Final Project: The End

After two weeks I have accomplished something amazing for me. I was nervously confident going into this project because it had a lot of things I had never done before with it. But I did it! And it doesn't look half bad! Its not perfect by any means and there are some things I think I'm going to keep working on with it, but for someone who is mostly self taught in sewing I am pretty proud. I can't wait to wear it for Christmas!

FRONT VIEW
paired with classic pearls and those 50 style shoes to help give a more 50's feel.

Look at those darts! First time was not such a success, but by the third I had those things down! P.S. the bow/belt is detachable so you can wear it in the front or the back

 

BACK VIEW
I am most proud of the zipper. I know that sounds weird, but it was my first time successfully putting one in correctly. I usually mess it up pretty badly

I added the pearl button to hide the clasp and to add that classy, timeless feel that pearls bring

Final Project: The Creation

Step one: Finding the fabric. I started with this beautiful red fabric as my original inspiration and plan. I love the way it shines and shimmers and it just looks 50's to me.
 

Step Two: Finding a pattern.  looked online for a while, but when I realized nothing would really get here in time I opted for looking in the shop. I found this pattern that I used (the pink one) with some slight alterations.
 

Step Three: Making the pattern. Because the actual pattern was too small for me Sister Dooley had to teach me how to change it so that it would fit. I now have a new skill!

Step four: Cutting out the fabric. This simple step takes FOREVER! Its funny how the time commitment comes more from easy tedious stuff than the hard and new things.

Step five: Sewing!! Finally! Once I would get to sewing it seemed to go by so quickly.

Final Project : The Inspiration

When I was first starting to think about what I wanted to make for my final project I knew I wanted to make something I could wear again. Then when we were going through the donated materials, I found this gorgeous red that I knew I had to use. Instantly I knew I wanted to make a 50's style dress so I started to look for movies based in the 50's. After a short time "The Notebook" came to mind. The decision was made. I was going to make a dress for Allie.

Allie's main color throughout the movie which worked great considering that is the color I had. She was an upper-class girl and s she dressed a little better which is why I chose to do a more formal dress.

Costume Critique: TANGLED

RAPUNZEL: Rapunzel's costume is a light purple to show her light and fun personality. The length of her dress is just to her shins. The length is important. It is not so long as to look grow up and proper, but not too short either. The length gives you the idea of her still being childish and sheltered. She has a corset around her middle to help set the time period and feel of kings and queens, princes and princesses, and magic. Her sleeves are puffy on the shoulder and then fit along the skin to a three quarters length. The length of the sleeves also helps to give the feel of her being young and innocent. Another important detail is that she does not wear shoe. Her bare feet help to give her that playful, innocent,  girly look. I think the costumer did a good job with Rapunzel.

Costume Critique: The Middle - Sue Heck

Sue Heck is a character in the show "The Middle." She plays a super awkward, always happy, energetic teenage girl who's family just gets by with what they happen to have.


Wearer of turtle necks, sweater vests, and piggy tails -- Sue heck! Giving her all three while clashing the colors she wears gives her the ultimate nerdy, awkward teenage girl look.

 

One of her few down moments. I think its great that she says nothing about clothing. Stripes and argyle should never go together unless the look you are trying to get is that of an oblivious middle school nerd such as Sue.
 





Once sue reaches high school se tries out for just about everything and does not make a single team, so she creates her own -- the wrestleretts. They were like cheerleaders for the wrestlers. The unattractive, ill-fitting uniforms only help with her awkward image.

 

This last picture I think just really shows her upbeat and hopeful attitude about everything.

Costume Critique: Thumbelina

One of my favorite "princess" movies as a kid was Thumbelina. It is a fun fairy tail that has fairies, adventures, love, friendship and a beautiful little girl the size of a thumb.

 Thumbelina wears a flowing blue skirt. I think this helps show her as free and somewhat elegant. The top helps portray her social status as the daughter of a widow and also gives her a young, girly look. The head band with flowers also helps with the you, sweet, girly image. This is her first and main costume. It really shows her personality.

 





As Thumbelina goes through the story one of the big events is that, when she believes her true love to be dead, she gives into the pressures of others and agrees to marry the mole. Her wedding dress here shows more of the personalities of the mole and those that pushed her to marry him than her own. The thing on her neck and her hair, no longer free flowing, show her restriction and uncomfortability with this decision. (Spoiler: she does not go through with it)


 



At the end of the movie, Thumbelina finds Cornelius and earns her wings. In a sense, she grew up. Her wedding dress shows her elegance and beauty and makes her look more womanly than girly. The pieces of free-flowing material attached to the dress keep her free and unique personality. 

Costume Critique: Cinderella

Cinderella is perhaps the most classic of fairy tales. From watching the previews, I have been so far impressed with the costume they have chosen for Cinderella's ball gown.

The classic look from the old Disney movie is kept by the giant dress and the almost-off-the-shoulder puffy sleeves. I also like that they are keeping the dress blue, but they are making it a deeper shade. I personally think it will help to make her "pop" and stand out fro the crowd which is why the prince notices her. I am disappointed to see that her hair is not in the Cinderella bun though. Well, at lest they got the glass slipper! I am very excited for this movie!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McQ_cCBaiac

Lab Journal

This week for my lab hours I came in and helped to fit Cameron as Blaine with Ingrid. We basically just made sure all the outfits we had already chosen for him would fit and that they would work in the sequence that we had put them in. That went by very well and pretty quickly.  Everything worked except for one cardigan which was very easily switched out for one that worked well. Blaine's personality is not that exciting, and very fatherly. Consequently, we dressed him in many neutrally colored shirts and pairing them with different blue and green cardigans to keep some variety in his chosen costumes. He will wear black slacks regularly to help him look professional and older while still relaxed.  After Cameron left I stayed for a little while longer with Ingrid and began to sew velcro onto his button up shirts. Unfortunately the sewing machine was again giving me attitude and so I did not get very far on it at all. Hopefully next time it will work better with me.

Costume Critique: Queen Amidala

Queen Amidala  was the queen of the Galactic Empire in the STARWARS series. She wears a lot of red as it is a symbol of power. In the (future) time era that she is in people wear a lot of billowy things. Jedi wear hooded capes with big log sleeves and royals all wear dress like things that typically have big open long sleeves. I think things that are billowy make you appear bigger, more powerful, and sometimes more in control. The styles reminds a lot of that of the Romans. Down the middle of her dress hangs a red and gold sash made with intricate and fancy designs- very much to show her high position. Her head piece is made of gold and really gives her that futuristic/outer-spacy vibe. The gold also serves the purpose of showing her wealth and high authoritative position. The Queen's insane hairdos always still look perfectly put in place and neat to help convey that she is on top of things and an orderly, in control women. Her face paint however, is one thing that I just have never fully understood. The only thing I can come up with is that it seperates her from others (commoners) and it would help to hide her identity if ever needed (which in the movies I guess it is proven to be the case). Her makeup also does give her a more serious look which is something a young woman in such a high position would need in order to be taken seriously by the council which consisted of older males of varying species. All in all, I'd say its a good costume.

Lab Journal

This week for lab I worked on the Santa Costume. There were a few things that needed to be done and one of those things was the that the zipper needed to be fixed. It was stuck and would not zip well if at all. It tool patience, but I kept working with it and eventually I got it to work again. I did not really do anything special to it, I just spent time trying to zip and unzip it over and over again. The more I worked the easier it got. Afterwards, I had someone else try it just to make sure it was not just me that could work the zipper. Sure enough it worked. It still was not perfect, but it was much better and now we know that the more we work on it, the easier it will get. After all that, I went and stated helping with the wig. It was a mess. You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning and your hair looks more like and animals nest than luscious locks? Well, it was close to that.

BEFORE

AFTER

In order to fix it, we used fabric softener and a fine toothed comb to slowly pick out all the knots(or as many as we could get in the time we were there). After we would get one part acceptably combed out we rolled that hair around our fingers and pinned it with a bobby pin so that when it would dry it would make nice Santa curls :)

Costume Critique: The Middle's Sue Heck

The Middle is a television show about a family in Missouri. All members of the family have very different and unique personalities. Sue is the middle child and has a extremely bubbly and awkward character. She is the type of character that can't really do anything, but never gets discouraged and continues to try out for literally everything.

To show her character, the costumers dress Sue in bright, happy colors with different girly but out of style prints. Rainbows and unicorns are common things for her and just about anything as random can make Sue beyond excited and joyful. To help give her that awkward, almost nerdy look she has a hair part down the middle and braces. Her clothing normally fits her okay, but often does not quite match and is always out of style. Luckily for her, sue is a character who is comfortable in her own skin and does not care too much about what other people might think of her. she dresses very modestly, and is always covered on her shoulders, chest, stomach, and usually her knees.

Here she is dressed in knee length jean skirt with a tree and birds on it. She has a brightly colored striped tank top over a pastel plaid button up.

Since sue can't make any of the school teams she decides to create one- the wrestleretts. They are basically cheerleaders for the wrestlers. As you can see in the picture below, she, and her friends, look just as awkward and out of style even in a cheer uniform.

The bigger the better: 80's hair and clothing styles

This week for lab hours we had the actor playing the role of Travis Yorgason come in for a fitting. I came closer to the end of his fitting, but we were able to find him a few options. After he left, Taimi and I started to work with Ingrid on what her look could be. It was a lot of fun. We weren't satisfied with just clothes though so we also started to look at some accessory and hair options. Big hair options. We got some good teases in her hair and found two outfits that really look good for her character. We decided she looks good in blues and we wanted something comfortable since her character had been waiting in a hospital for quite some time.

One of the looks was a cream colored shirt with a navy blue cardigan that had a floral pattern on the shoulders and elbows and some nicerish navy blue comfortable pants. The other look consisted of the same pants, but a large, oversized, light blue sweater instead of the cardigan. We got her hair really big, gave her a ring, and gave her some nice giant hoop earrings. It was quite a lovely sight. After finishing our fun with Ingrid, the actor playing the role of Blaine came in. He is quite the character himself. It was fun to work with him. He was full of energy and excitement and was willing to try anything we handed him. We weren't able to find him quite as much as we would have liked, but we did find him some things. After all was said and done, I feel I had a very successful and productive lab hour session.

Lab Journal: week 2

This week I finished sewing The apron for the dishwasher.


I had to finish pinning it first. Then I sewed
the strings and pulled them right-side-out. I really
like the color and texture of the material. It was fun
to work with. 

Sewing was fun and really made time fly. After
finishing I had a big pile of pins next to me. I was
kinda proud when I finished because I haven't done
much sewing in the past and It turned out well. Obviously
it is not as good as Eseta's, but it is not supposed to be.

Towards the end the sewing machine decided to start giving me
some attitude and I ended up have to rethread it about ten times.
I ended up getting annoyed enough with it that I quit with the machine
and just finished sewing by hand.
 

Freaky Friday Costume Critique

This weekend I decided to watch Freaky Friday. I paid particular attention to the mom's costume progression throughout the movie. In the beginning she of course dresses professional, but when the bodies switch that changes. The first morning, she wears what she can find in the closet, so she looks professional. She goes shopping and completely changes her look.

Imagine being a rebellious teenager stuck in the body of your mother. I would probably want to make a few changes as well. The costume designer portrayer this very well in my opinion. She gets a pixi cut and spikes her hair which gives her the rebellious sort of look. She has an earing put at the top of one of her ears that also gives the less professional, younger, almost rebellious look. The dress she wears is low cut and flows freely in the wind. It is boldly colored with a bohemian type of print on it. It is polar opposite from anything the mom would wear normally, but fits perfectly with what the daughter might wear. Essentially, what the costume designer did was think of what the younger daughter might wear that a grown woman could also possibly get way with and then put the mom in that. I would have done the same thing. She also is wearing some things that the daughter would not get away with so easily, but would have probably loved to wear like the high heeled, black, knee length boots or the new ear piercing. IT helps to convey the idea that the teenager now feels a bit of freedom as everyone else sees her as an adult and adults make their own decisions. At the rehearsal dinner She has to dress more formal since it is a formal event, so she is in a dress that the mom may have chosen when she was still the mom. Its sleek, but not form fitting, professional, and nice. I may have put her in something slightly more formal as it is the scene of the rehearsal dinner for the mom's wedding, but then again I don't think it was a bad choice as the costume designer's job it to present both a grown woman and a teenage girl in the same person. I think she did this very well throughout the whole movie.

Playing Dress-Up: Lab Journal

This week I had to split my lab hours apart in order to get them both in. The first lab hour I spent Practicing and playing around with the sewing machine and the serger.  While working on the sewing machine, I learned that there is a reason we sew material and not paper. Paper is so much harder. It would get kinda stuck when I tried to turn it and occasionally tare instead of gliding easily through. The serger was a bit more fun than I expected it to be. I felt quite accomplished when I successfully changed the threads. However, I ran into a little trouble when I tried to actually serge a piece of material. I'm not sure what was wrong with it, all the threads were coming out right where they were supposed to be, but for some reason none of the threads would hold on to the material. It was weird. Ingrid didn't really know what was wrong with it either, so I put a note on it and went on to look at the other serger to see how to rethread that one. After that I had to leave for a bit to go to a couple classes. The second lab hour I spent measuring the two girls who did come for their fittings and pulling outfits for them. It was fun- like looking for costumes for Halloween and shopping combined. :) Everyone there was super enthusiastic about it and together we came up with multiple costumes tat I think will work very well for this play. It also helped a ton that Kim could pull off almost everything we put her in. It was a lot of fun and really helped to get me excited for this play!

Costume Critique: Snow White in the forest

Once Upon A Time is a television show about fairy-tale characters that get trapped in the real world. Snow White is one of the main characters. For this critique I am going to focus on Snow White's forest costume. 

 While in the forest  Snow would have to be able to camouflage to hide from the Evil Queen, so she wears a lot of browns and greens. In the scenes where she is in the forest it is often cooler which I think is why the costume designer put her in different leathers and furs. Her clothes are tight fitting and made of material that she can easily move around in and she has leather boots to keep her feet dry while trudging through the dewy wet forest.  The belt around her middle helps accentuate her features and gives her the hourglass figure. There are a lot of stitches visible on her costume which really helps to give I that old-timey-fairy-tale-era feel. Her gloves, also made of leather, are good to keep her hands from getting all scraped up while climbing trees and over logs and boulders. Lastly, her cape is a deep forest green that blends well with her surroundings. It has a very simple trim, such as a peasant would have, and comes only to her knees as to keep it from dragging on the ground and leaving a trail. Her cape has a large hood that Snow uses to conceal her identity when needed.

Snow's hair is usually down with some slight messy curls in it and pulled partly back to keep it out of her face. It looks just as I would imagine an outcast princesses hair might look like. Her make-up is also very basic. Neutral tones help to show her raw beauty as she is "the fairest of them all." I think this costume was done very well with attention paid to every little detail.