with "microstripes" of red & gold shades. The fabric content is a silk/polyester blend. Score!

I also found a fringed ivory valance ($2.99) that I thought I could attach to the bedskirt above the brown silk fabric to look sort of like an overskirt. Then I found a  cotton/polyester blend red & gold brocade round tablecloth ($4.99 or $6.99, can't remember) that I think might make the perfect overskirt, because it will have the coverage without the bulk and there are instructions online for how to turn a round tablecloth into a circle skirt.

The tablecloth matches the bedskirt so nicely!

Right now, I want to say something about using household linens as costuming materials.

I used to work as a living history interpreter. I did it for less than a year, it was all new and exciting to me to get paid to play dress up and pretend to be a pioneer. The lady that made my costumes is enormously talented. I was very fortunate that I didn't have to pay for any of it. My employer paid for my costuming expenses.

Here in Texas, all the old Indian Wars forts have living history days throughout the year. Lots of people attend--volunteer interpreters, paid staff, and regular people that just like to dress up in old-timey clothing and walk around feeling special and different once in a while. Kind of like Renaissance festivals. Some costumes are amazing, some are awful.

The big names in historical costuming would laugh/sneer at the costumes that were obviously awful. I was one of them. I remember hearing one of the historical gurus say something about how she read on a blog or forum of some sort that someone was giving instructions about how to make a skirt out of sheets or something like that. And you could hear the major CONCERN in her voice, like "this has to be stopped!"

There was one lady who they singled out. Her outfit was, frankly, the worst thing I've ever seen. I've seen Halloween costumes at Walmart that looked better. Her skirt wasn't full enough to accommodate her hoopskirt, it was made out of cheap "faux" satin fabric like what cheap negligees are made of. Very overweight, and no corset. And one of the costuming gurus told her he wanted to take her picture and I don't remember what he said, but she immediately responded, "What, so you can make fun of me?" And he said no, something I can't remember, but she let him take her picture. And he was taking her picture precisely so that he could use her as an example of how NOT to do living history clothing. He was also taking her picture to make fun of her.

Okay, as I've said. I laughed along with the rest of them. It's easy to do that when you're not having to pay for your own gorgeously, authentically recreated historical clothing.

That job didn't last long, I moved onto other things, and 7 years later found myself buying a lovely medieval-style dress to wear to a Renaissance festival with my sister. I loved the experience so much that I decided to start making my own costumes, even though I have zero experience in sewing clothes, because there was so much stuff that I wanted and I couldn't afford to buy all of it. And that is when it hit home.

Fabric is expensive! It's so much cheaper to get your costuming materials from thrift store bedding and household linens than by the yard at the fabric store.

Now, granted, there were a lot of bad costumes I saw at the ren fest. Stuff that would have looked nice if... (...if they hadn't used broadcloth, if the skirt had been fuller, if the skirt had had a petticoat, if the bodice had been in proportion with the person's figure). The point of it all was that people were having FUN.

I have high standards and try to accommodate them the best I can within my means. I can't afford silk or cotton damask, brocades, or velvet by the yard. But I have a creative mind and a good eye, and so I figure that if I find something at the thrift store linens section that looks more "period appropriate" than poly-cotton broadcloth, I should be able to make a decent looking costume out of it. Which is so incredibly wonderful for someone like me who is on a limited budget and whose latest obsession is making costumes.

In the end, FABRIC IS FABRIC. Does it really matter whether it's been used to make curtains or a kirtle?

So... Eff you, snobby, elitist living history interpreters. Including my past self. Time to have fun. Time to be creative. Time to say, "You know what? I've always wanted to go to the ren fest in costume. I'm going to do it!" And do what it takes to get you there. Who cares what anyone else thinks.

Pirate Wedding - Skirt 1

Okay! Yesterday I made the first skirt of the pirate wedding costume ensemble using the homespun-like dark blue-grey sari fabric. It looks fabulous with my Elizabethan corset, which is NOT the corset I'm wearing to the wedding, but I wanted my outfit to be wearable to Renaissance fests too, so I'm happy with it.

I'm actually wearing a Victorian corset underneath the Elizabethan bodice, haha. You can see it poking out of the top. The petticoat + blue-grey skirt are so BULKY, and I still have another skirt to go on top, so I felt like I needed an under-corset over my over-corset! I am bullet-proof wearing this outfit. I love the Elizabethan bodice so much, but I think in this case it would be better on top, rather than a foundation garment. I want to see if the lady who made it will make it in the gold tapestry fabric I bought.

The skirt fabric is actually more like a gauze. It's very sheer. I'm wearing it over my 18th-century style petticoat and you can tell. And the fabric sticks to itself making it difficult to work with. I wanted to attach my bed skirt ruffle but if I attached it at the hem of the skirt, the skirt would be too long. As it was, the skirt was just the right length. The ruffle is about 15" deep, but I couldn't just iron & hem the skirt fabric across at 15" because it stuck to itself. And I couldn't attach the ruffle to it 15" above the hem for the same reason. It looks so good with the ruffle attached (just pinned as a mockup), I would hate to not be able to use it.

I haven't attached the waistband to the blue-grey skirt yet. It's too big for my waist, because I'm not experienced enough to figure out how deep the pleats should be for a fitted waistband. I tried to gather it using the sewing machine with my stitch setting on 5 and using a very strong thread, but... No. It is actually much easier to do knife pleats than to gather that much fabric along a thread. I made it like the petticoat, but I just sewed one seam up the center back and left an opening to get into. If I fold both sides over each other, it gives a bustle effect. I think I'll need to use hooks & eyes on the waistband for it.

Pirate Wedding

Yay! My sister is getting married at the end of April and she is having a pirate wedding! Needless to say, my parents aren't thrilled but I am because I love dressing up.

I looked at several costume blogs for inspiration. My sister's wedding colors are royal blue and maroon/burgundy (I don't know if there's a difference, to be honest). So I went to the Saver's thrift store and headed straight for their bedding department, because curtains & bedding are way cheaper than buying new fabric by the yard. And the hems are finished on most things, so that helps make things easy.

I think I'm going to have a layered skirt. It could go several ways.

Option 1: This will be completely fabulous
Dark blue-grey homespun-looking cotton underskirt made from a sari ($4.99)
With maroon, blue, and tan/gold ruffle on the bottom made from a Ralph Lauren king-size bed skirt ($3.99)
Maroon quilted fabric overskirt made from interior decorating fabric ($4.99)
Tasseled gold brocade (I think?) bustle-like thingy from a window valance ($4.99)
Shiny, silky gold I-don't-know-what-this-fabric-is-called chemise from a curtain ($5.99)
Bodice fabric/maker TBD

Option 2: Gorgeous & elegant
Light-blue nubby fabric underskirt from a bolt labeled 100% cotton royal duck which I think is wrong ($9.99)
Maroon quilted fabric overskirt made from interior decorating fabric ($4.99)
Rose-colored floral-embroidered tapestry bodice made from upholstery fabric sewn as a curtain ($6.99)
Shiny, silky gold I-don't-know-what-this-fabric-is-called chemise from a curtain ($5.99)

Why is my camera such a POS? Using the flash in low-lighting or as filler actually makes the picture DARKER. I can take three pictures in a row, not changing anything, and they will all turn out different. You can't tell how pretty the bodice material is from the first picture, so I took a close-up.

Looking at the picture, the blue doesn't go with the bodice fabric. But I could always have a bodice made with a different fabric. But I do love how the embroidered fabric looks with the maroon & gold fabrics.

I'm going to go with Option 1 for now.