Another corset for Lady Effulgent

During my maternity leave I also created another corset for the burlesque performer Lady Effulgent, -this time a pink corset. This time she rhinestoned the corset herself after a sample I made, and to be honest I think she made it look stunning!

The corset was then used for an act together with Lea Blue Delmas for Copenhagen Grotesque Burlesques Way out west -Vauderville party in August, where Lea Blue delmas wore the black corset with rhinestones that I made for Lady Effulgent last year.

Don't they just look divine?

Photo by Mariam Zakarian

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 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 year, New rules!

So, 2013 is upon us, and for this blog, it means a lot of changes.
First and foremost, you may have noticed the change in language. While blogging in Danish comes slightly more natural than in English, the number of people who actually care about sewing techniques AND read Danish are fairly low. Having the blog in english just makes things easier.

In order to draw a little attention to the blog, I have also entered into Foundations Revealeds sewing competition this year. For those of you who do not know Foundations Revealed, it is a subscription only homepage, full of high quality articles teaching you how to make corsets and other historic underwear. The page has two twin-sisters in Your wardrobe Unlock'd and History Unstitched, and I have been so lucky to write an article for YWU on how to weave fringes for trim.

In order to change the language on the blog, all new posts will be in english, and as times go, hopefully I will have time to translate some of the more popular posts.

So, that was one new thing. What was the other?
In 2013 I have decided not to buy new cloth. A common declaration among online seamstresses, this is actually rather healthy and sometimes quite needed. My stash of cloth for hobby projects have exceeded 100 m, and thus are becoming a slight nuisance. As I am bad at planning my projects from what I already have, this will be a good exercise.

January contained such a project, as I needed a costume for Copenhagen Grotesque Burlesques Persian Decadence & Subconscious Uprising party. Here I only needed to buy a white wig, two blue feathers and a bit of satin band. The rest was found in the stash, and in my opinion, it all went rather well... :)

Picture taken by Pao-Lung Tsai at Copenhagen Grotesque Burlesques Persian Decadence & Subconscious Uprising party.