The Ice queen ensemble

As I have mentioned before, I have my very own pet burlesque dancer Lady Effulgent, that I occasionally sew for. A big relief in my time of volume, as this means that I can still make huge gowns that are larger than life!

 Foto by Pao-Lung Tsai

This February Lady Effulgent needed a dress for the "Wicked Waltzes at the Russian Cabaret Verboten", aka Copenhagen Burlesque's winter party. With the theme set as a winter wonderland, I soon came up with a costumedesign, that we both liked: The ice queen ensemble.

 (yep, that is how my conceptdrawings looks like today, rather random, and often on whatever paper is avaliable. Also: I store them as crappy photos taken with my old smartphone that has a rather poor camera. )

As such, we believed this would not be such a hard dress to make. I had already made her both a corset and a pencilskirt before, so nothing new there. So we added a little bit of finesse to the design: For the headdress we wanted to try out lasercutting, and why not cover corset, bra and headdress in rhinestones?
Snow glitters after all.

Yup. This is going to take more than one post to tell you about!

The Ice corset and bra, and how to become philosophical from too much rhinestoning

A rough calculation told us that the corset alone would need 5600 stones, that one of us was going to glue on the corset by hand. Oh, and we wanted an iciclepattern on the corset too.

 So, I sewed up one of my by now classical single layer underbusts: 1 layer of coutil, same fabric for boning channels, spiralsteels and flatsteels for boning and nice big grommets to make it easy to take off on stage.

As I am a controlfreak, I also ended up doing the rhinestoning. That way I was sure to get the corset exactly as I wanted it.

Now, I am becoming quite fast at adding rhinestones, but 5600 stones are not set in one day. So after a couple of evenings rhinestoning, I ended up rather philosophical on the subject of sewing and rhinestones:

 Aaaalmost there!

A lot of people comment on me being creative... I find that somewhat amusing.
Honestly; creativity really isn't the main characteristic you need, when making big bold dresses.

Creativity is good and nice and entertaining. Creativity is what gives you the initial design, and it helps you along the way, when stuff blows up and you have to well, be creative.
But most of the time, what you need is dedication. Dedication, Precision and Patience.

You need to find references for your concept, you need to find the right material at the right price. You need to find a pattern, alter it, test it, and then alter it again, just to be sure you don't fuck up your expensive cloth. You need to sew the dress and then rip up the seams because it wasn't perfect. You need to take your time doing things right, and when you fuck up, you fix them. And when you decide you want to use 5000+ rhinestones, you sit down and glue each and every one of them on, in the right pattern and in the right spot, no matter how long it takes. Because at this point, you just made the dress of your life and god damn it, it's going to be perfect!

So, creativity really isn't that big a thing for me. Nor is the ever elusive 'talent' everybody seems to be obsessing about. Having an inherited talent is absolutely useless, if you do not back it up with hours and hours of hard work to improve yourself. And this is where motivation and inspiration comes in.

Nobody does anything without some sort of motivation, and everything is possible with the right motivation.
Having fun, getting praise or mere inspiration, it doesn't really matter what rocks your boat. If you get it from doing something, you get motivated, you will keep on doing it and you will become good at what you do.

So that is why I am having loads of fun, doing the same menial task 5600+ times.

I am not creative.
I am merely so inspired by the project, that I just HAVE to see it done. And then I'll become good on the way.


Minor rant over, it should be safe to come out now:)

The corset ended up with 6350 stones on it and it is sparkly! We also bought a white bra to match, and covered the cups in matching rhinestones, approximately 1450. So the total of rhinestones is currently 7800 pcs with more to come.

Uprising by Lady Effulgent

I've been involved in Copenhagen Burlesque for approximately a year by now, helping out at the shows and sewing for one of my favourite performers there: Lady Effulgent. 

It is a load of fun, and a way for me to make costumes that are more elaborate and showy than even my ordinary 'larger than life' dresses.

This fall we had the event "Dark City, Dreamy dystopia" and the Lady and I had out first collaboration in the show 'Uprising'.

 Photo by Maxmarkov.com

For the show I made a corset, a bumtail bow, a fishtail-skirt that could be transformed into a pencil-skirt and a dress to cover it all up in the beginning. Combined with a few bought pieces, a shitload of rhinestones and some handsome blokes, we had a nice setup for her act:

Lady Effulgent: The uprising

New Years Eve Dress 2012/2013

This is the new years eve dress for 2012/2013! Finish a whole 24 hours before it is to be used...
This year the dress consists of a black corset decorated with lace and rhinestones, together with a chiffon skirt. As a new feature for me, the back is covered with a modesty panel.

The corset consists of a single layer of black coutil, with a 2 cm band functions as a waistband, and self-fabric bands for the wires. The wires themself are made from 7 mm spiral steel boning and simple 7 mm spring steel boning. The edges are finished with a simple black cotton biastape. The coutil was cut back when I made the green underbust, but have been packed away while we moved in 2012.

In order to decorate the corset, I used two different types of lace; a burgundy lace, and burgundy and gold lace, found in City Sycenter at Valby, that had loads of stuff on reduced prices, as they were closing. Normally the golden/burgundy lace is 900 dkk (160 $) pr meter, but I found a bucket full of leftovers, for 50 dkk (9 $) a piece. And yes, I did almost empty said bucket.
As a final touch, I gued on 175 preciosa rhinestones i two golden colors. Most people know swarowski, but apparently preciosa should be just as good. I found my rhinestones on rhinstene.dk.

In order to create a whole outfit, I made a simple skirt using 4 meters of 140 cm wide black chiffon. It was cut into four pieces, and sewn together forming a large tube. It was then attached to a 3 cm wide black elastic, and the edges finished with a rolled hem.

Finally I tried something new, that I have wanted to try for some time now: A modesty panel.
When closing a corset, the skin is pushed towards the back, and often forms an unsightly meatfold. As this is a rather unflattering sight, it is often covered with a modesty panel. In its simplest form a modesty panel is a piece of fabric covering the back, but it can be made more sofisticated:
On Electra corsetrys homepage I say a version, that does not wrinkle or fold in any direction. The panel was held in shape with wires both vertical and horisontical. The panel was futhermore held in place, by a band, where the lacing goes through. I have always avoided modestypanels because the twist and turn, but this design was so good I had to try it out for myself. As it happens, they are quite easy to sew.

The decoration is heavily influenced by Sparklewren bespoke corsetry. Her use of lace and rhinestones are extremely elegant, and the quality of her corsets very high. Lucky for me, she is a writer at Foundations Revealed, and she have covered most of the basic techniques for this corset.
The new years eve dress is thus very much a product of my main inspirations from 2012, and required all the skills I learned this year. Very fitting for a NYE dress, don't you think?