More random things

It’s snowing. It’s April.

And not just little flurries. It looks like there’s a solid inch or two on the ground and it’s still coming. I am saltier than French fries at the moment. IT’S SPRING, STUPID MIDWEST….

Anyway, I have been keeping sane by sewing, as always! I made a change in my plans for the superhero swing dance. The Catwoman costume was getting too complicated. I would have needed to get more canvas and boning for the corset, and figure out something to do with the gloves, and possibly redo the whole shirt. The corset would have been fussy to make, and I might not have finished it on time because I actually have a job now. Besides, I wouldn’t be able to dance very well in such a corset anyway. Now, my plan is to do a costume from Captain America- one of the USO dancing girls!

The costume is pretty simple, and it will be easy to dance in… And Captain America is pretty much my favorite fictional character besides Anakin Skywalker anyway, so I wanted to do something that relates to that. I’ll also get to do 1940s hair. The 1940s is probably my all-time favorite hair era! They’re classy and timeless and they usually look great with my face shape.

I could go on…

Anyway, this project is going to be pretty fun!

Oh yeah. Another fun thing I did last week was, I made a little itty bitty corset! I downloaded a free pattern from Ralph Pink’s website (he’s a corset designer from Australia or something) and I was going to use it for the Catwoman corset. I wanted to try out the pattern without enlarging it, so I just traced it onto scrap fabric, stitched it together, and hot glued bag ties to the inside for boning! It came out really cute. It’s about the size of my fist. I stuffed it with scrap fabric to fill it out.

Too bad I didn’t get to make it full-size. It would have been a very nice corset.

Back to the USO girl dress.

My only reference I used was Kay-Dee’s website. She’s a contributor to Padawan’s  Guide and has made the picnic costume. The site showed pictures of her USO girl costume and all the pattern pieces, and that was all I needed to know. It doesn’t really show the back, but I’m just going to have the straps tie together behind the neck like a halter top.

I drafted the bodice pieces from a cute little green dress I wear a lot, because it has a seam at the waist, and princess seams on the front, so it was similar to how this dress will look. After I got the measurements, I cut out these pattern pieces.

I think now would be a good time for me to explain how you do princess seams! There were a lot of those in the 50s dress I made. A princess seam is a kind of tricky vertical seam that follows the curves of the female figure very closely. I really like them because they help to define the bustline… which is very helpful to those of us without much of a bustline in the first place. XD Anyway, see the center front panel up there, and the two panels right next to it? When we stitch those together we’ll get two princess seams.

One of the curves- the ones on the outer edges of the center front- is concave.

And the other is convex.

And you have to make them fit together, and that’s tricky. What you have to do is clip the concave piece so that you can turn it into a convex curve! Then you stitch them together.

That’s how you get this sort of seam.

I got the bodice mostly finished today, but forgot to take pictures. XD More on this next time!