Trapped by my screens

Today was the day I realized I forgot how not to look at a screen. Then today was the day I decided it was time to remember.

I could be a lot worse. I remember when someone asked with incredulity why I don’t have my smartphone by the bed. That doesn’t need to be the last thing I see at night and first in the morning. The rest of the day is bad enough.

I spend hours reading email, writing blog posts, and keeping up with communities in IRC channels. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. I often walk back from my daughter’s bus stop reading something on my phone. When I take a break, I might read a book on my Kindle or play a video game on the Playstation. Screen after screen after screen, non-stop.

Upon realizing this, I decided to take a break. Look at something else. I decided to bake gingerbread. Did I look up a recipe in the shelves of cookbooks I own? Nope. I searched for it online and referred to it on a tablet in the kitchen. Screen-escape fail.

I tried to think of what else I enjoy that doesn’t require a screen. Sewing! I’ve been putting off a corduroy jacket behind other priorities. But then I realized that I’d forgotten the trick to making welt pockets, and I needed to look it up. Back to the computer.

Having run out of ideas, I guess I’ll make lunch instead. Surely I can handle that without looking at a screen. Or maybe I should just write a quick blog post about it first…

Ravenna status: Thirteen days and counting

There was vacation, and there’s always work, and there’s actually working on the costume… so I haven’t posted much progress lately. And all the photos are taken late at night with my cameraphone, so there’s that. But here’s how it’s going.

The skirt portion has been a special little beast. Back in July I posted about how I was working on the skirt hook findings, which were originally sourced in Turkey, and, well, I’m not in Turkey. I wrote that Sculpey would be fine since they were just decorative and didn’t have to actually hold the skirt’s weight. Then a week ago, I was looking at the pictures for the eleventy-billionth time and realized they do. The skirt is separate and attached to the bodice by those pieces. My mister suggested resin, and my superhero-pal-in-Dragon*Con-crime Neal helped me with his resin experience to start casting them. Only 20 to go! Then drilling, painting…

But back to the skirt itself–you ever start doing something, then think, ooh, I know a quicker way, all the while knowing you should do it the right way instead? Yeah, that. I started out putting the skirt together with the piping between the layers, all in one pass, like this:

The right way would have been to make the piping, then insert it into the seams. But I just knew I could shave off some time doing it all at once. When I started ironing them flat, I realized just how inconsistent the width of the piping was. I’m not a perfectionist. I’m usually a close-enoughist. But this time I knew what I had to do. I took apart the entire skirt, all 24 panels, all 184 feet of stitching, and I started over. I made the piping first, then put it in.

If you figure I’d already done some of them 2, 3, or even 4 times in places trying to even it out to fix my cheat, that’s about a tenth of a mile of seams.

I’ve put a few of them together. They still need a lot of ironing, but you can see it will be the skirt!

Then I started worrying that the points would lose their pointiness after travelling to Atlanta and hanging in a closet for a while. So I started thinking about stitching in the ditch between the piping and the panel. It’s a slow-going process to keep it from being a disaster on the second side, but I think it’ll work.

Finally, the bodice. I’ve gotten most of the leather piping sewn to it. Next up, gold beads and sequins.

Thirteen days to go!

Oatmeal biscuits

I’ve made a lot of biscuits, but oatmeal biscuits are a new one on me. And that’s exactly what The Flying Biscuit sent out a recipe for in their daily email today.

2 cups rolled oats
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup butter cut into pieces
1/2 cup packed dk brown sugar
1 3/4 tsp double-acting baking powder
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup whole milk

– Chop oats in food processor
– Pulse flour, butter, sugar, baking powder and salt into coarse meal
– Add milk to make sticky dough, then add oats and knead until mixed
– Make two 6×3 inch rectangles and refrigerate until firm
– Cut loaves into 24 1/2″ thick slices and bake at 375 for 20 minutes

Together! Ravenna’s bodice

 

I kept meaning to post photos of some version of the muslin for this bodice, but I never took a picture of it, and now it’s in a dozen pieces. I’m no expert pattern maker, and this wasn’t an easy one. But the bodice is together! I haven’t ironed it yet, but I did serge the edges so it’ll hold together long enough to get the hand embroidery on in the center front.

 

I’m terrible at corners. V-necks, godets, things like that. So I picked a dress full of them. Genius. Practice by fire. I’m not too proud of the way the v-shaped insets fit in the bodice–I had to make some darts at the bottom to make it work out. But I am rather pleased with these two L-shaped corners on either side:

 

 

Look how smooth! And it’s not even ironed yet! 

I also got most of the necklace made except for the pendant. I’m still hunting for the right pieces for the earrings. Just a few weeks to go!

 

A few things I’ve baked this year that you really should try

• Fake Liege waffles
• Real Liege waffles–worth the effort!
• Cinnamon roll waffles
• Spent grain bread
• Irish soda bread
• Rustic dinner rolls
• Champagne cake
• German gold pound cake
• Fruit leather
• Pancetta-parmesan scones (-chives +cracked pepper)

Skirt hook thingies

Details at the top of each pleat on Ravenna’s wedding dress

There are a lot of interesting things about these little bits at the top of each pleat. First, there’s all the loose threads visible in this picture, but I guess I can let that go. 🙂 I do love that you can actually see the hand stitching around the loops holding them on. They look functional, but I don’t think they actually are. The piping down the center of each pleat is then attached through a loop on each of these. But they aren’t holding the pleats up or anything like that. Edit: After looking more closely at the photos, I’ve realized that’s exactly what’s happening–that whole skirt of godets is separate and attached by these findings!

I started my first shot at working on making them out of Sculpey. I’ve got the pearls to glue in later. I’m nowhere near any sort of Sculpey expert, so as usual, I’m totally winging it here.

First I traced the basic shape on a piece of the clay:

Then I used the needle to cut away “everything that wasn’t David,” so to speak.

I do think I’m going to get some of that Sculpey mold making stuff and do that rather than do this another 23 times. I just can’t decide how much to refine the design and how much to call it close enough. How much does the roughness add to the character, and how much should I try to buff out the fingerprints? This version is definitely too thick, but I’d rather it be a bit too thick and stronger than break apart. I also like the effect that the thickness has of making the bottom part of it look like a skull at a 3/4 angle:

Ravenna: Gold fabric found, keys lost

The creamy/gold fabric half of the dress was a hard match. It’s a pretty subtle pattern, and not soopah shiny gold, but has just enough sheen to look regal. I was also hoping to find something that could be cut both directions to save a little on the cost. I finally found some at the discount home dec fabric place.

Then I took back some wire I’d bought at JoAnn’s that didn’t match the first gold wire I’d bought for the lacing findings, but somehow while I was there, I lost my car keys. Talk about turning this into an expensive costume if we decide to replace them. Maybe they’ll still turn up.

I have all the clover sections wrapped for those lacing pieces–16 yards of 20 gauge wire. I don’t have enough of the bead caps I was using though, so I need to get more before I can finish.

The piping on the skirt is supposed to be leather, although it doesn’t really look like it. There’s a brown-gold suede at JoAnn’s I think I can use to make it look right. And the up side of losing the keys was that I found out where they keep the cording for making your own piping.

And finally, this morning’s project: duplicating the pattern of couching/goldwork embroidery on the center front of the bodice. It’s the same way I did the pattern on Elizabeth Swann’s Pirate King coat a few years ago–blow up picture, trace, transfer. Unfortunately, I can’t find my Wacom tablet pen, so I traced crudely with a touchpad. It’ll do. I can correct curves as I go.It looks off center in spots, especially at the bottom, because the photo wasn’t perfectly centered, but my tracing is one half, properly aligned, then mirror flipped.

Half of 2012 down

Completely unrelated to Ravenna…

I liked my “How I spent 2011” summary, so at the beginning of 2012, I started a Google Doc to keep track of the year. I’ll thank myself in December. The first six months have been pretty good! So far this year, I have:

• Written 38 GeekMom posts
• Seen 16 movies*, including 11 in theaters (The Cabin In The Woods twice) and 2 in our personal backyard theater
• Played 7 board games I’d never played–but only 1 video game
• Done only 8 crafty projects, but also 2 big cakes and 9 new-to-me baking projects
• Read only 4.5 books… that’s just sad
• Been to 11 parties (not counting conference events, but totally counting kid birthday parties)
• Been to 9 conferences
• Seen 7 live shows
• Bought 1 car
• Gone on 1 big road trip
• Changed jobs

And we’ve got six months left in the year!

* This many movies is just unheard of post-children. But there are so many to see this summer!

Billions of findings, findings for me

Are these technically notions or findings? Whichever it is, I’m about a fourth of the way through making more than 200 of them.

They’re the pieces that are used for lacing up the sleeves and along the front of the bodice:

I started out using a Thing-a-ma-Jig, but I might as well be using The Force for all the good it did me. I had to hold the pegs in with one hand and wrap wire with the other, which means I’m one hand short to do this effectively. For a dozen, it would have been fine. For 216, not so much. I went to the hardware store and got a pack of nails for $1.30 and a scrap from the wood department. Hammer them in, saw off the nail heads, and voilà, a much more effective wire jig.

Eight yards of 16-gauge gold wire later, and I’ve got the clover section made for about half of them. On top of that, I’m wiring on a bead cap and a small gold bead on each one to make the complete piece. The photo at the top of this post has two finished pieces on the left with a pile of just the clover-shaped base in the middle.

When not wrapping wire, I’ve been on a fabric hunt along the east coast. Sewfisticated in the Boston area is an amazing store, and I found something that would work for the patterned sections, but I’d really like to find something I can cut in both directions to cut down on the cost a bit. Back to hunting.

Starting Ravenna

“That was the most labor-intensive dress,” Atwood said of the wedding gown worn by the evil queen (Charlize Theron). “It took four people over a month to make.”

I think I’ll do it alone in five weeks. That sounds reasonable. Whenever I start looking for costumes I’d like to make, I’m always drawn to Colleen Atwood’s work. So even though I haven’t seen Snow White and the Huntsman (I hear it’s terrible), and even though I don’t have enough time, blonde hair, or any idea how to turn paper into bones, I think I’m going to launch into Ravenna’s wedding dress anyway.

I’ve been gathering reference pictures on a Pinterest board. (Hey, I finally found a productive use for Pinterest!) I always start a costume by considering what the biggest challenges will be. Once I figure out how to overcome those, I feel good about starting. For this costume, it’s:

The shoulder cage

I originally thought that the shoudler cage was a thin wood or straw sort of material connected together. It’s actually glazed parchment paper. Whereas I thought the bends were connections, they’re really just shaped into the paper.

A few nights ago, I started experimenting with card stock and the first glue I found in the house. Clearly not the final plan, but good enough to see if I could do it. It’s going to take… oh, possibly the rest of my life… but I think it’s at least possible. Here’s how it went with the card stock:

The dress pattern itself

Look at the hips here. If you look at the front of the dress, it looks like a top and a skirt. But when you get to the back, it’s clearly connected all as one dress. I’ll have to think about the best way to work that out.

The notions

I read that the pieces at the tops of each pleat/godet were found in some little corner of Italy, so I don’t think I’ll be stumbling across them in the local AC Moore. I’ll have to hunt for something similar or make them. There are only 24, so not too bad. Then there’s the little four-leafed metal findings that go up the sleeves and down the front. There are “only” 216 of them.