This year for Halloween I underestimated the time it would take to complete all my costume pieces yet again. My best friend and I recently watched a ton of Dracula films and had been reading Dracula Daily while it was running, so I kind of had vampires on the mind this year. In homage to my best friend who moved far away, I made my partner and I dress as Victorian-ish vampires for our Halloween events.
As per my Victorian corset post, this was a bad idea for my back and this was probably my last costume while wearing this particular corset. However after making this skirt I am absolutely in love with long and glamorous fantail skirts and hope to wear this as often as possible. I used the historical version of Scroop’s Fantail Skirt and the pattern was fantastic. The size was perfect and they included a condensed version of the instructions which I loved because I do like to just skim instructions and move on with making the thing. The reason this piece took me so long is that I had decided I needed it in velvet and if you’ve worked with velvet, you know. It’s not terrible as long as you use a walking foot and baste all your seams together before you take them through the machine, but this takes so much longer. Also it sheds everywhere. I’m still finding little velvet bits around my house. And the other problem is you can’t take an iron to it directly. I tried using my steamer which sort of worked, but I just decided it didn’t matter if my seams weren’t perfectly flat.
I had bought 45” wide cotton velvet on etsy for a good deal, so I decided to try my hand at piecing since the skirt panels definitely wouldn’t fit as is. It went…fine. It was a pain to do specifically because the pieces were so huge and unwieldy and also because velvet. But the fact that it’s black velvet means that it hides most sins in real life.
I also made my partner’s vest using Folkwear 222. The instructions were a tad confusing, but that might be because I’ve never made any tailored garment before. I was shocked that the short collar actually stood correctly my first try. I made view A and it’s constructed very interestingly. The collar band is built in to the front panels and to attach them to the back piece you have to do some crazy turning with some bulky seams. But it turned out fine and I heard no complaints about it being uncomfortable, though I was accused of dressing him like an early 2000s emo kid.
With the vest I was proud of myself for using almost entirely stash materials. The fashion fabric was a random corduroy from a rummage sale, the lining was a ripped sheet, and the interfacing was old stained bedsheets. My downfall was the buttons. I didn’t have any matching buttons and tried doing a hodgepodge look, but it didn’t work out so I had my parter pick out some buttons he liked at the big box fabric store.
The rest of our costumes were random bits we already had in our wardrobes. I’ve been trying to focus more on reusable pieces for costumes rather than owning too many pieces that waste away in my plastic costume tub. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with making costumes for the sake of costuming, but it feels nice to be able to use wardrobe and costuming pieces together. It’s my favorite aspect of historybounding and I hope we continue to see more of it in the future. 🌼
Dropout Daisy 