The damaged Baby So Beautiful doll finally has her new wig and face. Her wig isn't quite what I wanted but it was close and available so it will do. I may restyle it though. Now she's sitting on my printer, wrapped in a cloth nappy - to keep her clean; waiting for clothes. I still don't know what I'm doing about her clothes.
The brunette Baby So Beautiful is similarly sitting wrapped in a cloth nappy in the bathroom, waiting to be redressed and put back on the shelf. This is mostly because she's in a corner of the bathroom that's out of the way. I keep forgetting she's there and when I remember, I'm already doing something else, so I make a mental note to fix her up later, and promptly forget she's there again.
Not Glinda's dress is in a zip lock bag on a shelf in our loungeroom. Still not finished. Nearly finished, though. Will eventually be finished.
Everything was put on hold because a month ago the Giant Husband and I received an invitation to a costume party for the end of November. I (stupidly) suggested I make us costumes. Fantastic Elizabethan costumes. The Giant Husband (even more stupidly) said "You're not going to be able to do that." He says he was talking about time constraints. Doesn't matter, because the second he said that, I had to make them even if it kills us all, because that's how my brain works. Except, since then, I've been working twice as much as usual which has left not much time for sewing. Now there's a month to go and I'm ridiculously behind and about to have a nervous breakdown over the whole project.
We have to go as famous people from history or now. I'm going to be Elizabeth I. He's going to be Francis Drake. His costume is based on a portrait of Drake. (Not started yet, though, except making the pattern.) Mine isn't going to be historically accurate. It's not based on a particular picture or anything. My starting point was actually one of the dresses worn by Miranda Richardson when she played Elizabeth I in Blackadder. But I've made some changes mostly based on what materials are available and what I'm going to have time and skill to actually do. There's no standing ruff because I have no idea how to do that, won't have time and think it looks incredibly uncomfortable. The fabric won't be perfect - we couldn't afford for me to buy the sort of satin brocade I really would have liked so I'm using tapestry upholstery fabric. And when I drafted the pattern, I did something weird with the stomacher so it's not quite a stomacher anymore. Seemed like a good idea at the time but not sure how I'll feel about it when the dress is finished.
Since I started making this dress I keep thinking back to a princess dress my mum made for me to wear to a costume party when I was twenty. I bought the fabric, two months in advance but didn't own a sewing machine. I kept considering hand-sewing it but my mother kept talking me out of it. "Don't worry." she'd say, "Don't hand-sew it. I'll bring my sewing machine around tomorrow and help you." Except she was always too busy to actually show up. Eventually she came on the day of the party, made the dress herself in about an hour and a half and then breezed off again. In the end, I was grateful that she'd made it but I really wished I'd hand-sewn it because Mum had made it how she wanted it to look, not how I wanted it to look. And because it was made in a hurry, almost everything we'd planned was left off and frankly it fitted fairly terribly. That dress, I've decided is the bar for this costume. I know this dress may not turn out fantastic or exactly how I want but as long as it turns out better than that dress, I'll be happy. At the end of the day, I suspect it will either turn out amazing or I'm going to look like a couch.
The old princess dress. If not a couch, I could have definitely passed as a footstool.
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