Belle's blue gown, as worn by Emilie de Ravin in ABC's "Once Upon a Time" has been far and away my most popular costume commission. I'm about to start #4, and just before leaving for vacation I finished and shipped off #3. Each one is slightly different, as each customer has requested different variations and color choices (the dress color in the show looks really different depending on the scene/color correction). It's been interesting and nice to have projects that I don't have to do a lot of research for, since I already have all the details memorized!
All messages will receive responses soon, but today is day #6 of a migraine and I've been only able to get online for short spurts and my spelling is horrendous even with spell check. Very frustrating. Thank you all for your patience!
...that she is on vacation and taking advantage of it!
Seriously, I have e-mails that I need to reply and I am planning to do those tomorrow. But I'm on a sunny island, and for some reason time slows down and goes faster all at once. One becomes very lazy and suddenly the day is over and major guilt trip! Oh well. I'll return home refreshed, and that's the important part.
I did stop into the island craft store today, and saw that they are renting out sewing machines. What a lovely idea! There are a lot of 'snowbirds' who come down for a week, or two, or twelve, and might love being crafty but can't really afford to buy a second machine/carry one on the airplane (which wouldn't be a good idea anyhow!). Certainly if I were down here more than two weeks I would probably get very antsy and need to rent a machine! I've never seen this option before (and I've been coming down here for 23 years), and think it's brilliant.
Oh, and for those Hunger Game fans who are wondering where the next "Costumes of..." post on their favorite movie is... it's coming! I'm collecting screencaptures now, which is a tedious process, and then I have to edit them before I even get writing on the article. But it'll be up by the end of the month, hopefully!
Those of you who follow the Confessions of a Seamstress Facebook page have already seen these, but I figured there were enough of you who aren't on Facebook that it was worth reposting them.
While I utterly adore season 2 of "Once Upon a Time," I've been disappointed in the lack of long flowing dresses. Several of you indicated similar feelings, and requested that I try my hand and designing a few dresses for the ladies of OUAT to fill the gap.
(click the pictures to see larger versions at DeviantArt)
For Belle, however, I decided to take one of her dresses from the Disney movie and adapt it as an OUAT designer might. I suspect they'd just more glitter, but I'm happy with the way this one turned out. Especially that fur...
I love the character of Aurora on the show, but I'm rather dismayed that we've only seen her in one dress thus far. I decided to try my hand at adapting the Brier Rose woods outfit. For this one I also tried a new coloring method, in which I did the entire piece in grayscale first, and then glazed it with different colored layers. You can see the original below:
Ariel hasn't appeared on the show yet, but she's due to appear in Season 3 if it gets renewed. Since I'm currently on vacation by the ocean, I thought it would be appropriate to give our favorite mermaid an OUAT make-over! Above are two snapshots of the work in progress... as you can see, I'm influenced by the choices they made for Aurora, as well as Ariel's traditional Disney colors.
Based on the info from the poll here and on my Facebook page, "The Hunger Games" was the clear winner to be the subject of my next "Costumes of..." post. This will be followed by something about X-Men costumes, although I'm going to have to make a plan for that one, as there are about fifty years of comics, movies and TV shows to analyze. Might just do individual characters...?
Anyhow, I'll be working on that when I'm down in Florida and not enjoying the beach. I have two weeks away from the sewing machine (which is where I'm spending most of my time now trying to get everything done) in which the focus will be the computer... when I'm not in the sun. Y'know, screen glare and all that. So the blog posts will get more frequent and I'll also do better at answering correspondence.
