Frock Chick

Well not small victories, quite major really 🙂

I managed to repair some “work” pants to be able to still wear presentable clothing while working with the messy clay.

And then I tackled my new pants all of which have that new fabric and stitching and elastic that together make it a bit difficult to wear immediately. So I removed excess stitching and dropped the seat seams so now have two pairs of pretend denim and five pairs of various shades of pink.

I’ve also been slowly working on the Phantom of the Opera gown. The Elissa skirt and dance pieces. Still not sure how to make the velvet tubes remain tubes. The stretch velvet has better memory than velour so I may need to get some spray glue to help them stay in shape.

Replacing the narrow looped braid for this scrolling braid. I was going to machine them but it wound up possible to hand sew with lots of beeswax on the thread.

But I also have been getting all the gold beads and trimming in order.

This is one of six new rope and tassel combos for the front of the dance skirt. The World tour versions have really heavy tassels (gold and black) with a few lengths of chain beads. I’ll hand knot beads on gold cord instead as finding a perfect match is just so difficult.

I added this length of saree trimming without really thinking. I think the skirt I want to mimic actually has a length of trim that is even top and bottom. So a quick check. Yep.

Note, this is about as good as it gets for this photo. Older programs did not have high density printing and were often very small. This is though my absolute favourite version of this skirt and I suspect some of that has to do with the very heavy contrast that may be an artifact of scanning for the web.

But I think it’s easy to see how I can love this and love the similar era Australian costumes. Really dense texture, and big blocks of colour.

New braid around the edges, new saree trimming on the side pieces and I unpicked some of my own beading and oraganza to get moe accurate loopy pieces in between. This is now much more like the newer World Tour versions that were also based on the very early Melbourne production.

And finally I have managed to work on the Enfys helmet.

The wings are too chunky but I was aiming more to get the front curve accurate. I may need to carve that down a little further. I’ll need to get a pointy probe (ie a needle set into a wooden handle) to find the thickness over the forehead and nose. But this was a good 4kg of clay melted and put on the helmet in one session so I need a fairly big break.

The heat was fantastic for my hands. It’s very close to wax therapy really. I melt the clay in a regular crockpot so it doesn’t get too hot. And I melted the last kg or two too far so was able to pour out on a dense formica type of surface and kneeaded it into flat pieces to precut the side jaws.

The character still seems to be under a bit of a spoiler embargo so there is a decided lack of detailed resources for all the large details that help the helmet read as “bone” not a perfectly rendered 3D model. Those are what I love about it but they are hard to see.

This is dye testing. Pretty sure it’s a very easy mix of yellow and red for the coral coloured sections and straight dark brown.

What is confusing when talking about it is that it is not dye like in any other medium. This would straight up be called paint. It is thick like regular students acrylic paint and doesn’t soak through. I mean I’ve worked with it enough but it’s still counter to everything I know about paints and dyes in textiles, clay, canvas, paper, etc.

Anyway. It does let the neutral skin to show through and so I’m happy enough to just wait and see what I can find for the lengths.

And this is the actual make and model of the “beads”. So tiny. I was going to cast them as they wind up about $35 a pop.

I’ve been adding more ribbon to the skirt so as to make it balance more with the extreme business of the appliqued hanging panels.

ANd this is what the inside looks like.

So why did I hand sew? I didn’t want to have to take the hanging panels off as they are just perfectly sewn down at the top under the two rows of ribbon. If I was to machine them I’d be either banging those about or have to take them off.

But the other reason is that hand sewing allows the two ribbons to appear to float over the fabric, creating shadows and depth of texture. It helps the green and purple to really pop over the gold.

I did machine sew all the ribbon on the pleated hem though. And that is partly the need to sew that quickly- the pleats are three times the full length so it was going to be bulky and time consuming to hand sew! The effect is now of a single fabric due to the machine stitches.

Now I can start pinning the extra appliques and jewels on the skirt 🙂