I'm starting a new wardrobe re-fit project, like the one I did with my Viking clothing last year, and my Florentine outfits the year before. The first two were about making both sets of clothing more period-appropriate and replacing worn-out pieces. This time around, I'm pretty much replacing my entire Gothic wardrobe. Most of it is 4-6 years old, faded, worn out, and none of it fits me correctly anymore.
I started with making over
the blue velveteen cotehardie, which you can read about here. After having tried a few different versions of my cotehardie pattern in
the past couple of years, I decided that I really loved the way the blue
velveteen fits better than anything else I've tried, so I've gone back
to that one. I drafted a new pattern from the blue velveteen and ran a couple of mock-ups to make sure it would work.
The next step was making two new cotehardies with that new-old pattern, both from stash fabric. This pink one is plain linen, with bodice and sleeves lined in white linen, and buttoned in front and on the sleeves.
You can see where the bodice lining stops in this picture, because the fabric is so light! I have a white underdress that I plan to wear with it, though, which cleans that up when it's actually on me, thank goodness. That'll become an issue when it gets hot later this year, though, especially with the lining already in the top half of the dress. I may go back and line the skirt; or I may just make a plain, white, linen underskirt that I can wear with more things than just this.
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| "original" |
Finishing this dress involved some color changes. First, I tweaked the color of a dress a little bit by dyeing it in a bath of plain, black tea. The pink was a little bit too bright and Easter-egg-y for me; I really prefer a more ballet-slipper pink color like you'd get from a natural dye. The tea toned down the pink to something more like you'd get with madder and less like Paas.
Photographing pink is hard. The picture at left is NOT a good representation of the actual color of the fabric; but it does a pretty good job of illustrating the difference the tea staining made in the fabric. This fabric came from
Fabric-Store.com; their photo of the fabric
(here) is pretty close to its actual color. The real finished color is kind of on the line between pink and pale peach.
This is actually pretty close.
Stupid pink. Stupid camera.
It's weird for me, wearing pink. I think in my life I've only ever owned like three pieces of pink clothing. I really love this dress, though.
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Top: single coat of polish (left); two coats (right)
Bottom: unpolished buttons (left) and after two coats (right) |
The second adjustment was in the buttons. I had some 5/8" silver buttons with a pretty compass rose design on them that were almost perfect with this dress, except that they were a really dark, cool, silver tone. A couple of coats of gold nail polish ("I Married A Gold Digger", by Orchid Nail Laquer) took care of that:
(This is the dress, by the way, on which I used the Washi tape to help me with the buttonholes, which I talked about briefly last week).
What's Next?
Candlemas is tomorrow. After that it's all Gulf Wars all the time until March 11th. I'll be finishing a second new cotehardie, altering and updating a couple of older ones, sprucing up some accessories and making some new ones, and talking about a whole bunch of changes going on with my campsite arrangements for both myself and for Caerleon.
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