Now we’ve made it to the real meat of the costume. Last week, or rather two weeks go now that I’ve checked, you saw the petticoat, and the bum pad before that. This week we’re onto the skirts.
This gold polyester taffeta has been sitting in my stash for two years now. And this week I learned that even if I sneeze in its general direction, it will collect water stains. Also, its super easy to accidentally melt.
But back to the costume. In order to model it off of the console, I wanted 6 sections of gold divided by sections of light aqua.
Super scientifically I measured the base of the skirt (on the ground…with my flat tape) and divided it into six sections. Now, this ended up being too big, but we’ll get to that. I then decided I wanted the aqua sections to be about 3 inches wide, and divvied up the fabric.
When I saw how woodgie the aqua fabric was, I knew that I needed to not only back it with something, but back it with something solid, so I used the same taffeta for that as well. I cut the aqua 5 inches wide, and then gathered it every 10 inches or so, and basted it to the taffeta. I was using half inch seam allowances throughout, mostly so it would be easy to calculate the exact widths. I then realized that the skirt could use some extra texture, so I made wide pleats up three of the six panels, and centered one of them in the back.
Once the entire skirt was sewn up, it was a panel too wide, but I was determined to keep all six, so I left the back pleated one (which I had accidentally melted the bottom of anyway), and cut off 4 inches of each other panel.
It still ended up a bit wide, but it was easily handled by pleating, and the apron and bustle covered up most of the top of the skirt anyway!
I attached a waistband made out of the same taffeta (sense a theme?), and used a zipper to close it. It’s not a long zipper, so it’s still a smidge difficult to get on, but it works nicely. And it’s covered by the bustle anyways. If I knew it would be seen, I’d think of using a different closure, but it’s fine for this one!
Now, by this point I had spent nearly two days working on this skirt, when it was only supposed to take me one, and I hadn’t even touched the pleats on the bottom yet. I took a break to drape the apron and bustle and make the shirt. But it’s probably better that I did.
The break gave me time to buy some poster board, which I used to make a pleating board. It took nearly three hours to pleat enough to go all the way around the skirt. And I only almost melted the taffeta once.
There is always time to add extra trim, which is what I’ll be doing for the next month or so, since my daily life will be too busy to facilitate the extracurriculars. So tedious hand sewing could keep me on track! But that’s the skirt as it stood for the pictures that I’ve taken of the whole costume.
I’ll be back on Thursday to show you the bustle. Till then!