Atlanta by Night: The Scale Dress (Fabric)

The other day Vic and I were shopping for fabric so that I can make him a red cassock for AbN.  I didn't really have the money to get the fabric for my scale dress but I figured that since we were there I might as well take a look up and down the aisles to at least get an idea of what I might be able to use to create the look I wanted for the dress.  Little did I know that I was about to encounter my soul-mate of fabrics.  I had seen a couple of gold silks that were lovely but as I rounded the corner of the third or fourth row I came face to face with the most glorious fabric I could ever imagine.  It was perfect.  Gold and bronze and snake-scaled.  I was in love.  I knew that my AbN dress had to be made from this fabric and there was no way it could be any different.  So I looked at the price (30% off of 12.99/yd) and began to think of the quickest way to get this amazing fabric in my life.  Vic offered to split half the cost with me as part of my birthday present and I was confident that I could come up with the other half with no problem.  Success...sort of. 

Well...

Friday I came home to a birthday surprise.  5 yards of the very same fabric I coveted.  Best. birthday. present. EVAR!

How amazing is this fabric!!!!

Four exclamation points.  That's how amazing.

Atlanta by Night: The Scale Dress

So originally I had not planned to make anything new for Atlanta by Night.  Partly because I hadn't really been inspired, partly because of saving money and partly because I've made so many wonderful things that I want to wear again.

Well, lovely people, as you can imagine I wouldn't be writing this post if I hadn't changed my mind.  The dress that I will be making will be inspired by one of the gowns worn by Dame Vaako in The Chronicles of Riddick.  It's all Vic's fault.  Apparently it was on AMC today and he told me that Anat needed her gold dress.  I looked up pictures and immediately concluded that he was right.

Damnit.

Luckily the dresses construction should be fairly simple.  The design is exactly like the lace dress, but with different fabric.  I'd love to do the spine plates but I'm not sure what I would make them out of.  I may try to come up with something that will have a similar effect.  Anyway...pictures of the dress.

 I've uploaded this picture because you can see the back of the dress (the middle one) fairly well.  Now I just need to figure out exactly how I want to accomplish this look.

 The full dress.  I'll have to find some neat jewelry to go with it as well.  Hmmm...

Who Needs Clothes?

I like to think of myself as a fairly crafty person.  Not everything that I make is clothing.  Sometimes I like to to try my hand at other things as well.  In my bellydance post I mentioned that my style is tribal fusion.  One of my favorite things about the style is the accessories they wear with their costuming.  It's a neat mix of goth/roaring 20s/tribal topped off with some giant silk flowers. 

<-- This is a close up of the detail of one of the hair falls I made

 This is what the full fall looks like.  It's about three feet long. -->

I made a matching set of these.  They are fairly simple.  The top is four-strand braided down to and in between the cowrie shells.  The bells came from so old anklets I had.  They add a nice little jingle but nothing too extreme.  I plan to make more of these in the future and experiment with different lengths and styles.

I am really pleased with how the headband turned out.  The base is just a white headband with gold accents threaded in the design.  I found it at Hobby Lobby as well as the flowers.  I had the long chains left over from when I made by scale bra and the little bit of metal you see on the other side is an old gypsy earring I owned.  I just sewed everything onto the headband and it came out quite lovely.   I also plan to make more of these, again in varying colors and styles.

To see these two pieces worn with an outfit see the last picture in my bellydance post. 

Costuming for Others

On occasion I will sew costumes for other people.  This doesn't happen very often as I am lazy with my own sewing and am generally putting things together last minute.  This means I end up spending the three or four nights right before a con sewing in the wee hours of the morning so that I have a finished costume for the event.  But this doesn't mean I don't ever make costumes for other people.

These skirts were made for two friends of mine for Grande Masquerade 2011.  We were all performing together at the Toreador Salon and so we all wanted to coordinate.  The gold skirt is just a simple panel skirt (6 I believe).  The red skirt was made with the two slits up the front much like my white skirt (which I wore for the performance).  The red skirt just had a  simple elastic waist.  I also broke down Katherine's red dress (see previous post) and used it to line the skirt which turned out really nice.

I made this top to coordinate with the red skirt.  Sadly the person it was meant for lived in Arizona so I had no one to do fittings with and I ended up making it much to big.  It's a little big for me, but it's close so I plan to adjust it some and use it for myself.  I was really pleased with how it turned out.  It's lined with leftover cotton from my gypsy skirt.

This is actually the second costume I've made for V.  The first was a plain black cassock.  When I get a picture of it I will post it.  This is for a Victorian character he plays.  I made the coat and the Vest.  They both had welt pockets so that was a little bit of an undertaking but they turned out pretty decently considering it was the first time I ever made one and the directions were terrible and hard to follow.

I would like to start making more stuff for other people in the future especially now that my skills are much stronger than they used to be but my biggest problem is time.  I work all day and I don't have many free weekends.

Game on!

I don't generally make costumes for everygame wear.  Instead I like to reserve grand costumes for grand events like conventions.  Part of what drew me to gaming in the first place was the ability to wear fantastic clothes, and I don't mean that in the stylish sense.  The opportunity to create unique looks for each character was very exciting to me.  While it is certainly not the only reason I game I still love designing and creating costumes, and my skills have only improved because of it.

I joined in 2007 and later that year attended my first ICC.  It was in Nashville, TN and I was playing Katherine my, at the time, Ventrue Crone.  Unfortunately not many pictures of this dress exist so this is all you get.  Sad I know.  It was a red halter dress with a low cut back.  I based it on a dress from the Kusheil series.  I also had a rose drawn on my back (sadly no picture of it exists). 

And now we will skip to last year because I don't have any more pictures from my beginning times in MES. 







This bra was made for my original costume design for Anat.  Which consisted of this, snake patterned silky wrap pants and a red belt.  I also wore the top for Grand Masquerade 2010, but there are currently no pictures of the full thing.  I know they exist because I posed for a lot of them but none ever made their way back to me :(  But!  I plan to wear it again for this years Not-so-Grande Swell Masquerade in Atlanta so hopefully there will be pics in the future!

For Anat I began to base costumes off of paintings of Cleopatra.  So I will post the painting as well as the finished costume.

 Obviously the top couldn't be exactly as it was in the painting.  That would be inappropriate <.<

It's hard to see the slits in the skirt from the way that I'm standing but I was really pleased with the shape of the belt.  I still need to find a badass collar though.






For this next one there are no actual pictures of me in the whole outfit.  But I mismatched the pieces at various other conventions so you'll have to use your imagination.  Hey, we pretend to be vampires right?  How hard can it be?

taken by Seraphina

These skirts + this scale bra =

Tada!  Not quite as close to the painting as I had hoped but it's meant to be based off of and not an exact replica.  Also my torso is no where near that long.  I thought the top turned out great and the skirts are multi-functional.  This was the outfit I wore for Grand Masquerade 2011.  I also danced in the white skirt from the costume above and the scale bra on one of the nights as well.  It was a smokin' combo.  I also paired the first coin bra with the blue and red skirts for the second night of XX con (first night was the courtesan dress).

Now for my most successfully executed costume ever!  This dress was completely designed in my head.  I saw a picture of a lace dress in a magazine (it was just the back and the front was actually velvet) and thus the idea was born.  It may also be my most daring dress to date.  Unfortunately there's only one picture and it's not great.  There was one that was taken in the hallway but I lost the card of the guy who took it and I don't know where it ended up.  As a side note I would like to get some photos done is several of these costumes of a more professional variety.

Anyway, the dress...
What you can't see is that the back buttons all the way up with little red buttons.  It was epic.  I need to wear it again *sagenod*

Bellydance

Gaming isn't my only hobby; I also bellydance.  I've been dancing on and off since I started college so I'm going on 6 years at this point.  Recently though I began dancing with a troupe in Auburn and have made some costume pieces for such a purpose.

These were taken at the first performance by my dance instructor and troupe leader Seraphina.  She's a wonderful dancer.  You can find her at http://www.facebook.com/OtakuBellydance.

I did not make the pants.  They were yoga pants that I just split up the side.  The base of the bra is just a black bra from Ross.  I added a black beaded trim with silver embroidery.  The coins are actually from a pair of necklaces I bought some time ago.  All the members had a color.  Mind was peacock blue so I made stripes from a deep blue braid.  I studded it with colored seed beads as well as some silver beads.  Just call it my version of sequence.  The center piece and drape chains are from Hobby Lobby.  Behold my mad hand sewing skills!

I also made the belt.  It's rather simple in it's construction design.  It's also a black base with coins that match the one on the bra as well as heavy middle-eastern coins.  They are sewn over a lighter blue ruffly trim and interspersed with seed beads.  There is a large Kuchi pendant in the middle of the back and it ties in the front through two silver loops.

This picture is from our second performance.  I added yarn falls to the belt and I wore a mesh undershirt.  I was performing a gothic tribal fusion piece.  More on the hair things in another post!  This picture was taken by Layna.

College!

My group of friends always dressed up on Halloween.  We also instituted Corset Mondays.

This was from my first Halloween at LSU?  I'm fairly certain.  The corset was the very first one I ever bought (also from www.crimsongypsy.com).  It's not too much of a costume piece, but I made the tattered skirt so that I could be an Amy Brown style fairy.  I do have wings but they are very hard to see in this picture.  My sister (who is also crafty) made them out of silver and copper wiring.  They were very light and actually tucked into the back of the corset so that it looked like they were actually coming out of the back.  She's a genius she is!  You might can make them out if you click on the picture.

Zombie prom!  This is also something that occurred while I was in college.  Though it was at a club not on campus.  I didn't make the dress, it's actually from Goodwill, but I did destroy it.  We had a great time tearing and bloodying them up.  The blood around the rips was actually red nail polish which worked perfectly.  We also dragged them behind us as we walked to the car, letting the concrete fray them.  When we got to grassy patches we ground them into the dirt.

Another shot of the zombie clothes.  My sister (I'm telling you she's brilliant) did the bite/bruise makeup for everyone.

The Early Years

My earliest costuming projects were mostly for the renaissance festival.  I went to my first one when I was 8 and in 2000 Louisiana started it's own.  I've never gone to one out of costume and over the years I began making my own pieces.  Since my skills were still pretty fresh this mostly consisted of skirts.

This skirt was originally paired with a green one underneath.  The top was hitched up in the front so you could see the underskirt.  I also had a while chemise and tan bodice with trim that matched this overskirt.  The pattern was made up of pine trees, stars and suns.  The coins are sewn where they are because I didn't have enough to sew around the hem.

The chemise was made by a friends mom and I was just borrowing it for the day.  The corset came from www.crimsongypsy.com and is exceptionally well made.  I still have it and it hardly shows any of it's wear and tear (I bought it in 2006).
Around the same time that I bought the corset I started pulling together a gypsy ensemble.  I made a full circle skirt, shown in the two pictures above, made from cotton.  It alternated unbleached white panels with a creamy yellow and red striped design (not shown).  I made it before I understood some basics about making skirts and the waist is extremely big.  It closes with a draw string.  That's my sister btw.

This was from the year that I worked at the archery booth.  It was bitterly cold (it even snowed that year) and we all had to wear a lot of layers.  I made a capelet from a crazy orange fabric with gold stripes that my sister found and it was lined with a similarly colored fleece that was cut from a 5 dollar Walmart blanket.  I did not make my Jayne hat.  It was bought at D*Con.

On Silence

I apologize for being so silent lately.  While sewing/costuming is something I'm very passionate about I haven't really done much since XX.  So in the mean time I will post pictures of other finished projects both gaming and non.

Courtesan Gown: Pictures

So I'm lame.  I've had pictures of me in the courtesan dress for some time now and I'm just getting around to putting them up.  These were just taken around the event and not necessarily made to showcase the dress.  There are no good pictures of the back.

What you can't see in this picture is how awesome my nails turned out!  They were black with a gold snakeskin pattern and they really looked great.  The only jewelry I wore was a snake ring (I think) and these bronze snake earrings.  This picture is good for the shoulder and sleeve details.

<< Here you can sort of see the back.  It was a nice deep V.  I really like this picture I just wish I wasn't holding a glass of water.

This is cropped from a bigger picture so I'm sorry>> for the resolution.  I also have no idea what I'm doing.  Perhaps trying to sit on the table?

Final Thoughts:
Overall I was really pleased with how the dress turned out.  It was also a big hit at the convention.  I would love to wear it again but I think I'll make a few changes first.

1. I want to take some of the fullness out of the skirt.  I think it would make it fall better and make it a little slinkier.

2. I'm thinking of adding gold drape chains across the back of the dress.  This would look really nice I think and it would also help the dress stay in place.  Perhaps I'll do this for Eclipse.

The Devil is in the Details

The amount of detail that goes into a characters costume varies from player to player.  Some will wear the same outfit over and over again no matter what character they're playing while others will have a single identifying prop to help distinguish between them.  I fall on the other end of the spectrum, among those players who incorporate details into a costume even though they may go largely unnoticed.  Part of it is simply the fun of pulling a costume together, but also, at least for me, it helps bring a character to life making it easier to slip into their personality for a game.

The Clothes:
Just like in everyday life clothes are what help us make our first impression.  Slacks and a nice blouse are great for a job interview, they convey a professional and well-maintained appearance but you wouldn't necessarily wear the same outfit when you went out with friends.  This is no different in the game setting.  If you have a character that is supposed to be an extremely serious and shrewd business man then you're not likely to be taken seriously if you show up in ripped up jeans and a cut up t-shirt even if you have a pin that says "Armani Suit" clipped to you.  Now, I wouldn't expect someone to actually buy an Armani suit to wear for a fictional character.  I would think most of us don't have the money...also it's a fictional character.  But it's a lot easier to suspend disbelief if you're wearing slacks and a button up shirt versus cargo shorts and a hoodie.

So how do you figure out what look will work for a character?  Start with the basics.  For the most part every character is built off a starting concept.  Are you playing a business man, party girl, artist?  Do they have money or are they just scraping by? This should give you a good template to begin building your character.  If you're character is from another time then consider the fashion sensibilities were back then.  A lady from the Victorian era is likely to be more conservative than one from the 20s.  Google and Wikipedia are both great resources for light historical research.  If you have a particular character inspiration search images on Google or browse DeviantArt.  Pinterest is also a great place to get ideas for outfits.  Most importantly, look in your own closet.  If you do have to buy something check out Ross, Goodwill or clearance sections at department stores.  Even one piece can be enough to make a character.

The Makeup:
Makeup is one of my favorite things about getting into character.  There is so much you can do with it and how you use it can completely transform the way you look.  This can certainly be considered one of the more subtle ways to add to the overall look of a character.  The color/angle of the blush you wear or the heaviness of the eyeliner can all make a huge difference.  You can go simple creating a natural look, dark and more drastic for a sultry affect or even fantastic for a unique and otherworldly image.  Take a look at these examples:

                                 Doe Deere

As you can see each of these is a startling contrast to the next.  Even with every day make-up items you can create unique looks that can really add a whole new dimension to your character.  My approach to make-up has always been lighthearted.  I hardly ever wear it on a daily basis and even when I do it's because I think it's fun.  It's just so versatile!

And it's not just your face.  You can even add darling little details to your nails.  For instance I just got myself a set of Bundle Monster nail plates.  They let you stamp images onto your fingernails for a bit of added flair.  I got this particular set because they had a snakeskin pattern which is just so perfect for my Setite that I couldn't pass it up.  I also see myself using them for the everyday.  Take a look-see!

 

 And guys don't think you're excluded.  Make-up can be used to create hollow cheeks and eyes, more rigid facial features, etc.

The Hair:

I've always found hair to be a little challenging.  Local games are held at a myriad of places and sometimes it's hard, even impossible, to be able to curl/flatten/up-do your hair.  Still that doesn't mean that you shouldn't take your hair into consideration.  If you're wearing a sharp and professional out-fit then loose, tousled hair can really hurt the effect.  Instead pull your hair up into a simple pony-tail or even of twist or a bun.  These are great ways to wear your hair that don't take much time or effort but will still help maintain the look your trying to create.  Pinterest.com also has some great tutorials on simple yet elegant looks.   

Another option: wigs.  I love wigs.  They allow you to do different hair colors, lengths and styles without actually having to do anything to your own hair.  It also makes things a lot more simple when you're at an event where you may be playing 2 or 3 characters a day.  They are also great for helping distinguish between characters.  For the most part you can find a decent wig for between $30-50 dollars.  You can do anything from a "normal" hairstyle like short brown hair or blonde curls, to something funky like baby pink dreadlocks or a blue bob.  Look for a local wig shop in your area.  You should be able to try on a few styles.  I've also shopped www.lightinthebox.com.

Jewelry:
Jewelry can be expensive, even just costume jewelry.  To start I usually chose a specific piece for a character.  Maybe your character keeps a picture of her dead husband in a locket, or that ring your businessman wears is actually an occult relic.  It's easy to create a story for where a piece comes from and it is great for adding depth to a character.  Who knows, maybe some one will even ask you about it! 

Update (Or lack thereof)

I apologize for the lack of updates but I just got my fabric last week.  The dress (sans sleeves) is cut out and ready to sewn together a process I shall begin this weekend.  Once it's got a little more to it I shall post some pics.