Pirate Wedding - MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!!!

So my sister's pirate wedding was last weekend. My costume looked SO GLORIOUSLY FABULOUS, everyone kept asking me if I'd had it commissioned and I proudly said "I MADE THIS LOOK WHAT I MADE I TAUGHT MYSELF ON THE INTERNET!!!"

Me and my sis... I hadn't put on my belt and dagger and bracelets yet:

Me and the best man:

Back of the costume. See? You can't even tell the zipper is off-center:

Close-up of the dagger from when I tried on my whole costume for the first time:

I had to buy the chemise because I was just too burned out to make my own. I think it looks better than the gold one would have anyway.

I was really afraid that my costume would be too plain compared to everyone else's, but it was hands-down the best one there besides my sister's gorgeous costume.

I am so proud of myself!

Pirate Wedding - Skirt 4 DONE

I can't believe it's been more than a month since my last update! Actually, I can. I got married, had a weekend off, went to my sister's bachelorette party in Galveston the next weekend, continued working like mad on my costume, and then went to her actual wedding last weekend. It was glorious!

So the bustling with ribbons actually didn't work out very well in practice. I finally did what one of my coworkers suggested, and cut the waist hole bigger so that the front would be the length I needed it, and then I knife-pleated the back to the waist tape, sewed in a zipper and some hooks, and was done.

Step 1: Cut the hole bigger. I had to cut it like an oval so that I could keep the length in the back.

Step 2: Pleat it onto waist tape.

Step 3: Sew double-fold bias tape onto waistband to keep fabric from fraying. Install zipper. Try on skirt and discover that even though you were SURE the center back seam was... centered, it and the zipper are now off-center by a couple of inches. Sigh. OH WELL. Try on and decide nobody will notice.

Next post, my full costume!!!

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!