It’s June which means we are now FULLY into Dragoncon mode.
But first Kevin’s room.
I talked about the trim colour last week but I took this pic with the swatch of the colour and I SWEAR how are these the same? They do look closer to each other in non-direct light, but here in direct light in the window they are completely different.
But I’m not freaking redoing it anytime soon.
See it’s not quite so bad away from the window with the overhead on.
But anyway Kevin’s room feels SO MUCH BETTER painted! I started putting the furniture into new positions – moved the bed to the opposite wall, made a “entertainment wall” out of the shelves, the cabinet and the tv. We got some patching done on the paint yesterday and the closet and main room doors back on.
After Dragoncon, our plan is take those shelves and the cabinet downstairs and modify them to look more “star wars”. For that cabinet we’re creating a top for the tv to sit on better, and also probably removing the doors for some open area storage of his game consoles.
Anyway, exciting stuff!
So I think I originally said I wasn’t going to mess with the Nadja hat or bag for a while, well I changed my mind. I didn’t really feel like jumping in to Breha until the weekend, so I spent last week making a hat and a bag.
First I just kinda got the basic shapes and sizes for the hat figured out in paper. It’s giving Storm Mohawk era here.
Also my references for this hat were not great at all. As I said last week, it’s blurry or situated away from the camera in all of my screenshots, plus It’s away from the viewer AND backwards in the exhibit photos. So I sketched up something that I felt was close enough and that’s what I went with as my guide.
Got the shapes dialed in a little more then cut them out of the buckram I had leftover from my Dale hat. But I quickly realized the buckram was not going to be strong enough to stand up on its own once I covered it in my fabric – I’m using some red ponte knit leftover from my dapper Black Widow dress and it’s pretty heavy. Despite it being too heavy for this I really wanted to use because A) I don’t have to spend money to use this and B) it doesn’t fray.
So I recut the pieces in that sheet of kobracast I had laying around. I’d bought the kobracast for Scarlet Witch and ended up not using it because it did NOT feel comfortable to wear as a bodice. But for this? It was GREAT. It held its shape really well after being heat formed AND was still easy to sew through. Win win.
So yeah I got the fabric sewn around the upper part, then pinned it onto the base in the swirly shape I wanted. Then hit it with the steamer. Let it sit overnight…
And it retained its swirly shape! Yay. So I got the base also covered in fabric, then started getting them all sewn together.
I ended up hand-sewing some bias tape to the bottom edge of the upper swirly shape just for a neat finish – don’t love it but didn’t want the raw edges of the fabric to show, even if they weren’t going to fray. Then I saw and hand-sewed it in place on the base. While the kobracast is relatively easy to get a needle through, after a while I had to switch to my pliers and finger guards because my fingers started to get really sore.
Then I dug out my stash of red beads and added them between each swirl. These are all leftover from Alyss. Once that was done, I sewed a felt cover on the bottom just to clean it up, and it was done!
All that’s left is to attach this to a headband – I didn’t want to do that til I had my wig though.
My wig was supposed to be here Saturday, but when I checked the tracking again Saturday it had changed to Monday. boo 🙁
I started messing with the sash Friday.
But I decided the red of the tulle I’d gotten was too bright. I needed it to be closer to the red of my dress.
I did experiment with dyeing it since it was just cheap tulle.
And i felt like this was pretty successful… but also it dulled it a little more than I would’ve liked.
I had to run to Joann sat morning so I grabbed a darker red tulle while I was there.
Much better.
I know in photos this tulle doesn’t look that different but I swear you can see the difference in person LOL
I also made the little bag. It’s not perfect but it’ll be fine.
Again just made out of the ponte knit with a bunch of my leftover Alyss beads sewn on. I think her bag is probably something more like a velvet, but I’m not gonna sweat it. It’s not that important to me.
Friday we went and had dinner with my parents and then had a movie night watching Everything Everywhere All At Once – FINALLY, I’d been wanting to see it for ages. It was so good!
Saturday I officially switched over to working on Breha and decided to focus on the pants first — again.
I decided to just press pleats into the fabric I’d originally used for the lining in pants phase 1. I had to get a couple more yards of this fabric to do it, and thats the main reason I went to Joann saturday morning.
It was an ardous process. I would pleat the panel down to fit my new pants pattern pieces (Simplicity 8134 – worked much better than the pajama pants pattern I used for version 1). Then trim in the curve at the front and back. I pressed the pleats down into place after sewing them along the top.
This honestly took hours – I’d estimate each panel took me about an hour to do per pants part, so around 4 hours. Why so long? Because I suck at pleating things evenly. I’d get the top pleated then pin the pleats all the way to the bottom and it wouldn’t be even so I’d have to start over. It just took a while to get each panel looking good for pressing.
I was SO SORE after sitting on the floor leaning over these pleats for that long. But after a dinner break I got them assembled:
MUCH BETTER than version 1.
After this I trimmed off some of the excess length — I left a little because I hadn’t decided if I wanted to hem it or not. It’s a swimsuit lining fabric so it’s not going to fray – I just need to have a clean cut at the bottom I think. Easier said than done. I might get a new blade for my rotary cutter and use that.
I also did the elastic put in the waistband and all that finished off. It’s not pretty but it’s not going to be visible so (shrug)
Sunday it was time to tackle the dress, finally. It had been so long since I first started a mock-up I’d forgotten what I was doing with it. I had to go back and look at references again and re-familiarize myself with it.
I didn’t really have a pattern in my stash that was close enough to the top to be worth cutting, so I decided to do a quick plastic wrap/tape dummy to pattern it.
The skirt panels are just rectangles.
And I moved it over to the form with arms to start messing with the sleeve shapes again.
So tonight I’ll probably move the duct tape pieces over to paper and get a fabric mock-up of that section made, then start working in the sleeve/cape shape.
My hope is to have a decently finished mock-up in the next couple of days – enough so I can move onto cutting the real fabric by this weekend. Fingers crossed…
Oh and I also picked up fabric for 7 of 9 this weekend. It was a struggle to not immediately dive into that, but I need to focus on Breha a little more first.
OH! I nearly forgot until I went to add the header. I’ve been messing around the photoshop generative AI feature. For me the most useful feature of this is extending vertical-oriented photos into something horizontal for banners and headers, like so:
Pretty neat.
It also does a dang good job of removing various things from photoshoot pics, like I tested out removing the railings from my Queen Amidala post senate photos and boom – gone, perfect. Kinda makes me made considering how long I spent removing those rails by hand in my parade Amidala and Arwen photoshoots from there forever ago LOL
Doesn’t work so good on my white backdrop photos though, which is disappointing. I guess there’s just not enough info there for it.