Middle class adjustable feathers! (And hello again)

Hello hat people!!

I'm back! I'm back! I'm up and running (ok, mostly up and running) after the big move to Ontario! My kiddo has started school, all the essentials are unpacked, and I FINALLY have something to post for you to look at.

I got a request this week from a lady who was interested in this hat on my website:

The only issue with it is that she's playing a middle class lady at a faire and the sumptuary guidelines find the ostrich plumes too uppityfancy for her station. Valid point, really. She asked if I could replace them with more middling feathers, so I've mocked up something that I really like:

The dark feathers are dyed iridescent coque (rooster), the pale ones are guinea fringe, the speckled one is partridge and the green ones are dyed ringneck pheasant. The pheasant ones are not so electric in real life. Photography, eh? What can you do. Ok, I guess I could color correct, but I didn't. I'll just say that they are brighter in the photo than in my hand and hope that is sufficient.



Back view of same, showing the sweep of the coque feathers. I love the little brown tips.

She also asked if I could make the wonderful ostrich plumes addable for when she goes to other faires and is not constrained by the character she is portraying at this one. I said sure:

I'm just a teensy bit enamoured with the guinea fringe, so I added a touch of it there too.

If she pins the ostrich plumes on top of the other feathers, she'll get something fabulous like this:


Well - only not held on, yannow, with my hand. BOY I can't wait to get my photo studio set up again!  I wonder where the heck all the pieces are. Garage, probably.

Anyway - I need to show her these pictures, and get her OK before I sew them on, but I thought some of you might be interested too!

I've missed doing this SO much. Moving is such total chaos, even when you label everything like I do. (My son loves to tell people that I labeled my labeler. I also labeled the shelf where it goes. I did that to be funny...but that doesn't mean I won't do it again.)

I hope she loves the feathers!!

Google and Blogger, I apologize

I just spent the last few hours maligning you to the world for deleting all my older blog photos, which you absolutely, totally did not do.

I will NOT currently be switching blog platforms.

Apparently I have two different google accounts (I think I knew this?) and both of them are allowed to post on this blog. (Cause that makes sense)

Then apparently someone tried to hack one of them and you locked the account to protect me, which locked all my photos too. Which made them disappear.
So now they are back, and I'm relieved and a bit of a shmuck.

In the grateful department though - i realized that I really value this archive of my hat work, and I need to maybe pay a little more attention to it.

Also - I've tried to add the "like" box to posts (Very slick, that feature. Thanks)
so let's see if that works.

Sincerely,

The no-longer-panicky-hat-lady

Fun with Elizabethan coif embroidery

That's a misleading title cause I don't embroider, like, at all. But I do LOVE me a good embroidered Elizabethan coif. (you see my problem, here)

To make it all much worse, I'm almost out of  the machine embroidered linen I've been using for my embroidered coifs that I sell at Trulyhats.net and I can find more of it  NOWHERE.

So - I've decided to have some fabric custom embroidered just for me! Sounds like a great plan, yes?
The issue has been that I lacked an awesome, clean vector art file of the pattern I want, and I'm an Adobe Illustrator beginner. Not even an advanced beginner. I know enough Adobe Illustrator to spend over fifty hours tweaking a file, looking at YouTube for how-tos, moving little points and lines around till 3:00 AM, and then totally screw it all up by grouping a compound path all wrong or something. (Not that this happened, or anything.) (This totally happened.)

This is why it's taken a year for me to get to this point.

I finally decide on a design with this awesome blackwork pattern that I yoinked from the cover of this embroidery book:

Since I don't actually OWN this book, I've no idea what this embroidery is ON (Coif? Pillow? Sleeve?)
but it looked just like I wanted, so I'm not going to worry about it.

ANYWAY - Today I finally got it made, cleaned up, and printed out full scale to look at!!!!! Trouble was - It looked just like it did on the screen and it's really hard to say "yup - the scale is just right" unless you are looking at something in its final form.

SO. Since I'm likely to have to order 80 yards of this fabric (which will last me for EVER unless I decide to try to sell the yardage) I had better be for SURE fer shur about the scale, pattern and size. 

Naturally, the only thing to do was to make a mockup coif with the pattern drawn on.

So this afternoon, there I was, with paper and fabric all taped to the glass of my back door (otherwise known as the poorman's lightbox) tracing the design onto some linen with a Sharpie marker.

Results: I love it.


Admit it - You're totally jealous of my SharpieCoif™
 

I placed it next to my current one to check out the difference, and I really think the new pattern will offer lots of advantages.


Biggest design difference seems to be the lack of white space present in the actual Elizabethan pattern.

Also - I found it fascinating how different the same exact coif pattern looks on two different heads. Hairs. Hairdos. Whatevers. You get it.

 

Another groovy composite montage thing. I'm an advanced beginner with Photoshop :)

 

 

 Now I just need to get back in touch with my fabric person in India to see if the estimate she gave me last January still stands.  Fingers crossed!  I sure hope this works out. As enamored as I am with the SharpieCoif, I cannot WAIT to see yards and yards of it all machine embroidered!

Progress on a replica custom order

Finishing up my existing orders, I finally came to one I've been really looking forward to.

 

It's made of a fabulous long-haired (napped) cashmere/wool blend, which reads like beaver fur, and it's got a wonderful combination feather cockade made from dyed,burnt peacock herl and  curled ostrich plume tips around a centered pin. 



This is the first attempt at the shapes, and it's just placeholder bling. We're really only at the patterning stage.



But try #1 is totally viable!

I really like this shot. Shows the nice angle and curve I got in the brim.

 

Same hat - different, wigless, head :)

 

back view

 

 I'm trying to decide if the brim wants to be narrower. I already reduced the size down from my standard brim size, and made it a slight cone shape, rather than a flat oval.

It's very pretty the way it is, but the one in the portrait we're emulating does seem to be even smaller.

 We'll see what the customer says. I'm game either way. Yay progress, though!


Custom orders on pause

Just thought I'd post a note to let you all know that I can't take any new custom orders at this time due to a new job (yay!) and some family health issues.(boo!) 

If I've already accepted your order, we are still on track, so no worries there. Just need a pause- likely till Dec. I'll be sure to post the "all clear."

Thank you all for understanding. 

new girdle and carcanet set for a customer!

Here are some photos of a jewellery set just finished for an order.

(Had trouble getting the photos to shop up by email, so am putting them here.)

Nice formal "all done" shot

Closeup of centerpiece of girdle on my messy jewellery bench

And closeup of the necklace. I sure love those Montana blue stones.

All in all - a lovely order :) Can't wait to see photos of her wearing it!

Cinderella dress padded hem tutorial

How I did the hem on the Coello dress

So, I'm writing this tutorial because I think that hems do not get enough discussion and they are really important. They are especially important when they are done badly.

(And who among us has always done perfect hems? Not me, that's for sure.)

Before I start with the steps and the pictures, I want to add all the caveats. 

This type of hemming is best for:

•  Skirts that have curved hems, not skirts that are straight and are just gathered or pleated at the top.  Curved hems have difficulty being folded up since the whole geometry of a circle makes the outside bigger than the inside, and then when folded up, it's got to squish/gather itself even more. 
• Skirts made of thicker silks, wools, velveteens, or upholstery fabrics. It's not for drapey slinky fabrics that really want a teensy double-fold hem. We called these Janet hems. Cause Janet did them better than anyone else I've ever seen. (She did a lot of things that way, though.) I miss her :(
• Hems that will have trim put around them, like my dress did. This technique stabilizes the hem area, helping to prevent the trim from gathering or controlling the fall of the skirt.
• Dresses that can be hemmed permanently, not for hems that might need to be let up or down. Once this hem is in, there are no alteration options.  (So get the length really right)

Ok - enough about that, read on.

Step 1: Find the hem line

For this, I put the dress on the dress form over the farthingale and I used this lovely tool to get a chalk line that was parallel with the ground:

If you don't have one of these - get one. Like, really. Your local JoAnns probably has it. Here's the first link I found for an online one: http://www.nancysnotions.com/product/deluxe+chalk+hem+marker.do

After finding the hemline, I took the dress to the ironing table and pressed the hem up. I discovered that I had very little "turn up" to work with in a couple of places, and that my turned up edge was very uneven. 

Hem pressed up - showing really uneven hem lengths.

 Step 2. Prepare the hem tape

I decided to use milliner's grosgrain (sometimes called Petersham) as a hem facing tape. Here's what it looks like straight:

and here it is after I've pressed in a curve:

Regular grosgrain won't curve like this. It won't curve at all.  I used this stuff because I had some in the right color, plus it's finished on both edges and  I know that it will curve nicely. You can also use single fold bias tape.

 I pressed a gentle curve into the whole length of the hem tape.

 Step 3: Attach the hem tape

I laid the hem tape on the hem and pinned it through just the folded up part of the hem, about 3/8" up from the hemline. I pressed the tape flat to make sure the tape's curve was all groovy with the hem curve.

I then took it to the machine, unfolded the hem, and topstitched the tape onto the hem right at the edge of the tape.

 When I came all the way around the hem, I folded the edge under and stitched it down.

 Just for my sanity's sake, I put it back on the form and made SURE it was level with the floor. Looked good :)

Step 4: Trim the hem edge so that it is shorter than the hem tape

Pretty self explanatory. But here's a picture :)

 Here it is all trimmed.

 Step 5: Pad the hem

The hem looked a little drapey/wimpy to me since I needed it to hold up a lot of flat trim and since the overall look of the dress is very stiff. I decided to pad it with some craft felt. I got this idea from one of the notes in Patterns of Fashion 4 (Janet Arnold) where it says that the hem was padded with a thick layer of wool. Since felt curves nicely and doesn't fray, I decided to use it instead of wool. Also - it's cheaper, and I had a bunch of it lyin' around :) I would absolutely use this product again - worked like a dream.
I cut 2" wide strips of acrylic craft felt, and joined the strips together with a zig stitch:



I then laid the felt right into the fold of the hem, and pinned it place.

 I curved the felt with the iron as I went to make it lie smooth and flat.



IMPORTANT: This next bit will vary depending on how you will be treating the outside of the hem.
IF: you won't be trimming the outside of the dress, I wouldn't recommend doing what I did here since it puts visible rows of topstitching on the outside of the dress. I would instead fold the hem out again and stitch just through the top edge of the hem tape and through the felt, and then do some kind of blind hem stitch at the top edge of the felt to hold it all up. That would work beautifully and be invisible form the outside. BUT - since I WAS going to put trim around the whole hem, AND I needed a guideline to use for that trim placement anyway:

 I stitched through all layers, using this wonderful little screw-in guide that I could NOT live without.  I have no link for you - mine came in a vintage sewing attachment kit. I think you can still get them, but I don't know what they are called.

 I ended up doing two rows of stitching, since I found that my first row was too high for the trim placement.

Step 5: Prepare the trim

Since I used trim I could curve, I pressed a curve into it before I laid it on the skirt. (which I really recommend - I'm a firm believer that there's just no really reliable way to get a beautifully trimmed curvy hemmed skirt with straight, unbendy trim. )
Here you can see that the bottom edge is bigger than the top edge. This is trim I assembled from three separate pieces, so I was able to ease one side on in order to facilitate this.

 Step 6: Attach the trim

Once again your mileage may vary, but I just lined the bottom edge of the trim up with my guideline and topstitched through all layers.

 I chose very forgiving trim that hid my top-stitches well, which is one of the great contributing factors of the success of this project.  I stitched the top edge of the trim down the same way.


Here's an image of the finished bottom edge, with both rows of trim in place. I love how the hem edge is nice and smooth due to the support of the felt.

The trim needed a good press here, but did lie nicely after it was pressed.

And that's it! At least that's how I did it on this dress.

Ironically, the silly picture shows off the finished hem the best.
Tha's ok. I like the silly picture :)

Hope this was helpful. Happy to answer questions, if you have any :)