standgale's Journal

5:06pm: 14th - 16th Century Clothing
I've been reading about common women's clothing from the 14th to 16th Centuries, and looking at some pictures (online, since I don't know what books might be useful for such a thing) and I am still confused, very confused. I think I've found a reasonable looking style of pattern for a dress with no waist seam - one that is mostly rectangles and triangles.
I still don't understand how people of the time knew what shapes to cut the material for these clothes. Maybe they made a rough approximation of rectangle pieces and then tried it on and someone pinned it so that it was fitting at the waist and around the arms, and then it was either just sewn like that or those little bits were cut away.
In any case, I think I am going crazy with these clothes.

1:19pm: Current Project
At the moment I am wanting to make common women's clothing from Europe, mostly England, from the 15th and 16th centuries. And then I will wear them as everyday clothes, because I am weird like that. They will be semi-historically accurate. Eg. I am half-way through the smock, which is accurately hand sewn in linen from a pattern in the book The Tudor Tailor, but inaccurately pink because pink is what I had and linen is very expensive. As is wool, unfortunately as that is the other fabric I need.
Since I might post pictures on some LJ community, I shall cross-post it here when I do.

11:31am: I Made Something that is like Real Clothes
Maybe I'll have a picture soon, but in the last week I made my first thing that really felt like real clothes. I thought I'd record the landmark. I've made about 3 dozen items of clothing that I do wear, but none of them quite seem right. This item, a top, I made the pattern myself, made the garment and it fits quite well, is more or less as I imagined and is well finished without stupid annoying things that aren't right. It just feels different somehow. I wonder when/if this feeling shall happen again!

8:58pm: Contrary Silliness with our Hedge
We had to cut our hedge back from the pavement, because apparently it was "encroaching". Meh, whatever.  I hate it when people tell me what to do, don't you?


See my blog for very slightly more information.

11:11pm: Perfect Creature
We just saw this movie "Perfect Creature". It was the NZ premiere, apparently. It had too much gross stuff like blood and bleeding and injury for me, but otherwise it was cool because a lot of it was filmed in the city in which I live and in a nearby town's heritage Victorian District (a couple of streets) where I have been 4-5 times now. They did some very nice stuff merging real buildings with computer generated stuff. Eg. The building across from my work that I can see out of the window (the old central post office) is about 7 storeys high. In the movie there's the building, and then there's another 30 floors that they've made up. It looks pretty cool. That was kind of amusing because they just bought it to turn it into a hotel - I think it was bought by Hilton - and struggled to get resource consent to add one floor on top :D
The movie is vampires, and a bit of steam-punk. Strangely, we only saw two goths at it, which is weird because it is clearly a gothic kind of movie, and last year there were tonnes of goths at a quite non-gothic film. I like to see goths to get fashion tips. Last time I saw a woman wearing 14-pair eyelet boots Dr Martin boots in white, and I bought some later after getting my full-time job :) The producer and writer were at the performance and they gave a bit of a speech and answered some questions afterwards. I love to see movies where you get to clap.

( Cut to see picture of the boot )

10:24pm: Paid for Sewing
I'm kind of emabarrassed to post this here, since the only people I know on LiveJournal are sewers and corset makers, and this is similiar to a corset... But I swear it's not my fault that I followed the instructions of a commercial pattern! I didn't know that it would be awful and tell me to do terrible things!



See my blog autumn zebra from more pictures and details. Click to go to the blog post.

6:33pm: First Victorian Dress
Despite my main blog being over at blogger (Autumn Zebra) then I intend to post pictures of stuff here, and those interested can go there and look for more information if they wish.
This is my Victorian costume that I made about 8-9 months ago, and only just got pictures of. It includes a corset, a mostly improvised chemise, a petticoat based on something vaguely genuine I think, and a small bustle pad that needs more stuffing. The style of dress is actually from the earlier bustle era I think, so should have more "bum". But I don't think I knew this at the time. This is the first I made of all the things involved, and was more expensive than I wanted it to be, even though all material was on special and no more than $5/m (NZ). These things are just expensive it seems.

10:48pm: In case anyone actually expects me to have a journal here...
I only have a live-journal account to read and post in various communities. I have a blog at: http://autumnzebra.blogspot.com/