1.
Introduction
a.
Who am I?
b.
What do I do?
2.
The Beginning Begins
a.
The First Costume I Made – Blue Fairy
b.
The First Garment I Sewed – The Jacket
c.
Where I Became Hooked – Mistaken for Cast
3.
Inspiration
a.
The Honeycomb Fairy – Inspiration Strikes
i.
How Inspiration can come from the most innocuous
places – a note left on a desk, a roll of chicken wire…
b.
Summer Vikings – Historically Inspired &
Learning Something New
i.
How did this actually work? Will it work in this
situation?
ii.
How to decide what to change from “accurate” to “practical”
iii.
Learning to dye and the worlds it opened
4.
Design
a.
Layers to a Costume – Telling a Story
i.
First Visual Layer – Something that will be
noticed from a distance (Honeycomb Wings)
ii.
Second Visual Layer – Something noticeable at
conversation distance (Bees all over)
iii.
Third Visual Layer – Something to find when
inspecting (honeycomb stitching on the stays)
b.
The Strawberry Fairy – Designing for Someone
Else
i.
Pictures of pink & gold fairy
ii.
Pictures of Barbarian
iii.
Picture of K&R
c.
The Tartan Dresses – Using Someone Else’s Ideas
i.
Sewing patterns & their suitability
d.
The Patchwork Plague Doctor and the Pirate –
Drawing on my Sewing Roots & Costume Iteration
i.
The OG Plague Doctor (coat & pants version,
display Mask)
ii.
The OG Pirate (Corset [choices between historical
accuracy and aesthetic – stays vs. Victorian corset], shirt, shared pants)
iii.
Changes to Both
1.
Plague Doctor – “quilted” forepart, convert
whole thing to a dress, remove the coat
2.
Pirate – Add the coat without sleeves, balance
it out with a hat, add accessories that tell a story (navigational equipment)
5.
Sourcing Materials
a.
Patterns
i.
Historical records (Vikings)
ii.
Self-drafted (Honeycomb stays, skirts, chemise)
iii.
Etsy (Baroness Bodice for Tartan Dresses)
iv.
Commercial Patterns (Pirate coat)
b.
Fabrics
i.
Online (Etsy, deadstock retailers, specialty
sellers [linen, Spoonflower])
ii.
In Person (Big Box Stores, quilt shops,
deadstock retailers)
c.
Trims
i.
Online
ii.
In Person
iii.
Self-made (display woven trim on loom?)
6.
Lessons Learned
a.
Seam Finishes Matter
b.
Bigger Isn’t Always Better
c.
Natural Fibers Are (almost) Always Better
d.
The Three Foot Rule
e.
Always Be Learning!
i.
Skills I’ve picked up for costuming include:
band weaving, resin pouring, fabric dyeing & a multitude of techniques,
chainmaille, beading, pattern drafting, flower arranging, millinery, etc.
Props: Husband in Viking, Sister in Strawberry, me in Plague,
Honeycomb on mannequin, other costumes on hangers (?), loom, hats.
Sand in the sandbox:
Do you ever see someone wearing an outfit and you thing 'wow, why are they like that?' Well, I can tell you why I'm like this. When I was eight years old my parents took me to my very first renaissance festival. We went every year after that, and eventually I told them that I wanted to save my birthday and Christmas money to get my own costume. That's when Mom said the words that changed my life: why don't we just make one?
I grew up sewing and that thought had never occurred to me! Around the time of that first festival, Mom started plugging me in to her quilting projects. 'Sew this straight line, snip these pieces apart, press just like that,' so I wasn't exactly new to a sewing machine... But quilting and sewing clothing are not the same. We'll get to that later. For this first costume we went to the Goodwill on Boulevard in Tulsa and bought the biggest, poofiest prom dress we could find in my size. Then we removed about 80% of the skirt and I got my dad to help me make my first pair of wings. They were enormous and banged into everything I went near. They didn't stay lined up properly. They hurt to wear. And I loved them. I had made a costume and I was on top of the world.
And I was hooked.
I didn't make anything from the ground up for a few years, instead just pulling this dress or another prom dress with a corseted bodice out and wearing that, but I was wearing my own costumes. Eventually I thought I wanted something that I could wear out in the real world and I picked out a jacket pattern at Wal-Mart. Mom helped me pick out the fabric. My lovely quilters, did you know that 'seam allowance' is NOT universal? I had exclusively sewn with a quarter-inch allowance to that point and I fought with a sleeve for three hours before Mom called in help. There were tears. There was yelling. I was ready to quit. But a member of the Scrap Happy guild down in Okmulgee came over and just -doot!- scooted the project over a little bit under that presser foot and everything suddenly worked.
I wore the jacket maybe twice? My sister has it now. But I did it. I made a wearable piece of clothing.
From there I moved in to costume pieces and started with a bodice. It laced together in three pieces in the front, and I used watch bands and buckles for the center front. I made wings out of panty hose and coat hangers, and I used a thrifted skirt that was already a thousand different kinds of fabric in one. That was the year I went from 'hooked' to 'ok, so this is my personality now.' Two of the girls on the cast at the festival mistook me for a fellow cast-member. I was doing it all right! I looked like I belonged there!
And then I got married and things slowed down for a while while I live in OKC with my husband. When we moved back to Tulsa, and consequently closer to the renaissance festival, I started wanting something new but the ideas just weren't flowing. I got a job working in the same building as my dad, and I know that sounds out of left field but this is how fast inspiration can strike. I'd gone to the store for a snack and brought him back some but he wasn't at his desk so I left a note. It just said 'The honeycomb fairy visited you...' and by the time I got back to my desk I had a plan fully fleshed out. [this is where the costume on the mannequin gets pointed at]. Just all this dripping gold and any sort of golden hexagon I could find. We were at my parents' house one day when I saw some chicken wire laying next to their trash can and my brain just went 'WINGS!' Candy and trash, that's all it takes.
Now, the Honeycomb Fairy was easy. There are historical elements in there but it's largely fantasy so I could break as many rules as I wanted, but what about historical inspiration?
The year after my husband and I bought our house I got a season pass to the Muskogee festival and started going every weekend. In order to spend any time with me Hubby needed to go, too, and he wanted something he could wear. Now, he's from southwest Colorado and still hasn't adjusted to the heat out here, so finding something was tricky. We landed on Vikings. This was going to be my first historically-inspired costume so I started doing research. Vikings wore a lot of wool and a lot of layers and that wasn't going to work so we would need to adapt. I swapped wool for linen, which made the garments much more breathable and cool. We decided to go with light colors to reflect the heat instead of absorb it, too. The way these pieces were cut from the fabric may have been how it was originally done - all blocks and triangles, as these are very close to zero-waste patterns - and the shapes are accurate to some archaeological finds, but I put a modern spin on the project. We changed out fabrics to suit our needs, and I sewed with a machine. What you are seeing on Hubby and hanging over here to my side are the second iteration of these costumes, and if you look inside the dress you will see French seams and French felling, as well as evidence of some serging. These are more modern alterations that I made in the name of durability. For lightfastness and ease of care, the dyes I used for all of it are chemical and not natural, as well.
