TWO MONTHS & COUNTING

I feel like I need to document how the country’s current “isolate at home” has affected my blog. I was just reminded that my last post was March 16, shortly before we were all going on lock-down from the Covid-19 virus. It seems right that I should at least make mention of that in my blog since I may someday read this and wonder what the heck I was doing for two whole months?

Maybe like many of you, I was hibernating, and worried about when I would next need to go to the grocery store. But then I’m used to being home most of the time, and the only person I see is my hubby, unless I run errands, or visit friends, or vice versa, or go to events or sewing workshops. Hubby was still working and we worried about that every day but he finally was able to work some days from home, which was nice as I would get to have human conversations, rather than with a deaf cat. Both of us have some of the at-risk conditions, and him more so.

I started doing a lot of shopping online, which felt odd buying groceries, and it was rather erratic. And suddenly you find all kinds of things you needed for do-it-yourself. I am currently working up the courage to try cutting my hubby’s hair with a new trimmer, although he said its more of a groomer, not hair trimmer. What the heck does that mean? I’m not a barber, for heaven sake's.

Many of us assumed we would be getting lots and lots of sewing done, and the enthusiasm was high. But then the need for face masks came up, and many of my friend’s lives turned into mask-making factories. I made some for hubby and family but it was depressing to me with all the stress of needing them done NOW.

As events and fashion shows began to be cancelled, all the dresses I had planned on making, or were finishing, suddenly seemed useless. My incentive left me. I packed things away that I was going to work on. I had started an 1890s wrapper using Folkwear #208 Calico Day Dress. My rationale told me to keep working on that since it could be worn any time, and not a specific event. So, I got the body of it together and stopped. 

I thought I would have lots of time to to work on my plans for a Gala dress for Costume College, but that soon disappeared, since I knew the event would probably be cancelled for the end of July. Sure enough it was, and I still believe it was a good decision. I was going to recreate a Charles F. Worth dress using a cream and gold Chinese brocade my mom had given me, that my dad had brought to her in the 1950s from Hong Kong. I had already bought my sapphire blue silk taffeta, and had an antique white taffeta in my stash. I still haven’t found the lace I want to use for it, but then I guess I have time now? Costume College has been rescheduled for around the same time next year, with all the same event themes in place.

Every once in awhile I would pull out some of the colorful cottons I had for making the little girl dresses for Dress a Girl Around the World (DAG), and could pick those up, work a little, then set them down, using very little brain cells. I spent two days just whipping up a bunch of the skirts, and then organizing coordinating fabrics for trimmings and the yokes. My friend Cindy and I were lucky in that we had large boxes of quilters fat quarters donated to us last year for making these dresses. It was an amazing box of color coordinated cottons, about half of a 1/4 yard. I gave away a lot of the ones that couldn’t be used for dresses to two ladies in my neighborhood who needed fabric for making masks.

With all that fabric, each piece was not big enough to make a dress with, so I sewed strips of similar colors together to create a skirt. I think I ended up with seven of them, and have still more strips ready to sew together still. I called these my Mardi Gras Collection, since they were so colorful.

I went back to working on my wrapper dress for a couple days, and got the ruffled yoke attached to it, then sewed up the big ruffle that’s supposed to be sewn along the hem line, and stopped. Baby steps. I tried creating a pattern and directions for a project I had started but it wasn’t working for me. I had to set that aside.

Around this time in April, I also broke out in a rash over my eye and was in pain. It looked like some kind of infected bug bite. I was totally shocked when I went to Urgent Care and they told me I had shingles. Ugh. They said they’d seen a couple cases coming in recently. I guess we’re all under a lot of stress but I really didn’t think I was that much. What was I to know? After starting a high dose of anti-viral medication and lots of Advil, I was a little foggy trying to do anything. I had a lot of friends commiserating with me, telling me how painful it was. But I think because mine was on my face, and no clothing touching it, it didn’t seem as bad as others had experienced. The spikes of pain, which I found out are from the nerve endings, was probably the worst. Oh, and the swelling around my eye. I thought I looked like Quasimodo from the Hunchback of Notre Dame. I was grateful that we were on lockdown as I didn’t even want hubby to see me each day.

After a few days, the pain began to slow down, and the fogginess to go away. Still not having a lot of enthusiasm, I went back to my DAG dresses, and cut lengths of fabric for skirts, and whipped up about 12 of them. Then each day I would pick one, and put some contrasting fabrics with it for the yoke, hem, and pockets. These became more fun, and I guess some self-help for my stress. Either way, I became productive to a point and have been finishing about one a day.

I had been working on these dresses for the last year and a half, and lost some momentum at the end of last year due to events coming up. But I can proudly say I just finished #36. Its likely my friend Shelley’s trip with her church to Uganda in November to take all the dresses everyone has made will be cancelled until later but I have high hopes I may hit 50.

The other night, while half asleep, my costuming brain came alive again, and said, “hey, why don’t you start your Mrs. Santa outfit you already have the fabric for?”. And it came up with the idea of wearing a red beret rather than a Santa hat. So, I went online and found one I love, which won’t be here until late July, which is fine.

I have been sharing dresses from my Make Me file (those "dream dresses" you're just dying to make, I have 259 of them) on Facebook each day, just to share something pretty, and remembered that I had wanted to make a new 1860s dress, and after seeing the pattern from Truly Victorian #452 that I wanted to make, I pulled out three fabrics from my stash that I had bought for ones, and plan to cut them all out on an assembly line, then work on whichever one strikes me at the time.

So, we’ll see what happens in the next month or so as the Summer of Covid-19 continues. Stay safe everyone!

1870s BLACK & WHITE DALMATIAN BUSTLE

I’m not totally back to sewing normality yet, as our halls and rooms are still full of boxes needing to be unpacked, but I needed a little normalcy in my life. With Costume College looming at the end of July, I just had to get going on the one dress I wanted to make, especially since I’d bought all the accessories for it, and fabric. Since the accessorized outfit will be a one-time wear, it needed to get made. My dress, however, is going to be able to be worn in in the future. That’s my thing. I won’t make a one-time only dress, especially with all the work and money that goes into it. This is turning out to be fun.

There are many theme-inspired groups on our Facebook page, and the one I liked was “Once Upon a Bustle”, a Disney-themed idea. Any bustle dress but made to follow a Disney character. My friend Cindy was originally going to be Cruella Deville from 101 Dalmatians. Since I had been saving a dress for inspiration, although from the 1890s, it gave me an idea of doing a “Dalmatian bustle”. I’d still like to make that 1890s dress someday though.

Prior to our moving, I got really industrious and came up with a plan to make my own dotted fabric since I couldn’t find any in the stores or online that were a light weight, like voile or linen. So I started planning on stamping quarter-sized dots on my fabric. I looked through my swatch book from Costume College for the linen that I thought would work, and decided on an Irish linen, which I bought from Em-Bee Fabrics in the LA Fabric District.

I did a lot of questioning from friends what the best paint was to use for this, and bought one bottle each of DecoArt Americana & So Soft black, and a bottle of Ceramcoat Delta Textile Medium. Both worked the same with the textile medium, although the Americana is cheaper. I bought a set of foam cylinders to do the stamping with and picked the quarter-size one to use.

I had 10 yards to stamp dots on so it was going to take a LOT of paint, and a LOT of time. Then I had to decide do I cut the pattern first, then stamp, or stamp the fabric, then cut? I decided on cut first. Before stamping, I did a lot of testing on strips of the fabric. I started out using too much paint, then not enough. I was getting worried, and I didn’t want to ruin my expensive fabric.

For one week I was having the inside of my house painted, and I *thought* this would be a good time to find a corner and just stamp away. But in reality, it was so chaotic here, that I couldn’t even concentrate, and I would have to keep being moved all over. So I gave up and binge-watched Game of Thrones from the beginning. Yeah, I’m bad. I’d only seen the first 3 seasons, and now all 7 seasons were over. It had been so long since I’d watched it, I decided to start at the beginning. And this time it made more sense and I was able to get a handle on all the wonderful characters.

People started posting about how many days were left until Costume College began. But I couldn’t get up the enthusiasm I’d had before to do all that stamping. And then I’d still need to sew it. *sigh* I still wanted this to happen though. I went back to look at some links Cindy had sent me from Amazon for fabrics and most were either too small of dots or a stiff type of fabric. I finally found one that was a cotton-polyester for $4 yard. I ordered it on a Monday and it arrived on Thursday!! It was so soft and perfect! 

Now some pressure was off. But I still couldn’t get to it because now I had to put my house in order after all that painting. It seemed like every time I emptied boxes in the hallway, hubby would bring more in from the garage. It was like a reverse Black Hole.

Meanwhile I decided to run away from home one day and went to a sewing workshop for the Dress a Girl program that Shelley Peters hosted. After hearing that the older girls just wanted long skirts, I had bought about 6 fabrics at the Walmart $3 sale and worked on my first one. Then over a week’s time I got 7 of them done. But now the serious sewing needs to begin.

This last week I finally began to feel a little less stressed, and laid the fabric out to be cut. I still don’t have my new cutting table assembled. Its in the garage somewhere. So I used my dining table. It still took about 4 days for me to get around to start cutting it.

I’d say I have about 35 days to work on this, especially since it looks like I might have to make a pair of 1920s white wide-leg pants to go with a Miss Fisher outfit I want to wear for the Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries theme day. I made it even easier on myself with that and found a gorgeous long yellow knit jacket to use for it.  I just wished I could find the pants to buy. I’ve never made pants before, and my hip-hugger ones I made in class in high school doesn’t count. I have a black pair, and if I’m able to finish the black and white jacket I started, I would have a second outfit. Or just wear a teal knit jacket I have. Hmmmm… less work….

Back to my Dalmatian bustle: I wanted an 1870s polonaise that closed all the way down in the front and it seemed the easiest thing to do was use a previously-made pattern and shorten the polonaise, Truly Victorian #410. And I liked the style of the dresses from the series, The Buccaneers. I even have enough fabric to make a ruffle around the bottom.

Cutting began this weekend, and once that is all done, the sewing should go together pretty fast since I’ve made this about 5 times already. The accessories are what’s going to make this a Dalmatian bustle. Using the pictures from the book, I’m going to have a blue belt around the waist, and make a “dog collar” like Perdita's of blue ribbon with a small gold medallion I hope I can find at Michael’s.

Dog ears! I found this on etsy. Its cheap, and nicely made, and perfect for a one-time costume. A few months ago, I found this Disney Dalmatian stuffed animal for sale on ebay. So if its not REALLY obvious just what I am, LOL, this will help.

And if I have time, I bought some of this Disney Dalmatian fabric to make a simple tote to carry my class things in. We’ll see if that happens.

*Yesterday I got the skirt sewn together. But today I need to unpack some more boxes, so stay tuned.

                          Chloe, “Queen of the World”, surveying her domain.

                                                                 ~~~Val~~~