Livia's Zimarra

I just realized that I hadn't posted this project. Looking at images of zimarre while working on the black and pink one I came across this image of Countess Livia da Porto Theine. I liked the idea of having a fur lined coat to wear to events during the colder months. Jason and Stephanie gave me a gift certficate to a local fabric store for Christmas and I used it to purchase gray and white faux fur (I have no idea what kind of animal it is supposed to simulate). Then I got stuck on finding the fabric for the outside. I really wanted silk but I'm just not knowledgeable enough about fabric to choose it online. I have to see and touch it to know if it is right. The silk satin I was finding locally was $40 per yard which is totally out of the question and polyester just isn't an acceptable substitute so I set the project aside.
Last week I was browsing ebay (I had a Paypal refund buring a hole in my pocket. :D ) and came across listings for satin fabric in a 55% cotton 45% silk blend. I decided to give it a shot and order half yard cuts of two colors. The fabric arrived yesterday and it is gorgeous! It has the perfect dull sheen and a nice weight and, best of all, it's $11.50 a yard. Now I just need to decide on the color. To my eye the coat in the painting looks like a deep salmon-y color (though it looks slightly different in each of the three or four images I've found online). The fabric is available in crimson which seems a bit too bright to me and in mauve which is a lighter pink than I thought it would be when I ordered it. I suppose it would be possible to overdye it to get the right color but I'm just not brave enough to go that route for fear of messing up and ruining the fabric. I think I am leaning toward the mauve but I just have to keep looking at it for a few more days before I decide.


Edited to add that I've ordered a piece of this fabric in cranberry to see if I like that better.

Camping Clothes

Forgive me if I ramble a bit today. I figure typing things out will help me clarify my thoughts/plans. My plan is to go to Pennsic this year which means I need more clothes appropriate for wearing in the heat and the dirt. (That and I refuse to put the effort into a "court gown" until I lose at least 20 more pounds!) This is my list of what I figure I need to make by mid-July to supplement what I already have:
two camicie/smocks with square necks- one with full sleeves, one with narrow sleeves
two more partlets (at minimum) to keep the sun off my neck and chest
two or three simple dresses
It would make sense to start with the smocks since the fit is less exact and less effected by weight loss but I need to buy more handkercheif linen first. I do, however, have linen on hand for two dresses. I have some medium to heavy weight medium green linen that I bought last year and haven't done anything with yet. Then yesterday I stumbled upon a moving sale for the JoAnn Fabrics across town and scored five yards of light to medium weight navy linen for $12! So I think I am going to get started on the dresses. I am going to make them side lacing (under the arms, not side-back) partly because that style is SOOOOO much easier for me to get into and out of without help and so that I can make them to lace with a gap to fit me now and just close the gap as I continue to lose weight. What I still need to decide is if I want the waist at my natural waistline or slightly above and whether I want the skirts box pleated or cartridge pleated. As I type this out I am thinking that I could go with a slightly raised wasitline and box pleats for one and cartridge pleats at the natural waist for the other. Time to pull out my bodice pattern and start tweaking it!

Meet Jelly Bean

I'm gonna be a grandma!!! Jason and Stephanie are expecting a little one mid September! The ladies at ScrapFreak dubbed the baby Jelly Bean and started teasing me about making Renaissance baby clothing. I told them I might try this:

The Silly Red Hat

Okay. So I bought some red wool to make Tom a hat the same time we bought the ivory wool for the tunic but I just didn't get around to doing it until now. I used a black fleece hat that was laying around as my pattern to cut four pieces of the felted wool. Then I just overcast or whipstitched or whatever the correct term is the edges together.
the inspiration/pattern

the cut pieces


the finished hat

I think I actually prefer it with the stitching on the outside

Fake Venetian?

A post on the RenaissanceFestival.com forums this morning asking about stomachers got me thinking. When I made my blue gown last summer it was too tight by the time I finished it so I wore it once and didn't plan to wear it again until I lost some weight. The stomacher question got me thinking about how I could still wear it while losing the weight. I had leftovers from the gold embroidered curtain panel that I used to make the forepart, sleeves, and caul (which btw is currently on clearance for $20 at BB&B) so I pulled it out and pinned it to my corset.

I played with it a bit and removed the farthingale, pinned the skirt closed, and laced a cord across the bodice opening. Whadya think? Could it pass as a Venetian gown?



PS- I realized I could also do this with leftover silk and my red silk sleeves.

(Kindly disregard the camecia/smock in these photos. It's just what happened to already be on Bertha so she wouldn't be naked.)

Ivory Wool Tunic or Cote

After Tom nearly froze his tushie off at Fall Harvest I decided it needed to make him something warm to wear for cold weather SCA events. All he had were warm weather RenFest clothes: a few cotton and linen shirts and one pair of knee length pants. He didn't own any kind of doublet or jacket and I didn't feel that I had the skills or patience to try to make him one. We settled on a generic wool tunic or "man's basic cote" using the cutting diagram in The Medieval Tailor's Assistant.
This was supposed to be a quick and easy project so we chose an inexpensive wool blend fabric. I cut the pieces and quickly assembled them by machine. I follow the no *visible* machine stitching school of thought so planned to do all of the hems by hand. I expected to just pink the seam allowances and call it good but, unfortunately, the inexpense fabric ravelled like crazy! Deciding that felled seams would be too thick and bulky I chose to turn under each seam allowance and stitch it down with a running stitch. It's a good thing we ended up not going to Winter Revel in January because all of that hand stitching took me forever to finish. I did get it finshed in time for Val Day by hemming in the car on the way to the airport for the cruise.
In the interest of full disclosure (and because I share my mistakes so others than learn from them LOL) I did NOT know what I was doing when sewing in the split center front gores and totally screwed the top point up. Fortunately my mistake was hidden under Tom's belt because I also made the split a bit too high. And I did do a better job on the back. I didn't do a facing for the neck but simply turned the edge under and stitched it down. I may at some point in the future turn it into a keyhole neck and add some trim.


Side

Back

Front

Here's how it looked after we got home around midnight (which is my excuse for the crappy pics). I'm also posting a crappy mirror shot of my outfit because I never seem to remember to get pics of me in my garb.

Cruising

Tom and I just returned from cruising aboard Royal Caribbean's Grandeur of the Seas. Our only previous cruise had been a family event filled with shore excursions, shopping, and onboard activiites. This one was decidedly different. This time we skipped most of the scheduled activities in favor of relaxing in the Solarium. I made use of the spa and Tom spent some time in the casino. Instead of staying up half the night partying most night we turned in before midnight. This 5 night cruise was only scheduled for two ports, Costa Maya and Cozumel, and ended up with only one. I had been looking forward to a ruins tour near Costa Maya but we were unable to dock there due to high winds and rough waters. I got a few photos of the shore we never set foot on. We headed to Cozumel early and stayed there overnight. Many of the passengers took advantage of the extra shopping and partying time but the noise and pushy vendors at the port annoyed me enough to make me get back on the ship without heading to town. The next morning we took our scheduled excursion to Passion Island. I can't reccomend Passion Island highly enough! It was a beautiful peaceful island that our group of about 30 had to ourselves. The food and drinks were good and plentiful. I only wish that we had been able to stay another hour or two. Upon our return from Passion Island we again skipped shopping and/or drinking town in favor of returning to the pool onboard the ship. I think cruise vacations are something we need to do more often. :)

Christmas Gift Shirts

So this past Christmas I made several handmade gifts for my kids. Among the things I made were some t-shirts with bleach out stenciled designs. I did a little poking around online for ideas and found out about discharge paste (which does look as grtoss as it sounds!) which removes the color from natural fibers without weakening the fabric like chlorine bleach. I order a quart of the stuff from Binder Art Supply. The stencil designs that I cut into overhead transparency sheets are actually pumkin carving stencils from ZombiePumpkins.com but they served the purpose quite well. The discharge paste was painted on the shirts and allowed to air dry. After drying a steam iron was used to activate the bleaching process. The 100% cotton shirts bleached out white. Some of the shirts were a 50/50 poly/cotton blend- The cotton bleached but the polyester didn't leaving an interesting heather gray design.

Woohoo!

I am home from vacation and have my newly repaired and upgraded laptop!!! I haven't posted in forever mostly because it was a pain in the ass using the shared family room computer. Now that things are back to "normal" be prepared for the deluge of posts to get everything caught up. :D

Brief Update

I know. I'm being a bad blogger again. I'm having computer issues that make it a real PITA to upload any images and I am embarrassed to admit that I couldn't remember how to access my blogger dashboard from another computer. Soo...Let's see....
Had a nice Christmas and NYE with my family
Enjoyed the New Year's Freakfest crop at ScrapFreak and earned some gift certificates (Thanks Mon!)
Won a prize from the Pink Paislee blog
Am participating in a weight loss challenge and have lost 8 pounds so far
Have been busy getting ready for our cruise in February
Have decided not to make a new corset or gown for myself until I lose more weight
Used an Xmas G.C. to purchase faux fur to line a new loose gown/coat but haven't found the right outer fabric yet
Am making clothes for Tom instead- finishing up a linen under tunic today and plan to make a wool cote/tunic this week

My ingenious plan!

(Insert evil laughter here.)
Okay, so this upcoming cruise is definitely a budget buster and has severely effected my sewing/garb budget. But I think I may have come up with a solution. Did you get a chance to watch the latest The Librarian movie with Noah Wylie on Sunday night? (I tivo-ed it and just watched last night.) Did you notice the gorgeous corset the vampiress character was wearing in the scene where he meets her? Well I'm gonna need something new to wear on formal night on the cruise (while my gown from last time fits over the waist and hips just fine it is way too small in the chest) and thought Why not make the fancy new corset I want and wear it as a top for formal night?! I won't start on it 'til after Christmas to see if I receive any of the patterns or fabric store gift cards requested. In the mean time I will decide whether to go with an Elizabethan or Victorian style corset.

Merry Christmas to Me!

Woohoo! I'm goin' on a cruise! No, not on Christmas but it's what Tom and I are giving each other for Christmas!
I had recieved an email about Royal Caribbean offering reduced deposits and though "Hey, we can afford to pay that!" I assumed the balance wouldn't have to be paid until after the first of the year. Well, I found a great deal on a February cruise but the catch was that it would have to be paid in full immediately and I didn't see how we could do that with our Christmas shopping not finished and the fact that we do not use credit cards. So I told myself to forget that idea. But we looked at what we had saved up for next season's renaissance festival visits and what we had in regular savings with all of the overtime Tom has been working and realized that we had enough to pay in full! This means cutting way back on Christmas gifts for each other (Don't worry, the kids are taken care of.:D ) and no out-of-state faire visits next summer but I'm okay with that if it means being on a nice warm beach in February instead of freezing my tushie off her in Michigan! LOL
We'll be doing five nights Western Caribbean with stops in Costa Maya and Cozumel. We've never been to either of those ports since our only other cruise was Eastern. I'm leaning toward doing one of the ruins shore excursions for Costa Maya then just hanging out on the beach in Cozumel (I'll more than likely be needing to recover from overexerting myself at the ruins) but would welcome any advice or opinions from people who have been there.

Twelve Tags of Christmas

is back! Tim Holtz is at it again! If you are a fan or if you just like to play with ink you have to check out his blog!
Of course I will be making my versions of his tags and posting them here again this year. :)

Hi! It's me again!

I have really been slacking on updating th blog but I just haven't been doing anything interesting to share. LOL
Thanksgiving was nice (though I was a bit disappointed that Kim arrived just in time for dinner and left as soon as we were done). We made so much food that I put the rest of the leftovers in the freezer Sunday night because we were tired of eating them! I did something that I have never done before: I cooked the pumpkins that never got carved for Halloween and made pies, cheesecake, and pumpkin bread from scratch. Everyone loved them but I think I had better be careful with this Suzy Homemaker stuff so my family doesn't come to expect it. :giggle:


Winter is here. We had a snowstorm a couple of weeks ago but that melted the next day. this time I think it is here to stay. It has been snowing since Sunday afternoon. I guess you have to be a kid to enjoy this stuff.




ScrapFreak started offering these monthly classes back in June or July and the August class was to alter a chipboard house from Maya Road. I ordered the class kit but just had too many other things going to work on it. I sat it on a shelf and didn't even open the bag of embellishments until sometime in October. I FINALLY took it down and started working on it Saturday night. this was another of my "make-it-up-as-you-go-along" projects. I started with cutting the scalloped cardstock for the roof deciding to add some Bazzill Bling in pale blue to the white then pulled the Heidi Grace paper because the color matched and went from there! I still need to figure out how to do "smoke" coming out of the chimney and I might add a snowman next to the tree.



Oh! One more thing. I got a nice little surprise Sunday morning as I was heading out to the store. Late last winter I had purchased some potted flowering spring bulbs for inside the house and once they were done blooming I had set the pots outside near the back door. We had spent some time cleaning up the yard Saturday knowing that the snow was coming but I had forgotten about the pots. They caught my eye as I was getting in the car to head to the store so I grabbed the pots to toss them into the trash and noticed that the hyacinths were growing and even had flower buds! I am so excited to see what they do now that I brought them in the house!

Hello!

I have been feeling a lot better this past week or so but I don't have any projects that I can share. I've been working on Top Secret Christmas Projects! LOL Since I have a lot more time than money these days I am making most of the gifts this year.

I just haven't been in the mood to scrapbook lately. I don't have any recent photos shouting out to be scrapped. I decided yesterday that I will buy more 12x12 pages with 4x6 pockets so that I can get my old film prints out of their boxes and into my albums where they can at least be shared until they are scrapped, if they ever are. Most of my favorites have been scrapped and I just don't feel a pressing need to scrap every photo I've ever taken.

No sewing projects in progress at the moment though I do have a growing to-do list (not neccessarily in this order):
linen drawers/bloomers/calzone
green wool mid-16th century Florentine gown possibly with slashed sleeves like these

another coat/loose gown/zimarra this time with long sleeves and (faux) fur lined

a Victorian corset

a late Victorian tailored suit


the ric-rac skirt from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

a couple of generic SCA tunics for Tom
a doublet and breeches for Tom