A Look at my Past, Part 1: The Steampunk Dress

It all started with an invitation.

To be exact it was an invitation to my second Steampunk-LARP-Ball. Last year (mostly due to a lack of time to make a new outfit) I had worn a dress that I'd made some years ago. Since I wanted to come as the same character another dress (and not the victorian suit that's been hanging around in the back of my brain for some time) was needed.

I startet browsing the internet and found WAY too many possible ideas. But what I mostly liked was the Idea of a ballgown in several tones of red and a leather shoulderguard (which a friend of mine was wonderful enough to make for me. Check out his blog here his stuff is really amazing!). So I went out and bought vast amounts of red fabrics.

My less-than-perfect costume sketch

The basic idea (as you can probably deduce from the drawing) was bodice with three-tiered ruffles on the sleeves, a skirt with a ruffle at the bottom and an overskirt held up by bands of leather. The entire thing was to be draped over a bustle I've made a couple of years ago with this pattern.

Let the sewing begin.

(Note: Since this is a done-and-finished project I can only show a small amount of process pictures. Luckily enough I've made some so I can at least include those.)

I didn't really have a pattern for the bodice. Instead I worked out the pattern I wanted with my dressmaker's dummy (an incredible help to almost any project. I just wish I had room for a male one too. I'm sure there are lots of tutorials on how to work with a dressmaker's dummy, but at some point I'll check and maybe think about making my own one). So far so good. But then I made the mistake to go back to one of my favourite fabric shops with a friend. I didn't really find anything much. But I did find a small piece of grey satin embroidered in dark grey and another small piece in dark red embroidered in shades of brown and beige. I immediately fell in love with those and decided to incorporate them in the dress (I wanted to use a couple of different fabrics anyway so I thought it would work out.) but upon coming home I found that the rest of the fabrics didn't really go well with the new ones in colour (nor in fact did they match each other. What in the world had I been thinking??)

I started making the bodice out of the grey satin (that was rather straightforward, since the grey fabric went well with all the others) and the dark red satin (because it was so beautiful that I just had to use it). I also started embridering the neckline and the front with glass beads.

Close-up of the bodice at a later stage