The Prince: completed costume

I have just about completley finished the costume for The Prince from my sleeping beauty project.

 Underneath the blue suede jacket is a top made from fake tooled leather with front hook and eye fastening and also a back lacing to make it fitted.

 I have been working on distressing the jacket, as the character has been travelling and battling. I used my dirty down sprays that I have posted about before, aswell as a cheese grater and a mud crayon, to give the dirtied appearance.

 I have done a lot of decorative stitching on the seams to give it the look of handmade and repaired by the Prince. In some sections Ii unpicked the seam and brought some of the fur through the seam to look like its almost burst open a bit.

I wanted to distress the armour aswell so I began by adding a chemical to it that would make it go rusty.

 This step terrified me as it went bright orange and looked really awful. I then covered the rest in black shoe polish and used a blow torch to burn the shoe polish onto the metal. This has give the metal a darker more weathered look, and some of the rust does show through but more subtley than to begin with,

 I made a pair of hand quilted leather gauntlets which the metal shielding will be riveted onto. Wearing these around the studio makes me feel like a superhero...

And finally, I made a pair of structured leg guards. I have taken a lot of photos of these as I made them so I think I will do a seperate post about that to show the process.

I will post about them tomorrow probably

Rachael
x

Sleeping Beauty Making Progress

We have no completley finished the Design part of our second Project, so its onto the making. I have decided to make both Sleeping Beauty and the prince from this project, here are the designs for their costumes;

 

I have mainly been working on the skirts for Sleeping Beauty, which are made out of lace and embroidered tulle, which I have them distressed.

The top half of the dress is going to be digitally printed and embroidered with a design from a collaboration I am doing with an illustration student. As her illustration is not yet finished, I won't be able to proceed any further with that for now, but hopefully it should be done by the end of February and then I can print it and sew it all together.

I have got the Princes costume all toiled out and ready to make out of the real fabric once I have had a fitting with my model on Wednesday. This week I have been spending time down in the metal workshop of my college plasma cutting and welding to create the armour that is worn on his shoulder and wrists. I haven't worked with metal for the last two years ( we did quite a bit in second year) so I wasn't sure how easy it would be, but after a bit of help and re introduction to the machines by Mark the technician it actually wasn't as hard as I was expecting. 

The Gauntlets;

And the Shoulder Pauldrens;

Both still need a tidy up and a bit of a fix up here and there, but they are nearly finished I think. Pretty chuffed with them seen as I had never made anything like this before.

So that's my current progress with those two costumes, hopefully I will have more to show you all soon :)

Finshed Tally Youngblood Costume

For my 4th year design project I have been making costumes based on the Novel 'Uglies' by Scott Westerfeld. I had my final Crit for my first costume, based on the main character Tally Youngblood, at college today so while I had my model in the costume I decided to take a few photos of the finished costume.
She wears an underskirt, a dress, a knitted jumper with detachable scarf/hood and then a long ginger wig that I styled.

Wuthering Heights; Cathy's Dresses

As Cathy had 4 or 5 dresses to herself I thought I would do a separate post just about those first off.

As you can see in my designs, I had planned for them to have accurate 18th century shapes and I had made 18th century bum rolls for all the female characters from the 18th century time period, but because of the physical nature of the play it was decided that they shouldn't be worn, which is why none of the photographs have them in. It was a bit of a shame in terms of the look of the costumes, but when I went to see the play I did understand that it was probably true that it wouldn't have worked, there was a lot of falling over and fighting which would have made the bum rolls shift around probably.

The Photos are all after the Jump...

Wuthering Heights costumes

Nelly;

Nelly works at both wuthering heights and the Grange, and through telling the story of Heathcliffe and Cathy to Lockwood narrates the story. She is on stage for the majority of the play as she narrates and is shown to partake in all the different time periods. While she is in the different times, she couldn't really change between scenes as sometimes she went from talking to Lockwood straight into the reminiscences of the past so because of this  I wanted her costume to seem to fit in all the different times. My main inspiration for her costume was this image of an 18th century maid;

                                     

Young Cathy;
The Daughter of Cathy and the wife of Heathcliffes son Linton. As she is from the later period of the book her dress has the higher waistline heading towards the regency era. However, I am not a huge fan of the dresses of the regency era, so I took inspiration from the 2005 kiera knightly adaption of Pride and Prejudice, with the waistline not quite at the bust line and still with a more corseted look. As with Cathy, young cathy has the purples in her costume that none of the other characters had, but its slightly lighter than Cathy, as she is a more innocent naive character, to begin with at least. I think that this dress was possibly my favourite of the girls costumes and worked really well on stage.

Hindley and Francis;

Like everyone else who lives at Wuthering heights, Hindley and Francis are in browns and greens, all earth colours. Frances is wearing a zone front dress, with a green linen jacket and an embroidered chiffon skirt and stomacher. When Hindley is young he wears just the waistcoat and breeches but when he comes home after his father has died he has brought a wife home with him and he is trying to appear more respectable so he has a jacket and necktie. 

Edgar and Issabella;

For Edgar and Issabella as they are richer and posher than Cathy and her family, I wanted them to stand out in contrast. They are both in much lighter pastel colours of greens and yellows and in fancier styles and fabrics. Issabellas dress has more decoration and lace than any of cathys dresses. Issabella is shown to be pregnant later in the play but instead of making a whole second pregnancy costume for her, like Cathy, I wanted a dress that could be adapted for a pregnancy as well. I used a combination of the chemise de la reine and zone front styles so that when the sash is on, the dress looks like a normal structured 18th century dress, but when the sash is taken off a bump can be put under the dress and the fabric flows out to create a pregnancy shape.

Thats all for today, I think I will show you Heathcliffe next and then wrap up all the other characters.

Wuthering Heights Sneak Peak

Just a quick photograph of the cast on stage recieving their applause
The photographer has taken so many more photographs, but I havent recieved them yet so I will just show you this one for now

Knitting Machine

So I bought myself a knitting machine, which I think might be one of the best things I have ever bought. I am having so much fun with it. a few of the costumes I am making this year have quite a lot of knitwear and stuff involved in it so I thought it would be good for that, and I also love knitting but never have the time to make a full garment by hand.
 For my first project this year I did Uglies, which is a Science Fiction novel by Scott Westerfeld. I will be making three costumes from this proejct for the costume show at the end of this year (my final year :/) We have just finished our first design project so we have finally started making so I can start showing you guys what I am doing :)

 So this is the costume that I am making first (sorry the image quality of my illustration is a bit crap, it looks better in real life i promise...) ;

  She is the main character of the book, and this is a costume that I designed for when she is living in an encampment in the forest called The Smoke. My model for this costume is the same as for my School for Scandel costume last year.
I started by making a Toile mock up for the dress

So there is a nice fitted dress with a circular skirt an fastening up the back. On top is a jumper with an open back with cowl snood collar, that I will be knitting. The dress will be made from a brownish tweed fabric that I bought when I was down in London a few weeks ago and the underskirt will be made from a cream silk noile fabric. Both the dress and the Skirt is will be distressed.
I started by knitting the scarf/ cowl first as I have never actually knitted a ful garment so I was a bit daunted about the idea of working out the knitting pattern and shaping for it.
Just a few progress photographs I took during knitting;


Both the scarf and the jumper have various cables and lacework patterns on them
The finished Scarf with the Toile of the jumper and the dress;

And Finally, I worked out the pattern for the jumper using a tension swatch and complicated guage calculations etc which were all quite difficult but it seems to be going okay so far.
I haven't done the back sections yet, but the front and sleeves are both finished.
The Front has a lacework pattern and two plaited cables down the front, although I am not sure how well you can see that.


So thats it so far, but I have a full day of pattern cutting on monday so there might be more to see soon :)

Also, I went to see Wuthering Heights on Friday, so hopefully photographs of that to follow soon.

xxx