Doing the FANDANGO!

A few long weeks ago, the buzz word across the blogosphere was "Fandango!" Specifically it referred to the Fabulous Fabric Fandango, a  fabric shop expedition to London's Goldhawk Road, super-efficiently organised  by Karen of Did You Make That? But you probably already knew that, right? With somewhere between 30 to 40 sewers there on the day, it would be hard to have missed the feedback.
I'm a very late with mine, but I'm pleased to finally share my spoils and my intentions for them.
Like several others I arrived keen to see what Goldhawk Road had to offer and categorically stating that I could not possibly buy any more fabric as I had no storage left and a broken sewing machine.   Of course, if I found a real bargain, or something for Miss Mango's summer wardrobe, that would be okay... 
I actual left most of the dozen shops empty-handed until the end of the afternoon when I whipped back round a few to pick up the fabrics I really wanted.  So what's a sewing blog post without pictures of gorgeous fabrics to drool over? 
     

    Spoils for Mango                                                           Spoils for Molly

Because of the fabric restrictions I had to buy with a purpose, so for everything I bought, I had an idea in my head of what pattern it would be used for. And what's a beautiful fabric without a fabulous pattern to partner it with?
    
Clockwise from left:
Brushed cotton lace fabric, really soft and pretty.  this was a free sample and so generous there is enough to squeeze the cute bolero out of it!  Its 100% cotton so could be dyed.  It is £4.99p from A1 Fabrics but I just found it for £2.50pm in Walthamstow!
Lemon floral needlecord £4pm.  Perfect summer weight and hard-wearing.
Red floral needlecord £3.50pm. So cute, will be making a pinafore dress with it
Patchwork fabric, cotton £3.50pm. 
I want to do something with lots of tea-dyed lace and frills for this a la Daisy Kingdom.  Haven’t quite got the picture in my head or the right pattern  This one might make a starting point.


The trip had a second impact on me and one that Karen may not have envisaged. The second part of the fandango for me was all about the patterns.  I already knew what I wanted and could pretty much lay my hands on them straight away, however as I headed for the pattern box I noticed a few mailing envelopes stuffed with patterns laying on my bedside table. And on the hall stand.  And in my filing in-box.  And on top of the fabric stash.  And in a box in the cupboard under the stairs. About time I filed those I thought.  So I gathered them together and pulled out the pattern boxes (divided into costume, children,  mens and ladies). To discover they were all full if not overflowing.  Ahh.
So I ended up spending two days emptying boxes, dating patterns, adding protective covers, reconsidering my filing system and putting patterns away - in chronological order. And I've yet to go through the costume and fancy dress box.   Thanks Karen!  But the exercise was worthwhile and I pulled a few more cute patterns for Mango to be teamed with fabric fro the overflowing stash:

Hot pink needlecord (ebay) for the pinafore teamed with vintage style cotton (Fabricland £2.22pm) blouse.  Hoping this won’t be too much pink!





Summery gathered cuff dungarees in navy floral brushed cotton.  I’m recycling the fabric from a slip dress I made about 14years ago and haven’t worn in at least 10 years.  Its lovely fabric though and very comfortable for Mango.




Red tartan for the jumper dress. Just hoping it won’t be too large a print and drown the poor girl.  Will see when I’ve laid the pattern pieces on it.



As for my spoils. Well, again I know what I want but this time I have no patterns to match (how can this be?), so I shall be kept busy drafting / adapting / frankensteining patterns to fit my ideas. Here’s the fabric in close-up and a rough idea of how it will end up.
 
Gorgeous floral poly-cotton fabric on an eau-de-nil background £3.50pm.  Idea: Full skirted, tea-length dress with simple, square neckline bodice.  I love the skirt from V2561 and the bodice from V2267.
 
Green floral needlecord £4p.m.  This fabric just pops and I had to have it! Pinafore style tunic length top, very simple and unfussy. S3738 is the closest illustration of what is in my head.

    
Teal blue sand crepe-de-chine, £1.99p.m  This has a lovely weight to it and almost designs itself.  While playing with the fabric I decided to do a long drapey skirt and empire draped surplice bodice. V8360 is more-or-less what I have in mind. 
Gorgeous blue and pale grey tweed fabric.  At £2.50p.m I’m  not anticipating this has much of a wool content but it has a lovely soft drape and great spring/autumn weight.  I know exactly what I want from this having drooled so often over Couturier Dimanche’s beautiful weskit and skirt ensemble (click here).

 
Cocoa brown poly taffeta (with a lovely pink sheen to it) £2.50p.m. Wine coloured viscose stripe fabric (with a metallic thread running through it for sparkle) £2 p.m.  The latter has an incredibly soft drape to it, the picture does it no justice. 
I’m going to use these to make Victorian outfits, I’ve set no decade limitations so I am undecided on patterns, but I have quite a few original drafting instructions as well as the Janet Arnold Patterns of Fashion books and modern costume patterns to draw ideas from.  I also really like these from Ageless Patterns, I’m totally in love with #1181 the blue silk ensemble. 
 

There are also some lovely options at Truly Victorian (shown below). Too many to choose from in fact, it will be a while before I get onto making anything with these fabrics!
   
So with all this luscious booty to choose from, do you have a favourite fabric or pattern?

Trials and Tribulations of The Crucible

The last couple of months of my life have been more or less devoted to the design and manufacture of a stock of late 17th century costume for a production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

It was no easy feat and involved a lot of man power and time, tears, blood (I came out of it looking like I'd gone several rounds with a lion), my first proper sewing machine injury (sewing through the tip of my middle finger, yep that hurts) and sadly it was not without casualties, two sewing machines broke under the pressure, one of them mine, boohoo! :'(

Still I have learned much along the way, in historical and political terms as well as in crafting and found a new passion for natural dyeing which has been immense fun although frustratingly inconsistent.

The design veered sharply away from artists renditions of monochromatic people in collars and cuffs and embraced the colouring techniques, fibres and fashions that would have been available to the populace of Massachussets in 1692.  From wills, testaments, diaries, court records and social writings I discovered that colour was plenty, the scarlet petticoats, sky blue breeches and jackets, purple cloaks and plenty of tans, browns, beiges and fawns.  This gave me a lovely pallette to work from, defying social convention slightly but allowing for the the theatrical means of alluding to mood and character through colour itself.

The accusing girls all worked on variations of brown and yellow, the maids wore cinnamon (dyed) dresses and they were complemented by copper, lemon, yellows and browns. All the cotton and calico was naturally dyed.  Abigail wore changeable silk (how pleased I was to discover this a fabric is use at the time) in shades of red and green to display her passion, anger, bloodiness and envy. The yellows came from various combinations of onions. Tea was also useful in taking the bleached edge off fabric.

These are rehearsal photos, for the correct look the girls should have  had aprons and collars on and we hadn't got round to finishing boning and lacing the bodices for a more structured look (without having to put the girls into stays).

They are based on Simplicity 3723 Pilgrim costumes which includes a stereotypical Thanksgiving Puritan costume in black and white. The pattern really is just a fancy dress nod to the era, using zips and darts so I ended up redrafting all the bodices.  The new bodice draft had no darts, instead shaped at the side-seams, and the zipper was replaced by a modesty panel and back lacing.  I added a full lining to each gown, the bodice lining was boned at intervals and also into the V of the bodice front to support it. Waist-stays were also used to support the skirts.  The skirts were constructed with a nifty short cut that occurred to me late on evening when reading up on cartridge pleating (the correct period way of gathering your skirt).  I attached together the skirt outer fabric and lining at the top, then stitched on 1 inch curtain header tape along the width, pulled the strings and hey-presto, pleated skirt! Saved a lot of time and tears, especially as the skirts still had to be hand sewn onto the bodices.

Abigail's dress had an extra process to go through as the fabric was taffeta lining, so very fine and needed stiffening up.  To do this I layered 3 pieces of of fabric for each pattern part - a red tulle behind the taffeta lining for stiffness, a red organza layer behind the tulle to add drape, prevent the tulle from showing through and give a softer finish.  The tulle was the last fabric I purchased, I found a bargain on eBay - 5m for £4 including postage.  I was more than dismayed to open the parcel and discover it was fluorescent!  Fortunately the organza did a good job of disguising it and I found the bright colour very cheering as I put this dress together. I was pleased to find that I had little problem with the fabrics on the machine and I actually really like this dress, I want to make it again. The only thing I might do differently is to tack each top fabric piece onto the fabric of the next layer and cut it out that way as I found very rarely did my edges match, especially on the skirt pieces. I wanted to do a similar dress for her cousin, Betty and ordered what was described as a yellow-peach taffeta online as couldn't find one locally.  The fabric that arrived was practically orange and not at all what I expected so the dress got scrapped and she ended up wearing the cotton lining instead as her dress!

It was interesting to discover that the Puritans weren't so much into the wearing of rough and practical clothing as we think.  English-origininating Puritans keenly followed European fashions and their regular sea-trade with the "motherland" brought them fabric, garments and trends from England.  They also believed that social position and wealth was divinely attributed, so if God had bestowed it upon you then you were entitled to wear it.  As was common in that period of history (and still is if we think about it), clothing reflected your social status and your income and by the time of the play, after almost 70 years of industrious occupation, many Puritans had become wealthy. Just as celebrities drive fashion today, the lower classes of Puritan society  became desirous of the fashions and fabrics and court records show numerous people arrested for wearing clothing and silks considered "unsuitable" for their social rank! The upshot of this from a costuming point of view meant it was acceptable to use velvet, silk and satins, lawn and muslin, a little lace and contemporary European fashion as a template.


Keeping up with the colour theme, Elizabeth Proctor was also given green to represent her jealousy and fertility, however her costume took a lot more dyeing in the natural dyes than I anticipated and didn't quite get to its desired finished colour. Her bodice which should have been a rich, rusty brown came out looking decidedly sunny with no time to keep re-dyeing it. In the end a substitute was made for her Act 1 dress for practical reasons.  All couples were colour coded though for the aesthetics and audience benefit. You can almost see the back of John's waistcoat is sunny too.

Elizabeth's Act 2 maternity dress was dyed in red onion meat which produces the most gorgeous green colour on smaller amounts of fabric, on her dress it was almost lime-like but the washed-out green somehow suited her long stay in prison and her jaded character.

It was very hard to find any description of maternity wear so I came up with the best approximation I could based on my research.  It is basically a tent, fitted at the shoulders then flaring out from the bust and side laced tohold it in to start and allowing for expansion. The picture on the right is pre-dyeing.  It is made in calico lined with cotton and is incredibly heavy, I couldn't imagine it being practical at all for a genuine maternity dress but it held a certain charm!

Giles Corey was intended to be a fine looking man, he was a wealthy landowner, but this is not really made clear in the text and the actor's portrayal of him, made him much more suited to the crumpled, scruffy look he ended up.  The lovely variations of tone and grey-brown (dare I say, stone coloured) came from oak gall tannin which takes very little time to impart colour.

All the men's jackets were variations of one pattern, Simplicity 4923, which was the closest I could find in period style.  The gores were left out to make it slimmer in shape and the cuffs were modified or removed entirely.  The sleeve construction is interesting to say the least and took several attempts on the mannequin to work out the correct positioning and method of fitting.  Once it was clear in my head it was very quick and easy to churn these jackets out. The facing proved to be crucial to stop the fronts flipping out annoyingly with this pattern.

 The costumes are all going to be overhauled for use in other productions and these jackets should prove useful.  They were made in an assortment of fabrics, velvet, heavy crepe-satin, cotton sateen and calico and all turned out very well.  The velvet, bought on a strict budget, was stretch velvet (at £2.50pm) and while incredibly frustrating to cut and sew, once interfaced and lined, it looked as good as the pricier stuff.

The waistcoat pattern included in S-4923 was lengthened to jacket length and again was quick and easy to make.  If you use the Simplicity pattern, as a caveat, it came up small on all my actors and needed some length adding too for the taller ones. The judges had interfaced waistcoats made in red/block shot satin lining fabric, one in plain, one in brocade bought for £2 a meter in Walthamstow.  Parris' heavy jersey satin jacket fabric, the copper satin and Abigail's dress silk were also from there at the same incredible price.  The buttons, which are very pretty metal and wooden designs come from my favourite ebay button shop, Pretty-Chinese and around 200 buttons came to just over £20 including shipping.

I must admit I had truly under appreciated Walthamstow Market as a source of fabric and notions such as thread, ribbon and tapes until a spate of recent blogging on other sites and desperation to save money on a tiny budget prompted me to go and check it out.  I know I shall be a regular visitor there now, I am still in awe at some of the amazing fabrics, incredible prices and the friendly sellers there.

I hope you enjoyed another whirl-wind tour of another costume design and production.  I am shifting forward 150 years for the next one to the 1840s to 1860s for a production of The Winter's Tale and then probably a few years more for a Victorian styled theatre experience for Peter Pan, somewhere in between I might get round to finishing off my 1950s garments.  When I get my new sewing machine of course...

It appears that Batman has been at my fabric stash....

I pulled out some navy lining for a skirt I'm making, spread it out and this is what I discovered...

I think the last time I used the fabric was for lining a dress, this is how the fabric was left after removing the pieces, don't know how I didn't notice it before!

P.S. Note the beautifully folded and stacked fabric stash in background, most proud of my productive day spent doing that!

In with the New and Out with the Old...

Well that does sound such an anti-vintage thing to say but rest assured the "old" isn't old enough to fall into that category yet!  It simply means I am taking the new year as an opportunity to do some much needed decluttering.

A whole portion of my bedroom has been lost these last few months to an ever growing pile of boxes marked "ebay" and which I have not had the time to attend to but am now addressing! Maybe by February I will be able to get into the cupboards and bookcase again somewhere behind that pile!

My mood has also led to another sort through my pattern collection, there will be a lot going on Etsy when I re-open my shop and I am now looking for the perfect storage system for my patterns, which prompts the question, "How do you store yours?".  I would ideally like my patterns to be stored upright in single file (dividers ok) and flickable. I was thinking of chests of drawers or filing cabinets.  The latter would add some pretty tough protection against rodents, elements and fire but aren't exactly pretty or cheap yet a chest of drawers is going to take up quite a bit of space and I'm not sure where I could fit them... 

Finally I also spent a rewarding day shaking out and refolding all my fabric stash.  Its now sorted according to fabric type, folded in neat bolts and sat back on its shelves looking pretty as opposed to the messy, collapsed piles it had become.

As for the new, I have just treated myself to a new camera, thanks to the generosity of the family and their Amazon voucher gifts, that should arrive midweek so I can finally get taking pictures again.  It's been about 6 months since I had a working camera I think....  Blogging will become illustrated again!

What are you doing to mark the start of your new years?  And have you made resolutions?  I don't usually but I am going to try to organise blogging and sewing time better.  Maybe blog reading over breakfast, sewing in the daytime and blog-writing at night... otherwise I spend far too much time reading other people's fab blogs, inspiring me to rush downstairs and sew only to realise its far too late in the day and there are other things to be done.