The Ice queen ensemble -boa, stola, skirt and photoshoot!

Unfortunately I did not take a lot of pictures when I made the skirt, stola and boa, but hopefully the photoshoot pictures will tell you a lot.

The most challenging part of the last three pieces was definitely the fishtail skirt. While the original design called for a simple pencilskirt, I soon changed my mind and ended on an elaborate fishtail design, with fur trimming and loads of rhinestones, as this matched the overall design much better.

Not having a fishtail skirt pattern, I created one from the pencilskirt pattern I had for Lady E: I elongated the pattern to floorlength in the front and a train in the back, and added plenty of width all around. Then I was merely a matter of putting the mockup on Lady E and mold the pattern into what I liked.

 The next step was to add a fur trimming all around the lower hem. Here it was very important to know that the dress had the right length already, as the pattern for the fur trimming would be a copy of the pattern of the skirt. Thus, a 5 cm change in skirt length would alter the pattern for the furtrimming radically, and naturally I did not want that to happend.

So once the length was decided, I made a paper pattern of where I wanted the fur, and tested it on the skirt. Here I did take some pictures:

I did have some minor altercations to do, but in the end I was ready to cut the fakefur, sew each panel together and attach it to the skirt. The to of the fur was sewn on right sides together with the skirt fabric, in order to fluff up the fur a little extra, and the bottom was sewn together with a simple overlock.

Cutting out the fakefur was an interesting thing in itself: Because of the risk of cutting the fur strands, you do not use a scissor. Instead a sharp knife is used on the back, cutting only in the bottom layer of the fur. This ensures that all furstrands are intact AND that you have as little loose strands flying around as possible. The last this is not to be underestimated, I had fakefur strands all over the house for 2 weeks afterwards...

Above the fur the skirt was decorated with rhinestones, creating a gradient from the fur and up into the skirt, just like of the bra and corset. However, as the skirt had a much bigger surface to be coveres, the stones were not set as close as on the other pieces, but I still think I must have crossed 2000 stones on the skirt. I really should measure and calculate to figure it out:)

The skirt was finally closed with a zipper, placed at the top of the front slit. I put in the zipper upside down, so the skirt could be removed elegantly on stage, and the slit length be varied by opening the zipper more or less.

So, that was the skirt. Now on to the easy part:
The boa and stola were both relatively easy to make, as they consist of rectangles of fakefur sewn together into tubes. The stola was closed in both ends and had satinbands attached to tie it on with, whereas the boa had a little more going on:

Here the boa had to be attached to the arms with two elastic bands, that I covered with matching satinband like you would on a garterstrap. It was also decorated with wooden balls painted and rhinestoned to match, so the whole boa looked a little more exclusive.

The balls together with the cvorset and bra,  before they were put on the boa.

All in all both boa and stola were easy to make, and if anybody feels the need for one, I apparently added the measurements to one of my design sketched above.

and now onto the exciting bit: The photoshoot!

I was so lucky that I could asemble a really good team for the shoot: Lady Effulgent was ofcource the model, then we had the ever talented and crazy Niels Laigaard as makeupartist and Michael Tonsberg as photographer. Niels I have worked with before and absolutely love, and I have admired Michaels pictures for a long time now, so it was all very exciting!

And here are the pictures:

The Icequeen ensemble -the headdress

The next interesting part of the ensemble was to make the headdress. My beloved burlesquedancer Lady Effulgent had contacts that could help us get access to a lasercutter and also teach me how to make my patterns for it and use it. Very exciting!

We started out making a rough pattern for the headdress, so it sat in the right position on the head. An interesting note here is, that the perspective of the viewer is very important here! I started out sculpting the headdress while Lady E was sitting, but the silouette was all wrong when she stood up. We then realised that we needed to check everything while she was wearing her showheels, in order to know just how it all would look.

Next step was to design the snowflake pattern on each of the peaks. I looked at a lot of different snowflakes on google, and this is what I ended up with. It was a very rough sketch, but it was enough to go by and after it got scanned I had something to work with at the lasercutting center.

At the center I learned to clean up my sketch and turn it into a vector pattern using CorelDraw. This was really fun, as I originally started out playing with this program when I was 13 (I used Corel Photopaint for 5-7 years before I switched to Adobe Photoshop for my drawings).
Using this vector we first tested the pattern on cardboard, and then when we were happy with it, cut it out in 3 mm filt. The filt is flexible but solid enough to make the self-supporting snowflake pattern. It should handle accidental crushing better than a stiff material, and still be able to carry the weight of the rhinestones.

To asssemble the headdress, I glued the peaks together and onto a thin layer of filt. I planned to use a gluegun, but unfortunately did not have time to buy one. Instead I used wood-glue, something I rather regret now:
First off, I tried to brighten the cream white of the filt with clothpaint. In order to quicken the drying process, I put the whole piece in the oven at 75 celcius. The woodglue did not take kindly to that. It turned an horrible shade of burnt orange, that clashed with the white and blue colortheme.
Secondly, when I started to move the headpiece around to work on it, I realised the woodglue did not keep it together very well, and I had to re-glue most of the areas.

All in all a very good reason to buy that gluegun:/

Rhinestoning the headpiece was pretty much the same story as with any other piece of this outfit: Patience and more patience. Between gluing everything else and this, I had to cut down my nails (I broke one at work) and found out that having long nails to grab the stones with is a huge help in rhinestoning. And thus, not having long nails slows me down.

To attach the headpiece, I added one hairclip in each side, and checked that I had enough hairpins to secure with behind each spike. It held on very tight!

Hold tight, as next up is the boa, stola and skirt, all covered with fakefur!