Star Trek Dress!

Woo!  Star Trek was amazing!!!  And... I'm going to leave it at that, because if I start saying more I'm going to start giving away spoilers.

I will say, though, that Benedict Cumberbatch is welcome to come read anything to me, at any time.  Damn.  Can't wait for the next season of Sherlock to come out (in January...).  So yummy.  He rivals Alan Rickman for voice (and looks), and that's not something I ever really thought I'd say.  Wow.

Anyway, on to the dress!

This first image (above) is not mine - I found it while doing research on the female dress Starfleet uniform from the 2009 movie (click for a link to the original website).  But you can see how many pieces there are - a LOT.  If I had done it correctly, the finished garment would have 29 pieces.  I had to add a panel, so mine actually has 33 (it cut another panel in two, and added two other panels in order to make the new seams look like they belonged there).  I'll get to that in a minute.

Because of the very precise nature of the pieces and seams in this dress, there was little room for error.  I made a test dress out of a thin knit fabric I owned, which helped some, but when I switched to the jumbo spandex, which is a lot heavier, the fit was still wrong (hence the extra panel).  Jumbo spandex is the same material they use in the movies.  I just bought a royal blue piece, as I didn't have the time to do a custom dye and screen printing job, though I was tempted.  If I had a couple more months I might have looked into it.  Part of me is sad that it isn't the right color and pattern, because it just doesn't look quite the same.  It's pretty close, though.

Alright!  So, above you can see my pattern pieces that I made.  I had cut out the entire shape of the dress, then cut that piece into the individual panels, and then retraced those panels with seam allowances added in and cut those out into the pieces you see above.  The leftmost piece is the extra panel I added into the back of the dress, which I then extended the seams going upwards towards the armpits so that it wouldn't look out of place (this will make more sense when you see the picture of the dress below).  The raglan sleeves (sleeves with the diagonal connection across the upper torso from neck to armpit) were hard - never done those before.  They also have to be very precise, or else the dress won't hit correctly under the bust.  I had to redo the sleeves three times before I finally liked how they turned out, and even then I had to put more of a dart into the top of the shoulder than I wanted to.  Also, I completely spaced on under-bust darts, and they aren't in my dress.  The material stretches, so I don't really see this as a problem.  

Front of the dress!  As you can see, the raglan sleeve connections have the funky added seams to them.  This is created by having extra pieces sewn to the right side of the pieces, then flipping them up and around and sewing them together to make the seam, leaving the extra seam-binding exposed.  Jumbo spandex is shiny on one side, and the exposed seam binding is just the wrong side of the fabric - you can see that the inside of the dress is also shiny.  The neck and arm holes are also bound in a similar fashion, but with only one piece per binding.  I learned how to do a proper V-neck binding when making this dress (scroll down to Drawing 5).  The neck binding wasn't hard - I used my regular technique when binding knits of making the binding be about 3/4 of the length of the opening so that it tightens and doesn't bubble up.  But the sleeve bindings were really tricky, because they aren't tight to the arm if you look at pictures from the movie.  I ended up doing the binding three times before I was happy with it, and essentially the binding was almost exactly the size of the arm opening - about an inch tighter on a 14 inch circumference.  

Back of the dress!  You can see the extra panel I added into the middle of the bottom half.  Because the jumbo spandex was so much heavier than the other knit I had used for my test dress, it was unusable before putting in this panel - waaaaay too tight.  At this point I did not have enough fabric left to re-cut new center panels that were wider, which is what I would've done if I had the fabric.  I did order more fabric than I needed to, but I used it up already because I actually had to cut out the entire dress twice - I cut it out the first time with the stretch going in the wrong direction, and it mattered.  Now I know how to cut these out in the future.  Without enough fabric to re-cut panels, I either had to pay another $24 to get another yard of fabric ($12 shipping... overpriced *angry mutters*) and risk not being able to finish the dress on time, or improvise.  In order to make it look like it belonged, I cut the center panel in half and added another panel in the middle, curving the seam up near the top to fit the look.  Then I continued those seams on the top half of the dress up to the armpit.  I think it looks quite nice, and I highly doubt anyone who wasn't a costume designer would see the difference at all.  Adding the extra panel made this dress just big enough to fit.  I wish I could've put a couple more inches in it even from this, but the fit isn't bad now.  (And this is yet another incentive to keep my current figure, because I don't want to grow out of this dress!)

Oh, and all of the seams that are bound with the shiny fabric have two decorative lines of stitching on either side of them.  Gah.  I tried to use a twin needle, but it was bunching up the fabric really badly, so I ended up just doing a straight stitch on them.  On the more up-and-down seams it doesn't matter at all, because the stretch is horizontal, but I've already have had a couple of them break where the seams curve to be horizontal as I've been pulling the dress on and off.  Oh well.  That's pretty easy to fix, if I want to get anal and go back and tack it down. 

Voila!  Dress!  The pin is an all-metal pin that I bought online - it's really nice.  It's the pin for science and medical.  Oh, and I went with blue for science and medical because I felt that was a lot closer to what I am as a biomedical engineering researcher than I am to a Starfleet engineer, which seems to be more electrical/mechanical engineering (based mostly on Scotty... could be broader and I don't know it because I haven't seen enough of the original show yet).  Also, it doesn't have the 'red shirts' connotation, haha.  And while I don't like either red or blue much, I like royal blue better than fire-engine red.  But I mostly went with it because I view myself mostly in science/medical professionally.  Though, really, I wouldn't be a member of Starfleet if we were in Star Trek times - I can't imagine myself going on five year missions away from my home planet.  I'm too much of a hobbit for that.

I also made the black knit shift dress and the black leggings.  This dress is so short I can't sit down without most of my butt touching the chair - no way was I wearing that without leggings.  I have no idea how this is a uniform (yeah, yeah, sex appeal of television...).  The 2009 movie uniforms technically have a charcoal grey undershirt/dress in cotton lycra, but I couldn't find it.  I found heather grey and black, and several friends agreed with me that black would be a better fit.

And because one of my favorite bloggers, Cation Designs, uses this summary, I'm going to steal it from her.

Summary:

Pattern: Made it myself, based on sketches online.

Fabric: In the final dress, about 1.5 yards of royal blue jumbo spandex, two yards to black cotton lycra (very thin bolt), and 1.5 yards of black thin knit (leggings).

Notions: 2 spools of thread (probably only needed one, but I bought two to use with the twin needle that I ended up ditching).

Hours: Guh... a lot.  At least 30.

Will you make it again?  There is a tiny part of peeping that it could be more accurate, and I could do a custom dye job and learn how to screen print and then re-make it with really accurate fabric and then also adjust the fit so that it would be exact and perfect... but in all likelihood, I will probably not make another one of these.  Maybe if my body changes a ton after pregnancy someday and I really want another dress that really fits, I'll do it.  But probably not.  This one is pretty awesome, and I don't think I need more than one Starfleet uniform.

How accurate is it?  A hell of a lot more accurate than anything you can buy online.  With the exception of the extra panel in the back, it's as close to accurate in the stitching as I can make it without examining a real outfit from the movie up close.  The fabric choices are off in color, but correct in material type, so agian it's as accurate I can make it without spending a lot more time and money on it.

Total cost:  Thread was $5, black knit was about $20, the jumbo spandex was about $50, and the thin black knit for the leggings I bought a long time ago but was probably $5 or so.  About $80, all told.

Final thoughts:  This dress was more expensive and harder to make than I had any idea it would be when I started on the path to making it, but I'm pretty happy with it.  People who've seen it in person seem to like it.  I'm happy to have a really nerdy dress that I can wear to conventions (assuming I make it to one one of these years they don't overlap with a beloved SCA event) and movies and just to be super nerdy.

Wow, this post got longer than I thought it would.  But this dress was the hardest thing I've ever sewn, so I suppose that makes sense.  Hope you enjoyed it!

~Kelly

Hi!

I promise I've been working on cool things!  My Star Trek Starfleet uniform dress was finished on Monday, and that's most of what I've been working on the last couple weeks.  It is the hardest thing I've ever made, and I will get some pictures this Friday when I go see the movie and then put up info on how I made it!

Other random projects: 

Started making an inkle weave based on the Purple Fret - I've had a lot of fun looking to Middle Kingdom awards for inspiration.  I've already made one based on the Cavendish Knot and one that's Midrealm-based.  I promise I will soon take photos of the weaving I've done and post them!  Need to start taking pictures before I give too many more of them away.

Also started work on the leather book I'm making as a memory book of DeForest and me again.  Haven't worked on that in a few months.  The cover is almost finished.  One of the biggest problems I'm having at the moment is that I didn't use the same treatment on the cover as I did on the pieces I cut out for the inside flaps, and the dye didn't take the same way.  Galen told me that could happen, and it did (now I know for future projects to cut out *all* the pieces and soak them the same way, even if all of them aren't being tooled).  I'm trying to figure out if I want to try and soak another piece of leather for a month, or if I just want to use the pieces that don't quite match.  I'd have to cut it out of a different hide, so it might have a different color anyway, even if I go through all the work, and that's a fair bit of leather I could use for something else.  But this is also a very beautiful project, and I want it to look good.  Maybe I just need to dye it a completely different color - green or something - so that it won't matter if it matches, because I don't think I'll be able to get it to match now.  Hmm, thoughts.

Grief is hard.  In general I know it keeps getting better - I keep reminding myself that these days are so much better than the days were a few months ago, and that continues to be true.  But days when it doesn't hurt much are still few and far between, and while the ache isn't a stabbing pain anymore (usually), it's often still there and still hurts and everything is still harder.  On the other hand, I now have been living at home for four weeks, and I've only spent one night away in that time, so more evidence of progress.  Still hate waking up at 4-5 am for my mid-sleep bathroom break and having him not be here, and then waking up later and knowing that he's not out sitting in the living room or on the front stoop, reading a book or working on our D&D game.  The rollercoaster is hard, too.  How I think I'm doing fine, but then ten minutes later I'm crying because some random thought of him popped into my head and it was too much and I couldn't stop it.  That's not to say that every time I think of him I cry - I don't.  I can think of him and smile or laugh, too, or just note it and keep going with my day.  Just... 

I'm rambling, and I need to pack up and go to lab so I can get my experiment set up before our lab meeting. The Star Trek dress is fabulous and I'm excited to see the movie (and go to my first movie in theaters since seeing The Avengers with Arnolde last summer... I knew a couple months ago that I was excited about this movie to go, and I set myself the goal that this was worth facing that, so I'm also slightly nervous/aching but mostly excited).  I'm doing fabulous inkle weaves, and I'm looking forward to checking out the looms for sale at Pennsic to see if they have ones that are worth the price of buying or if I should just suck it up and make one myself (woodworking isn't my favorite thing).

Gah, I'm still rambling and still need to leave.  Ttfn!  ~Kelly

Gratuitous Pictures of Cats

The title pretty much says it all.  I've amassed a decent number of pictures of my cats, and I'm going to post them.  Because cats are adorable.  Most of these were taken with my cell phone, so some are definitely of dubious quality.  Eh, yay, my blog, I'll post what I want to.

Cats pictures after the jump!

Random happenings and Mushroom Garden

I promise I'll start taking pictures and putting those up as I talk about things soon, but for now I'm just going to ramble about current projects without pictures and continue clearing out pictures of things I did last year (I figure I'll be that much more motivated to start taking pictures of things when the number of folders in my "pictures to blog about" file is much smaller).

A couple of my current projects:

- making a Star Trek uniform dress for the opening of the new Star Trek movie next month

- making leather crowns for Their Excellencies of Cynnabar

Star Trek Uniform Dress

You know, they look really simple from afar.  Some kind of stretchy textured fabric, a simple flared short dress, with a little bit of trickiness with the exposed seam bindings in the raglan sleeve cut.  That simplicity is DECEIT.  Deceit in two ways.  (Sources:  An awesome set of posts that LJ user LaughingMagpies put together in 2009 that did very detailed analysis of fabric and design of the Star Trek uniforms of the new movie.)

1.  The fabric is actually not textured, but a dyed design on what is most likely jumbo spandex (2 way stretch, 90% nylon, 10% spandex, 10 oz).  The design is a bunch of tiny Star Trek swoops, with a two-tone background.  The jumbo spandex part isn't that hard (though must be ordered online if you're not in the few select places like NYC which have spandex stores) but the design requires custom screen printing.  I debated whether to get this done, but I think it will cost at least $50 (though I haven't called the four local screen printing shops to find out...) and I don't think I want this outfit to get that expensive, even if it would be neat.  My plan is to pick a blue I like in the correct fabric (I've ordered swatches from a couple companies, which hopefully will arrive later this week so I can choose one and order the fabric), and then just make the pattern and everything else super correct and it'll be awesome enough.

2.  This sucker has TWENTY-NINE PIECES.  That's right, you read that correctly.  29.  The exposed seam bindings on front and back at raglan sleeve edges add 8 pieces (two per seam).  The bottom half of the dress actually has six neat swoopy seams in the front and back, which means the bottom half is 14 pieces.  Then there's the neck binding and two sleeve bindings, and the sleeves and the top half of the dress (another four pieces).  8 + 14 + 3 + 4 = 29 pieces.  I made a muslin yesterday out of some thin dark red knit fabric I have sitting around, and it's a neat dress, but also somewhat intricate.  Jeez.  And then there's all the decorative top-stitching over all the bottom seams, etc...

Oh, and then I have to make the sleeveless undershirt/dress (which is most likely a cotton/lycra blend, says others on the internet), and I'm going to whip up some leggings, too, because those dresses are short.  So, yeah.  Complicated.  But I will have a Star Trek dress, which makes me kind of gleeful for all sorts of reasons.  :)

Leather Crowns

I'm working on my first leatherworking commission!  Their Excellencies, the Baron and Baroness of Cynnabar (SCA people), asked me to make the Barony a pair of leather crowns.  Their crowns are very heavy metal ones, and it would be nice to have leather ones to wear during less formal times at events.  I don't want to say too much at the moment, but assuming I don't botch the paint job they are going to be awesome.

I've also had another friend tell me they want to commission something from me, which is super exciting.  And a couple other people ask me for leatherworking advice the last few months.  I'm becoming known as a leatherworker, and apparently one with enough apparent skill to ask things of.  Yay!

Mushroom Garden

And now for the "pick the random thing from last year to blog about" time... mushroom garden!  My lovely sister got me a mushroom growing kit from Back to the Roots, a neat company that takes used coffee grounds and turns them into a kit to grow mushrooms at home.  Here are the pictures of my mushrooms growing over the course of a week (this is as far as my kit grew).  I don't remember how long it took it to start growing, but it's about a week from first two pictures to the last picture.

1st picture day

1st picture day

2nd picture day

4th picture day

5th picture day

8th picture day

I never did try eating them, because I wasn't sure when to pick them and then they got too old and weird.  But hopefully next time? I think this would be fun to try again.

That's all for now!  I'm off to work on the leather crowns at craft night.  ~Kelly

Cat Toys and Ramblings

Here are a couple cat toys I made last June.  I made a companion cube out of felt and embroidery thread.  The nice thing about the companion cube is that it's large enough that it doesn't get lost under the couch, like so many of the cat toys.  It still gets lost, but it also turns up every once in a while. 

It's filled with pillow stuffing (fluffy stuff bought from JoAnn's), empty candy wrapping (for the crinkly noise), and catnip.

I also made a dorky little mouse from some fabric scraps, with the same filling.

And now for the cute pictures of baby Gnome playing with the companion cube.  :)

She was so little then... the kittens are over a year old now (their birthday was three days ago).  I didn't celebrate their birthday - just don't care to mark the day, as DeForest should be here to mark it with me.  If he were alive, I'm sure I would've made it into a big day for the kids, with presents and treats and all, but this year they're not getting anything.  They're cats, so it's not like they know the difference.  Hopefully by next year I'll care and do a big production of their birthday.  I'm going to assume for now it's similar to how I didn't care about The Hobbit coming out last December (still haven't seen it) and how I'm actually really excited for Star Trek to come out next month, and not worry about it.

There's a part of me that wonders about talking about grief and the struggles with it online, but there's another part of me that reminds me that I always like it when other bloggers talk about their realities, too, and not just the shiny parts.  I also continually wish that our culture talked about grief more - there's a large part of me that's amazed that I got to be 24 without having any clue how grief can affect people.  I mean, yeah, I knew people would be sad when someone close to them died, but I had no idea that it was such an all-body experience, and that it would last so incredibly long and affect me in so many ways.  I'm still struggling with it every day.  Some days are better than others, and overall there is a definite upward trend, but it's still takes me over an hour longer to get myself out of bed every day than it used to, before he died.  It's still hard being by myself most of the time, though I've gotten to the point where I can sometimes distract myself into having a decent time for a few hours by listening to podcasts and focusing on a craft project really hard.  But it's still a daily struggle.  And from talking to other widows and reading their words on the Young Widows Bulletin Board (ywbb.org, if you need it), I'm doing really well, and this is normal.  That's what's weird for me - that this is so completely normal, and I had absolutely no clue that this is how grief works, because it had never touched close to me.  Maybe, just maybe, if our culture talked about this more, it would be a little easier to bear.  Maybe the fear that there's someone out there, just waiting to judge me and tell me to get over things already, that so many people must just not get it, would be a little less.  Thankfully, that's only happened a little, and most of the people in my life have been wonderful.  But I know not everyone gets that, either, and that's sad, too.

So I suppose I'll just leave my grief-inspired ramblings in, when I have the courage to.

Heya

Hey, friends, family, whomever reads this - 

I'm still slowly getting back to normal.  The other widows I've spoken to tell me I'm actually doing great for almost 9 months out, though the progress still feels glacial.  As many people have told me, though, I'm trying to be kind to myself and just be patient with the sadness and the slow progress.  It is progress, though!

I've actually been doing TONS of crafts (I try to do something every day, and I can't always bring myself to do my research work, so I work on crafts instead), and have learned lots of new things - weaving and leatherburning (inscribing designs with heat into leather, like woodburning) come to mind most quickly.  I've also been doing a lot of thinking lately about opening up my own Etsy shop.  DeForest had been nudging me for quite a while to do so, and lately other people are really doing so, too.  I've had several people ask if they could commission leatherworking from me in the last few months, and several others note that my sewing skills are getting quite sharp, and others tell me that I'm good enough that I should start charging for my art.  So I might open a little shop soon and see how it goes!

One of the first things in the shop will probably be a downloadable PDF pattern to making my SCA hood, which will include neat variations about how to make it with a liripipe (the long tail you see on some medieval hoods) and how to make a piecework leather version of it (I made an amazing leather and fur hood for Winter Revel in January - pictures will be posted soon!).  It will be easily printable on 8.5" x 11" paper.

I also really love customizable work.  I'm going to be tinkering with leatherburning small images and quotes into leather scraps, and might be putting up offers to do customizable work on those, too.  Also, I really like the piecework leather dice bag I made, and I think I could price that at a level that would both be able to sell and tempting enough (time and materials wise) for me to make it.  I've looked at what others are offering out there, and no one is selling piecework leatherwork like I am, that I can tell.  Maybe my friends are onto something when they tell me that my pieceworking is really awesome and I should sell it.  :)

Anyway, those are some of my current thoughts.  I have a bunch of pictures of things that I hadn't posted from before DeForest passed, so those projects are able to go up.  I mislaid my camera some months ago, so I only have crappy cell phone pictures of some of my recent projects, but those will go up at some point, too.  Also, a lovely friend has an old camera that she said she'll send me soon, so I can get back to taking photos of things.

Life is still really hard, and I'm a good ways away from stable yet.  But things are heading in the right direction, and I'm excited about seeing if I can sell some things.  So, yay.

~Kelly

July 15th, 2012

July 15th, 2012, is the worst day of my life to date.  My boyfriend, DeForest, passed away from complications from a ruptured appendix that day after a week and a half in the hospital and doctors telling us that he was doing fine and recovering.  That's not a critique on the doctors - medicine is complicated and I don't think anyone did anything wrong and ruptured appendices can take people unexpectedly; it's just a statement of how unexpected and shocking it was.  He was my favorite person in the whole world, and the best person I have ever known (and I know a lot of really great people).  To people who don't know him, it's impossible to describe just how warm and caring this man was, and just how many people's lives he changed, and while it is incredibly amazing that this man loved me most in the world, it's incredibly hard to have that gone.

I'm getting better slowly.  But that would be why I haven't posted anything on the blog in two months.  Well, the first couple weeks of that are because I started playing Minecraft again, and between Minecraft and pulling things together for Pennsic I was being lazy about posting on the blog.  And then we went to the hospital on July 4th.  We had spent the morning sewing together, laughing and cuddling the kittens and sewing clothes to bring to Pennsic, the annual two-week SCA event that over 10 thousand people attend.  And then the pain started.  That week and a half in the hospital is both wonderful and not - DeForest got to see just how loved he was, and I know he was humbled and awed by how many people were constantly visiting him, and we got even closer that week as we realized just how dedicated we were to each other as I was there every day in the hospital with him.  Of course, it was also in a hospital, and he was in more pain than usual (he had Crohn's disease, lupus, and cronic neuralgia on 32 square inches on his side, so he was used to more pain than I've ever known), so that part wasn't the best.  But I will always remember the look on my man's face every time I walked into the hospital room - I've never seen anyone look at me with that much adoration and love.  I couple days ago I was hanging out with a friend, and I was saying how I loved DeForest so much, and she just looked at me and said "that much was obvious."

Some days are bearable now, and are starting to be decent.  Other days suck.  It's been five weeks now.  It might be a while before I start posting things again here, but I'll be back eventually, I imagine.  I know he would want me to continue doing all the things I love and continue loving life as much as I did (and still do, though it's hard some days), and I liked posting here about the things I made/make.