If you scroll down and stare at Haruhi's costume, you'll see I've got several different kinds of fabric I need to work with, and I need the colors (shades of black, mostly) to be friendly with each other.
There's the bra part of the top, which is white and needs to be gathered top and bottom and be able to have little buttonholes where the black rope will pass through in the top. I'm thinking white suiting for this, and basing it all on a white bra I need to buy but again can't until I'm the right size and all.
There's the base black fabric for the top and the part of the skirt which is not a ruffle. I think these should be the same fabric to sync the two pieces together. I was thinking of thick swimsuit fabric--slick and with a bit of stretch--for the skirt but I realized I don't want that much stretch in the top--I need to get that to fit right and stay put. I want a little 2-way stretch, but I don't want to play with much I found this today, but it was WAY too stretchy...
I may end up just using black suiting for these portions...it's thick and 8$/yard, has a bit of stretch and irons like a dream. We'll see.
I knew what I wanted to use as the top fluffy transparent layer for the skirt, and that's smoky chiffon. I'd like to find one that's brown/black but smoky seems to be what's available. I found this but wasn't sure how much I needed. I just get a foot for my sewing machine last week that finishes chiffon and other things nice and neatly which I'm kind of exciting about getting to break out when the time comes.
Snap, I lied, this is organza. But I'll probably end up with chiffon.
I'm torn on the big ruffly part of the skirt. I looked at duchess satin, (more structured but heavier) and taffeta (lighter and stiff, but too light? would it look silly?) but couldn't pick one to be really good. I'm considering the possibility of doubling the taffeta, and putting a stichery row along the edge of the ruffles and running cord or wire through it to make the ends heavier and maybe sway when I walk....not sure.
I also found satin taffeta at another store, which looked pretty good:
this was a cheap black satin that was 50% off, but there wasn't enough to get to play with. For 3.50/yrd I'd just like to have seen how it did, you know?
in the end I bought 10 yrds of the cheapest muslin I could find and will be playing with draping that on my dress form when I can get the right dimensions on it. I'll take pictures of that amateur hilarity when it happens.
So, the other part of the costume which I've been thinking about is the belt. It looks like an impossibly wide belt that will probably need to be in 2 pieces and glued together to get the angles right. It's got two layers, a gunmetal gray or silver layer on the bottom and a slightly smaller black layer on top that has diamond cut-outs every few inches along the middle. Those are going to be a bitch.
I looked at 2 helpful things today, a thick cord thing that vinyl in the right colors cold be wrapped around, and a thick silver belt-looking thing that is probably too thin, but looks really cool.
The last thing I found may actually be super cool. I found it in the fabric store closest to me which is awesome, but there were a million people in the store and didn't want to deal with it twice (once for the muslin before I found this.)
One of the things that worried me was that on the top there's black that goes up in between her boobs. What the hell is that? How does it attach?
So what I fould was a black velvet...tube. I'm thinking of ransacking an old bra for the underwire, sliding the underwire through the velvet tube, and then hand-sewing it to the top.
Should I mention now how very VERY bad I am at hand-sewing? well, it's all a learning process.
So that's what I've been up to. I'm also working on the guitar, but there's a thing in the works that will very probably fall through but would be super-awesome dance around crazy good.
That's why it probably won't happen.
~Raiphin
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