| Put him on the fastest scout ship available and send him here. No flight plan is to be filed. |
| That’s against Bureau standing orders, Commissioner. |
| Who do you think wrote those orders, Borr? I did. So do as I say, and do it now. (source) |
So, what on earth, or should I say … off earth, is going on here?
Well, we are going to a Sci-fi party, and it’s been a while since I made something ridiculously glamorous so I decided to embrace my inner superbitch, and go as Supreme Commander Servalan. This requires some mega-fabulous frocking up and I get to behave like an obnoxious vamp all evening.
DOUBLE WIN! I can hardly wait! 😀
“I find unsophisticated clothes quite amusing. Like unsophisticated people. Obvious, but amusing.” (Servalan)
It’s been a while since I clapped eyes on Servalan doing her evil thang on the small screen… I checked out this video and also this one for a trip down memory lane, and to re-acquaint myself with her style. She has the most amazing and dramatic wardrobe. I chose this dress above from out of the plentiful fabulosity. It’s winter here. It’s cold. I want to be covered up!
I bought some cheap and rather temperamental silver-foiled, slightly stretchy stuff from Spotlight and two packets of crystal beads in different sizes and got drafting. I drafted the pattern myself and have provided more extensive details below, if anyone is interested in all that technical mumbo jumbo 🙂 but basically I used the idea behind the gathered hole design from Pattern Magic.
Speaking of Pattern Magic, I received an email from Anna-Brit, who is curating The Pattern Magic Index. This site is aiming to bring together makers and enthusiasts of the series with images of people’s creations and link-backs. If you have used any of the books in the Pattern Magic series to make things and would like to be included on the site, then send her an email at thepatternmagicindex(at)gmail(dot)com.
Drafting and construction details:
I started out with my custom fit Tshirt pattern and spliced it with my plain little skirt pattern, and lengthened; to get a front and back. Then cut out a portion from the side front to be the flat beaded section at the waist. The remaining portion is cut and splayed out as per the gathered hole instructions in Pattern Magic 1.
The back is quite plain and featureless, basically a fitted Tshirt dress. Like Servalan’s dress, the skirt has a long slit in one side, for walking ease. Unlike Servalan’s, which has a centre back zip, mine has enough stretch for it to be a pull-over the head affair.
The sleeves are based on my plain Tshirt sleeve, with the side seams tapered out in a gentle arc to a wide wrist, in a bell shape.
The neckband is a plain rectangle, cut to fit the neckline measurement, and sewn on using this method. It is interlined with a piece of old cotton towelling, cut from a (clean) old towel. Sounds deeply unglamorous, right?! but I didn’t have any batting on hand which, yes, would have been ideal, and didn’t want to spend money on invisible things like that in a costume and the towelling was the perfect thickness and stiffness for the job. It is securely stitched to the neckband facing around all its edges on the inside.
The beaded section is done on two layers of the fabric for stability, and then with a layer of plain woven white cotton sewn underneath, to contain all the threads and for extra strength.
Being so shiny it’s hard to tell, but the fabric is actually almost sheer! so I made a little attached slip/liner dress as well, using the same pattern pieces, shortened and the front without the gathered feature, obviously. This is attached to the shell of the dress at the armscyes and the neckline, and conceals those gathering edges and that white bead-backing fabric inside.
I didn’t hem the sleeves or the hemline. The fabric is blessedly not frayable, and anyway, it’s a costume!! I will be lucky if I get to wear it more than a handful of times, really.
I have a little anecdote about this fabric too… we have a History. About twelve years ago I put up my hand to make half of about fifty costumes for little girls, including Cassie, performing an Abba number in a dance recital, and this was the exact same fabric I was given to work with along with the breezy advice to “just run them up on the overlocker”. I didn’t have an overlocker back then, so borrowed my sister-in-law’s brand new overlocker.
Man!
That experience nearly put me off overlockers for life! There is just something about this fabric … I destroyed almost one whole costume’s worth of fabric, just trying to get the settings for this fabric right on the overlocker. Nothing seemed to work. Either the seam was too loose and looked wobbly, bobbly and like a messy nest of loose and tangled threads; or too tight and threads were snapping left, right and centre. I re-threaded that machine countless times. Luckily it was not my own machine, if it had been mine I might even have heaved it into the bin in a rage…. When I finally hit on a setting that gave me a nice neat looking seam with no bobbly bits anywhere; the seam would just pull quite wide apart when any pressure was put on it. I was tearing my hair out. Finally, I hit upon a plan of attack; I overlocked using the setting that “looked” real nice but pulled apart under pressure, which was for “looks” only, then went back over every seam with my regular sewing machine using a straight stitch, which was actually holding the seam together.
Finally, success!
Just before the dance recital, I surreptitiously checked out the costumes made by the other lady … and they all had the pulling-wide-apart seams! I was new and didn’t want to rock any boats so just kept quiet and hoped for the best. Luckily no little girls’ costumes fell apart on stage!
Obviously, I sewed this dress using the described double-sewing method 😉
