Two Hours to Paisley Paradise

Time out for a mundane project!  (Yes, the corset proceeds apace).  This, like the pincushion, was a quick project I'd been meaning to get around to for ages.  It started with this:

A paisley silk sarong I bought from Victoria's Secret about twelve years ago.  It's been to the Bahamas and back, Florida, and New Mexico, and has served as a skirt, beach cover-up, and tablecloth for like three different tables.  It's got wax stains on it, and teeny tiny burn holes, and the little plastic beads that once graced the corners had long since peeled and fallen off.  I still loved it, but it had been relegated to sitting in a drawer for the past year or more.  

And then I saw this on Pinterest: 

And this:  

And after about a year of procrastination (sensing a theme here), and then a 2-hour flurry of work last night, this is what happened: 

The edge trim, belt, and belt loops are all made from a dark blue polyester charmeuse curtain panel I picked up at a thrift store a million years ago for like a dollar, hehe.  

In fact...I may make another little robe like this out of the rest of the blue curtain panel.  

I didn't use a pattern for this;  I made it the same way I make Sir Takuan's kosode and kataginu: 

A rectangle of fabric, folded in half (or two, sewn at
the shoulders), slit up the center front and bound
with a straight double-fold [bias] strip.  The kosode
is sewn at the sides (red dotted line) and knee or ankle
length;  the kataginu is open at the sides and usually
only hip length.  My robe is made kosode-style, with
added belt loops in the side seams. 

P.S. - yes, I patched the teeny tiny burn holes. 

.

The Dragonfly Process

Because the first question people ask me when they've seen the new Japanese outfit I made for Takuan (you remember Takuan) is "did you make these?  wait - how did you do that??"  I figured I'd make a blog entry about it, since I've spent all week working on these.

In place of the six lions down the lapels of his jin-baori, as with the yellow and gold Caerleon outfit linked above, I did six mon, the circular embroidered designs (patches, in this case) running down the front of the garment, which bear a form of his SCA device.

All of these images can be enlarged by clicking on them.

I started with a red silk fabric with gold-colored dragonflies already woven into it.  This circle was cut so that it had one fly already in it, to save myself a bit of work.  I ironed a scrap of lightweight interfacing onto the back, and satin-stitched around the design to make it look appliquéd on the way the others will be.

All six of them are done, here.

you can see I've also run a loose zigzag around the edge of the circle, to keep it from unraveling.  This is some seriously unravely fabric.

Sometimes my camera is really badass.

The rest of the flies - all twelve of them - had to be cut from the fabric and ironed onto an interfacing backing...

...  and then cut free of the surrounding fabric, leaving a small border of red around each fly to carry the satin-stitching yet to come...

...which is what's happening here.

I have to say, at this point, that this new sewing machine is CRAZY AWESOME.  It's fast, it's quiet, it's smooth - seriously, these things went together in about twenty minutes apiece, once all the prep was out of the way (interfacing, making the circles, etc.).  On my old machine they took an hour EACH.

Also, I didn't notice until I saw this picture that I'd forgotten to put on the special foot I'm supposed to use when I'm satin-stitching. Oops!

Finally!   Obviously the circle isn't really straight, but I can't trim it just yet.

First I had to clip all the loose threads.  Next was to iron a circle of heavier interfacing onto the back, since, as you can see, the fabric is kinda wibbly.

Before I did that, I should have gone over the front and clipped off all the little hairy fabric bits that stuck out of the satin-stitching, but I can still go back and do that when I straighten out the circles before I put them on the garment.


And what are these going onto?

Well, this, for one thing.  Or rather, something like it.

The set of patches featured here are actually the second set - the ones for this black and red outfit were the first.  the second set went a lot more smoothly, since the first set was the proverbial $4M ashtray (West Wing reference; r&d and experimentation are the hard part.  Now I know what I'm doing).

The black and red outfit was done in August of this year.  It was a bit of a surprise, so I hadn't posted about it yet.  But here you go.  It's basically the same thing as the Caerleon samurai outfit (linked at the beginning of this post), but with sleeves...and...obviously...a different color.  The helmet, armor, and weaponry were all made by Takuan himself.




.

And Now For Something Completely Different

As I mentioned in the recent month-in-review post, in February I got the opportunity to create part of a Japanese outfit for a friend of mine, for Gulf Wars.   His persona is that of a 14th-century (Ashikaga period) Samurai warrior.  He's also a member of a fighting company/household whose colors had to be taken into account, and a Centurion (an Ansteorran grant-level fighting order), the insignia for which also needed to be worked into the garment.  Whew!

The piece I made is called a jin-baori, which later evolved into the kataginu. It's a sort of loose, sleeveless vest, tied in the front and split at either the back or the sides, which Japanese men wore over their kimonos, with thier hakama (the big "Samurai pants").

In this picture, instead of the kimono underneath, he's wearing a padded armor shirt that he made himself.  (He also created the black leather armor with red lacings that's visible through the front of the jin-baori, and the helmet in the second picture!)  The hakama were made by another friend of his.

The black panels down the front are a wide lapel which is turned back to reveal, in this case, the black lining in the garment, which is appliqué'd with six white lion heads, which are the symbol of his fighting company.

Black and gold are also part of the company's colors - and also the colors of our kingdom.  The 10-pointed star on the back of the jin-baori is also the kingdom badge.

The red displayed eagle on the lower right of the back, with another black 10-pointed star in the center of it, is the badge of the Centurions.  Their usual livery includes a red cloak with a gold eagle and black star; it would have been a bit much to wear the full Japanese kit with the Romanesque Centurion cloak, so we incorporated the Centurion badge into the jin-baori, and reversed the color scheme.


This was SO much fun to work on.  I believe there are going to be one or two more of these coming up this year, for this same person.  I can't wait to work on it again. :)



.