mandie_rw | Entries tagged with hat chatter

Finished Robin's hat yesterday - I sent her pics but I won't show The Internet At Large yet, til the hat's on her head. It's extremely ridiculous though. My text to her involved "I really hope you wanted to wear a bucket of flowers on your head LOL." It's...a bit much for my taste but that should mean it's just about right for the recipient. ;)

Also worked on my hat a bit today - covered the underside of the brim with silk, and since my ostrich drabs showed up in the mail this afternoon I started curling them. I should have gotten the next size up - these are only 12" - but that's what happens when you order feathers at midnight, oops. That's fine, I can work with 12".

Also cut out my size of the TV 1898 jacket pattern. Was going to make a mockup, but after pinning the easy-pattern pieces together I decided it looks like they fit, let's live dangerously. I still want to make a mockup of the sleeve though, since that sleeve head is Large and In Charge! I know 1898 still has a fairly gathered sleeve head but this seems a leetle bit much.

And yes, I am going to have a million unfinished pieces of outfit instead of an outfit...why do you ask?

Current Mood: sleepy
Crossposts: https://mandie-rw.livejournal.com/647931.html

If we want to call it a shirtwaist? Vest? Sleeveless thingie? Circa 1900 tank top? I decided I see no sense in putting sleeves on something I'm planning to wear a jacket over, so it's gonna be sleeveless.

Also I can't find my shirtwaist pattern so I just cut shapes out of a piece of lawn and am hoping for the best.

And I decided to do some insertion! Mainly because I couldn't think of any other way to make a white lawn waist look less terribly boring with what I had on hand...I was going to use some of the swiss dot I bought on sale a couple of years ago...but I can't find it. (How do you lose 10 yards of swiss dot? I dunno, I'm talented. Also highly messy.) So, lawn it is. I may do some pintucks on the shoulders, once I see how it fits. If it needs them. We shall see. And, as promised when I talked about the drawers, these lines of insertion I'm finishing by hand. I even measured and pinned the lace on! They still managed to be slightly uneven (if you look at where the outside line of lace falls on the shoulder seam on each side? yeah, uneven), but for something that's going to be worn under a jacket, I ain't fussed. Someday I make a nice turn-of-the-century waist, with finer lace, and then I'll actually starch and baste and mark lines and shit, but this item's still something of a practice run. And while the lace is cotton, it's not all that nice.

Oh, and I also hit up a couple of thrift stores today, amongst my running of errands, and snagged a ridiculously pink hat to be the base for Robin's c1900 hat. She may regret giving me free rein... It's like 1990s-Barbie-pink. It's wonderfully awful. (And it's a good shape, which is really the main reason I picked it up. I'll need to reshape the brim and maybe wire it, but other than that it's only about 10% off the shape I'd make if I were starting from scratch...which is pretty damn good.)

Current Mood: mellow
Crossposts: https://mandie-rw.livejournal.com/647136.html

- At this point in time, I feel moved to almost offer my condolences to those of you going to Costume College; you guys seem so stressed! (Not all of you...but a lot.) I guess when you're a veteran it's worth it...? but as someone who's never been, it sounds pretty miserable at this point!

- Beige print bodice of never-ending-ness and its silly cuffs are done, although not in time to get pics today. Hurray! This damn thing's dragged on waaaaay too long (long enough that I'm tired of the bottom half before I ever got to wear the top half!).

- I've gotten fairly tired of my red spoon bonnet (yes, I'm still keeping Gettysburg in mind, even as I work on Belvidere); after all, I've been wearing it since 2011! I still love the color (shocking I know), but it was a synthetic, albeit a decent one, and it's fairly crap construction-wise, involving a polyester lining and even *gasp* glue. I know. 2011 was a long time ago. *grin* But I sternly told myself I wasn't allowed to replace it unless I sold it off first. Amazingly, somebody bought it (actually two somebodies tried to buy it), and I sent it off today. So that'll just about pay for the two yards of taffeta to cover and trim the new one! Well, it'll be two yards if I go with the navy option, as I would trim that in pink...but I keep coming back to a brick red and copper shot that's baaaaasically the same color as the bonnet I just got rid of! I might have a fixation on dark reds, you guys.

(The solution here is obviously to make two bonnets. Ha ha ha.)

Current Mood: okay
Crossposts: http://mandie-rw.livejournal.com/604821.html

Not terribly productive today, but I did cut the flannel for mulling (three different colors LOL), and the main fabric for the hat. Which, since I happened to pull some scraps of velveteen out of the bin while I was digging for flannel, is going to be said velveteen rather than the hunter/navy silk. It's a kind of chestnut-brown cotton velveteen - and is the remnants of my second-ever dyeing project, ten years old at this point! I honestly don't remember what I originally wanted to do with it, but the scraps are the remnants of gored, awfully French-seamed panels. So, some kind of skirt thing?? Most of it ended up being a tragically-fitted 1570s doublet at one point, I do remember that.

So I had just enough to squeak out the fabric for this hat! An amusing end to that fabric, I think.

Current Mood: amused
Crossposts: http://mandie-rw.livejournal.com/570937.html

Working on

sewloud's 1830s bonnet for New Castle, because there aren't a million other things I could do instead, right? (But it's probably good to get commissions done first!) I did the part I really don't like today: wiring and binding the edges of the buckram pieces. And hit myself in the facewith millinery wire once or twice, which is always fun. I'll sew the pieces together and then maybe work on something else for a bit, if the fingers need a break. We'll see.

Current Mood: sleepy

Finished

hiraimi's bonnet today, and spoiled the surprise of the color for her, mainly because I took a couple of stupid pictures and couldn't resist showing them off.

It's a French hood from The Tudors! It's a Regency bonnet brim worn backwards! Dual-duty!

It's a lampshade!

(And it's actually dark red, not that you'd know it from those pics.)

Current Mood: silly

Wah, swimming is done! Yeah, all the Olympic events are impressive, but let's be honest, I'm mostly here for the swimming. (And I'll only really believe Michael Phelps is retiring when he isn't on my tv in four years in Tokyo...)

I had a baby shower to go to, and work right after that, so I didn't have much crafty time today. I did cut out hat bits though - I remembered I had one more woven straw blank (easy to forget it, as it was squashed under several bags of crap) so I'm cutting that up and backing it with a layer of buckram. So we'll see what happens with that.

I should be able to get a good chunk of it done tomorrow, as I'm off work, and refuse to go outside, as the heat index is supposed to be around 106F. Currently it's 89/feels like 100. At 11.30 at night. I WILL STOP COMPLAINING ABOUT THE WEATHER WHEN THE WEATHER STOPS SUCKING.

Current Mood: hot

I finished the soft-crown Regency bunnit I've been poking at, but didn't take any pictures yet because I am super good at this "at least attempt to sell your crap" thing. The flowers on top ended up slightly off-center, but I decided that could totally be a deliberate design choice, and therefore left them there. I actually think it's very cute, and almost want to keep it for myself...the danger of only making things to sell that you like!

Also finally gave in to the fact that it's winter, and I cannot in fact sew in an un-insulated room any more, so had to drag the sewing machine in and set up all my paraphernalia on the dining room table. Grumble grumble grumble. Good thing we have a large table, and never have Real Sit-Down Dinners or anything, so I don't have to clean it all up unless company's expected! Sewed up all the various bits of buckram that have been hanging around for the last week while I pretended I was going to sew in my very cold sewing room, including the brim of another soft bonnet. Mainly because I cut out the crown of red silk to go with the latest straw brim that'd been bound in that red, and then realized having the binding and crown of the same color with a straw brim had a whiff of farbiness about it that I disliked. So a crown of cream silk went with that brim, and I may as well use the red crown before I lose it! It's very brilliantly red and fairly obnoxious, so I'm not keen on having 2/3 of my bonnet offerings involve it, but maybe the solution to that is make bonnets a little faster, eh?

Well that was a nice stream of consciousness! I think I'm getting sleepy...

Current Mood: okay

I probably could have finished a bonnet today if I didn't decide I just had to trim it in the same silk I made the brim binding out of, as nothing else looked nice. Commence eternal hemming of ties.

I even got my box o'ribbon fun in the mail today, and none of them were satisfactory for this bonnet! I so picky. But it is a very nice box o'ribbon indeed. Mostly moire, a few satins.

I also probably could have gotten more bonnet done today, but I felt the need to watch at least one Alan Rickman movie. (Snif.) Figured at least Sense & Sensibility was relevant to my interests.

Current Mood: sad

Well there went my post-every-day-this-year streak. Lasted, what, 11 days? Clearly I am no

koshka_the_cat! ;)

Probably the most exciting thing I did was to buy a very respectable variety of moire ribbons to stick on hats, which isn't really that exciting to anyone, including me, until I actually get said ribbon in the mail. I have, I think, four? five? hat-things in progress at the moment (alright, one of which is for me), some of which are straw and thus still very sadly waiting for me to order sizing. Which is okay, because I realized I should probably also buy some boxes I can actually mail bonnets in. The ones I bought originally fit the flat/mushroom 18thc hats fine, but not so much bonnets. Hurrrrrrr.

sewloud is both continuing her obnoxious headwear streak and keeping me in business, with an orange tall 18-tens bonnet in the works. Although she never gives me deadlines, so if it's not done til 2017 I will not be held wholly responsible. ;)