Here we are beginning the last week of July. It’s not a great Monday as it is, I have a migraine and 2 conference calls today which means my brain is basically saying “no” to any other work. I swear a call may only be an hour long but my brain is like, we have to build in an hour before the call to prepare and then an hour after the call to unwind, so with 2 calls and a break for lunch that’s basically the whole day LOL
Also somebody tried to call my work phone at 6:30 this morning, wtf. Thankfully I keep do-not-disturb when I’m not working so it didn’t wake me up.
So I did actually get a decent amount of work done this weekend. Let’s start with Padme.
First up I finally tried it all on. that was exciting.
I got all the snaps positioned for attaching everything to the surcoat. There’s 4 holding the long velvet front panel in place, then 1 holding the little capelet on, and then 1 under each brooch piece, so I can take them off if I need to.
Now I just need to sculpt the buttons, and figure out the floral overskirt. OMG the floral overskirt is the bane of my effing existence right now. You know what, I’m just going to bitch about that at the end of the post.
I finally trimmed and stubbed the wig. I was very scared to do this. It turned out… ok I guess. I tried it on and it looks decent. Because the wig is so thin it doesn’t look like a poofy helmet which is always my beef with pulled back wigs. I’ve got to take a scrap of the hair to the wig store to match to extensions to make the back bun. I’ve decided if it doesn’t look good at the end I’m just going to say eff it and use my own hair, even if it’s red.
(Also literally the day after I got this wig in for this project somebody on one of my facebook groups posted a warning about buying this wig and that it’s not suitable for updos. Head slap moment. I can see what they’re talking about, and that’s why I have 2 stubs and not one, because trying to get the lower half pulled into the upper part looked horrible. Lower one will be hidden by the bun. Like I said, it’s not pretty, and I’m just playing it by ear right now.)
Speaking of wigs, let’s move onto the next projects… I finally did my Diane wig and the wig for the little blue dress I made.
I don’t have a direct pic of the Diane wig but you can see it in the Padme pic above… I did a general cut of it on the wighead last week, but I need to put it on and Chase is going to clean it up for me/finish shaping the back. It was hard to get it trimmed into the right shape on the wighead not being able to see exactly where it would be on me.
The beehive wig for the blue dress was a fun time.
I ended up cannibalizing my old Wonder Woman/Zatanna/Arica wig plus a small foam bump to create the beehive. The WW wig was in terrible shape and needed to be replaced anyway, so I didn’t feel too bad.
I bought a wrap around ponytail and curled it for the sausage curls in the back. Here’s the finished product:
It is cracking me up. So that costume I can fully mark off my to-do list.
And now onto Wanda…
I got my pants cut and basted together to check the fit, then took them apart again to do the front designs. I got them patterned out but that’s as far as I got there.
Next, I got my HTV to start applying the all-over design and decided to start with the half skirt. Now, I had 2 fabrics for the half skirt – a scuba fabric I wasn’t totally in love with but decided to use anyway, and a stretch taffeta I’d only bought as lining for the scuba to give it some more body. But once I assembled the lining layer out of the taffeta and tried it on, I was like… I love this. It’s a lot stiffer than Wanda’s half skirt but when I walked around in it the way it caught the breeze and flowed was magical. So I decided to ditch the scuba and just use the taffeta, even though it’s shinier than I wanted (and also I knew the HTV would probably weight it down on top of that but still). So I finished up the skirt, got it hemmed and ready to go.
So I had one sheet to start with, decided to start at center back. Went to apply it and… it wouldn’t release from the carrier sheet. Could not get it to release at all. Some did and those had a weird white outline around them. I’d followed the directions, iron set on wool, used a teflon sheet over the top, set a timer on my phone for each press. So I had to just throw the whole skirt in the trash and order new fabric.
I took the other sheet of HTV and tested it out on some scraps. Couldn’t get it to release cleanly under any circumstances so I’m going to chalk it up to shitty HTV from amazon. But I was totally bummed over my skirt.
So for the bodice, I went and got some HTV locally and spent the weekend applying it. Worked MUCH better.
But as of this morning I still don’t have all 8 of the bodice pieces covered! It takes like 3 hours to cut one sheet so I was just applying it whenever I got a new piece. A bit frustrating at how slow it is. I’ve got several rolls on order for the new skirt, so once they get here I’m going to have to just set it up to keep cutting alllll day while I’m at work.
That being said I think it’s looking really cool. And here’s my 3d printed neckpiece, which Chase will be casting soon.
My red pleather for various pieces came in yesterday so last night I worked on the boots.
Chase cut some clean strips of it for me so I could attach them to the boots – I got some double side tape meant for hems to use for this, since I couldn’t sew it through the hard parts of the boots, and used that, worked pretty well. Been a long time since I used that stuff for applying a design to boots (Urd – 2002 LOL) I also decided to use it on the other part of the boots I made, so they’d look the same.
I decided to do the boots as 2 pieces – the boot, and a secondary piece acting as a partial boot cover. Her boots are shiny (shiny-ish, anyway) but mine are pretty matte, so I decided to stick with the matte look and used some leftover faux suede for it. Patterned them out using some scrap fabric and then cut them out of the suede, using what was left of my poor messed-up half skirt as lining LOL. Got the strips applied and then sewed it up the back. I’ve got to sew the elastic strap onto the bottom and some tabs at the top that will attach to the inside of the boot to keep it in place.
I’ve got to cut pieces of the pleather for the pants stripes next. Which I’m a bit concerned about doing because I CANNOT FIND MY TEFLON FOOT for my sewing machine. I don’t think the pleather will go under my regular foot smoothly. I’ve got stabilizer I can use in a pinch but I’d rather not.
I did just look at the babylock’s manual and it does have a non-stick foot so I may have to get her out to do this part.
Anyway, I also experimented with the gloves. I worked up a simple glove pattern for the hand part and tested it out using scraps of the HTV leftover from the bodice pieces.
It’s not bad but it’s hard to get on and the fingers are really tight at the ends. I think I’m going to drop finishing the edges of the fingers – this fabric doesn’t fray – so that’ll reduce the bulk and tightness there. I trimmed up the shape so that everything from the first black triangle upwards, I can put in a zipper to help make it easier. Also need to cut the next pair a little wider, the HTV doesn’t allow the base fabric to stretch as much as without.
So I feel like I made a decent dent on Wanda this weekend. This week/weekend I need to:
-finish applying HTV to bodice pieces
-assemble bodice
-put zipper in bodice
-pattern out rest of hip panels
-finish pants
-finish boots
-pattern rest of gloves
-remake my half skirt when fabric arrives
Ok so now let’s talk about the Padme floral overskirt debacle.
So my swatch arrived tuesday and it was not good. Not just not good but awful. So for like an hour I was in a tail spin.
After hasing it out with Chase we decided to go back to my original idea, just simplified for time’s sake. The issue I was having with the original idea seems to have been solved? But we haven’t tested that out yet. So taking my designs into photoshop to simplify and start testing again. Thing thing has just been a freaking roller coaster and like I said on IG, I’m not ready to tell the whole story just yet but one day, I will.
I just want to figure it out first. And I want to figure it out on my own. If I start sharing the problems I’m having I’m going to get a ton of advice that I don’t particularly want – not that I don’t appreciate the advice, but like I said… I want to figure it out on my own. That’s usually the way I operate. I like to figure it out for myself, it’s part of the fun for me, and having 60 IG messages with suggestions is nice but also overwhelming and makes me second guess my own decisions. (And not so nice are the people telling me I “did it wrong”)
Anyway, that’s where we are at today.
In other news I reallllly want to get out and see the Disney exhibit at Graceland. Dunno when we’ll get to go but since it’s HERE we’ll be able to go anytime really. I’m excited for it! I really want to go Halloween in my Tightrope walker costume to get pics with the Haunted Mansion stuff.
And this came in the mail Saturday…
It smelled so good! I don’t drink coffee but I had to get it for Chase.
Now time to have another good week in terms of good forward progress.