The Elusive Vogue 8465

Hello!

At the time of writing, I'm still rather ill. I've set this post to publish in a couple of days though, so perhaps I'm better now. Anyway, I've been whiling away my time reading Gertie's Blog for Better Sewing. It's great; she's got some really good tips and her vintage dresses are lovely! I'm not much of one for using home sewing patterns; I usually draft them myself (with a custom sized bodice block, might I add), but reading her blog has inspired me to start using patterns again. I love drafting, but making three or four toiles is arduous, so by the time I get to the real thing I almost don't want to look at it anymore. I've been toiling a dress for a month during my downtime at uni, and the fabric I'm making it out of is sitting in the flat staring at me. It's driving me insane. I really want to spend some time just sitting and sewing, without any of the finicky I-know-this-pattern-will-work-but-I-have-to-test-it-anyway stuff. I'm a fairly standard size, so I can usually get away with little to no alterations on commercial patterns.

Anyway, the pattern I'm currently lusting after is the elusive Vogue 8465. Okay, it's not *that* elusive, but I can't find it for less than £12 (or $4.99 with $15 shipping). I'm going to have to take a gander around Goldhawk Road and see if it's there. Vogue 8465 is a coat pattern, and it looks like this;

I'll be making View C, the red version. The photo of the real version on the envelope is not nearly as nice, unfortunately;

The skirt section looks especially lackluster; I'll definitely need to flare it out quite a bit, and probably add in some extra seams for the purposes of fitting it onto the fabric. This can only increase the yardage required, which the envelope currently states as 4.8 metres fashion fabric and 4.8 metres lining for size 12! Joy. I've found a fabric I want to make it in; a wool houndstooth, black and white with little bits of sax threaded through it. It's £16/m, though, so this project may have to stay on the back burner for a little bit. I really want to make one in navy with gold buttons, though. Oh, I do love coats. And it's cold here in London, so I feel like I need more of them.

Anyway, that's all from me today. I'll be back soon,
Amy

The Incorrigible Mrs. Wilberforce

So for our current project at uni, we've been studying the playtext of 'The Ladykillers', adapted by Graham Linehan (Father Ted, The IT Crowd) from the 1955 Ealing Studios film of the same name. Our task, for the whole of the Crafts pathway (that's Prop Making, Scenic Art, Scenic Construction and of course Costume Construction) is to re-create a still from the original film;

I'm making the costume for the main character, Mrs. Wilberforce, the woman standing with her back to the audience on the far right. I'm making a blouse, skirt, jabot and wristcuffs, as well as sourcing a belt/buckle and shoes. Although I've been sewing for a couple of years, it's my first time making a custom-fitted garment, and a lot of the methods used in costume are different to the ones I learned at fashion college, so it's been a bit of a learning curve.

The blouse and skirt are coming together nicely. Here's some photos of the toile fitting;

These photos were taken after we made the fit adjustments. There weren't too many, just small things like raising the shoulder a little, widening the collar, lengthening the bodice and adding an inch or so the the waist of the skirt. After talking to the designer, we decided to also add an extra pintuck to the front of the blouse, as it looked a little bare;

This was the second time I toiled the pintucked front - the first time I cut out the wrong side! It was kind of good, though, since the first time my tutor told me to put the pintucks into the fabric and then cut out the pattern piece, but I found that this made it harder to get them in the right place and they came out kinda wonky, so I ended up drafting them into the pattern. After making adjustments to the pattern, I started cutting out in my real fabric, which for the blouse looks like this;

I'm using the wrong side, since the right side is quite yellow in real life, and it clashes with the skirt fabric somewhat, but it's super pretty, if a pain to work with. It likes to move around a lot, so it was hard to chalk-mark. I'm going to be marking the darts and tucks with tailor's tacks.

I also played around with ways to bring out the lilac in the skirt, to hopefully play down the yellow in the blouse. I thought that changing the ribbon on the jabot to lilac (in the film it's salmon) might work quite well;

The little swatch is the skirt fabric. It's a beautiful heavy polyester-pretending-to-be-wool crepe. I love it. I want things made from it. It comes in more colours, like wine and navy, so I'm going to buy myself some and make a nice loliable jacket for the spring with it.

That's all for today. My next post will probably be something about my weekend in Cardiff (and all the things I bought!), and the dress I've been working on recently. Thanks for reading!

Me, Myself, and the 'poor man's Royal Gate'

So, here it goes, the ever daunting first post.

A bit of background about me; my name is Amy, I'm 19 (almost 20, scary!), studying BATP Costume Construction at RCSSD, and living in a little flat in London with my boyfriend. I've been here just over two months, and since I moved, my life has gotten a whole lot more interesting.

I'm supposed to keep a journal as part of my degree, so I thought I'd start this blog. I'm planning on writing about my clothes, both the ones I buy and the ones I make, what I wear and all the weird fun stuff that happens when you go to a London drama school. Seriously, the other day we had a costume department Disney princess sing-along; it was glorious.

I've been pretty ill the last couple of days, so of course that means that, after discovering that playing Godus makes my head hurt (Molyneux's play-dough animation is too much for my addled brain), it's time to start throwing money around. And where better to throw it than at this beauty;



I'm getting the skirt in red (of which there's no sample picture). I love the blue version (and the black, for that matter), but since I have quite a lot of blue in my wardrobe, and a pair of red tights and no dress to go with them, I thought that I should go for the red. It's so pretty!

People have called this skirt the poor man's Royal Gate (that's Moitie's new Iron Gate homage), but I agree with the /cgl/ anon who said it looks more like IW's Rottenburg print, with the gradient and everything. I've always kind of coveted Rottenburg, so this skirt looks great to me!



I placed my order through celestial_delinquent; she's lovely, and accepted my order even though she's on hiatus (I hadn't noticed the message), since it's a pre-order item and I wasn't getting anything else. I used her when I bought my CP petticoats this summer, since I'd heard that she's good at communicating with them and getting them to hurry up with orders, haha. Anyway, she said that the skirt should be ready by around February, sometime after Chinese New Year. I've never done a Taobao pre-order, so I'm hoping it won't be as much of a disaster as Krad Lanrete's pre-orders seem to be. Oh well, I don't mind waiting. It'll be worth it, especially at a total cost of around £50 + shipping.

Anyway, I think I need to get some rest now. I'll be back soon!
Amy

PS, if you want to get in on the pre-order, it's here (and the JSK version is somewhere in the related items section): http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=2013.1.0.0.035Y7m&scm=1007.10011.301.0&id=36367887301