Wings!!!

One of my favorite projects. Sadly, no construction pictures again (I promise, I'll remember to take them... although this was from long ago. still, it would have been awesome.)

The wings are a 1/4" mild steel frame with fabric stretched over; the fabric is some stretchy synthetic. I painted it with a base coat of fabric medium, then acrylics, then a pearl glaze.

The corset is a fairly standard three-layer deal with 1/2" spring steel. I had to hand-sew the last couple panels (argh), because the metal attachment points made it impossible to cram through the sewing machine. I had hand-sewing callouses by the time I was done. *sigh*

The wings are actually detachable. The nuts, er, unbolt, letting you remove the pieces of metal they're attached to, and the strip running between them that the wing frame is anchored to. What's left is a sort of flat loop of metal with bolts sticking out - so theoretically, anything that can bolt to those loops can be attached to the corset. I could make all kinds of other wings if I wanted!

Can't think of a clever title

As promised, more details on hand-painting.

To keep the fiber from getting all scraggly, I tried enclosing it in pantyhose for the duration. This ended up failing, because I couldn't get the dye through the way I wanted, so I ended up switching to a length of netting tube from a bath poof thing. To keep the fiber stretched out along the length of the tube, I tied scrap yarn around the fiber in several places and then tied that through the holes in the netting.


After you get your fiber into some sort of protective casing (this is quite possibly unnecessary for other fibers - bamboo is just tricky that way), put it in the salt and soda ash soak.


Get your dye area set up. Lay down some plastic wrap to work on; make sure it's big enough for the whole thing, because you'll be wrapping the fiber up in it when you're done. Mix your dye and urea into squirt bottles.



Start squirting the dye on! Keep applying it until you see it puddling on the plastic - if there's no dye coming out of the fiber, it hasn't absorbed everything it can yet.

Keep going... and once you've got this side nicely saturated, flip it over and do the other side. See the places where it didn't soak all the way through?



All done. Now roll it up in the plastic wrap like a burrito! It's worth putting another layer or two of plastic wrap on while you're at it, as well.


For added security, throw it all in a plastic baggie before leaving it someplace warm to cure. I left mine for about 24 hours.


Time to rinse! Dump it out in the sink...

take the plastic wrap off...


and rinse off whatever you can by hand.


Unfortunately, these fiber reactive dyes are incredibly irritating when it comes time to get them off the thing you're dyeing. This picture is from four rinses in, simmered on the stove with Synthropol. Argh.

Eventually I gave up rinsing and just hung it outside to dry.

Here it is! The colors weren't as deep as I wanted; it's fairly clear that I didn't get the dye all the way to the center of the bundles. Either I should make a point of saturating the fiber way beyond what I think it can possibly hold, or make the bundles thinner. Also, the purple came out way too red, but that's probably just a mixing error.

Even so, it's still pretty.

Tactical Kimono and Tactical Yukata

Ok, so tac vests are awesome. I love all the pockets. I recently found myself in need of an article of Chinese/Japanese-style clothing, and as I was laying it out, I thought.. "You know, there's a lot of room in these sleeves." And thus my Tactical Kimono was born. (Ok, so it's not really a kimono - too short, wrong fabric. But still.)



For extra sturdiness, I topstitched all the seams and did a satin stitch on joins that were likely to see some tension.


One side of one sleeve (I flipped the sleeves inside out so you can see the pockets in all their glory)


I tried to make cargo pockets like you see on BDUs...

Little elastic loops and button toggles so you can fill the pockets arbitrarily full.






At the time I made the Tactical Kimono, I wasn't blogging, so I never thought of doing in-progress pics. If anyone's curious, leave a comment and I'll try to explain - but basically, it's just a simple kimono with a sleeve lining of canvas with pockets sewn on.

Anyway, after that, I decided that I wanted something a bit more authentic (...as authentic as a tactical kimono can be, anyway) and something a bit lighter. So I ordered some fabric from the amazing people at ichiroya.com - they sell all kinds of kimono/haori/obi/etc as well as fabric for all of those. I also decided to go with a double layer of fairly fine-woven cotton broadcloth (sheets, actually) for the pockets. I also got an obi from them - and it turned out that the same kind of flower is on both the obi and the fabric!

Yukata with obi






Just in case one of the things you need to keep up your sleeve is an 8.5x11 envelope.


Loop and toggle again, with pleated cargo pockets




Turns out this fabric takes flat felled seams really nicely.

I was making it up as I went along, and the neckline turned out all wrong; I'll fix that before the next time I wear it.

Isn't the fabric pretty?

There were a couple flaws in this model; I should have tacked the pocket pleats together at the top, because they kept spilling everything out. Also, the sleeve lining tended to creep forward out of the sleeve - I need to tack it down inside somewhere. Same basic construction principles as the original tactical kimono; I just spent more effort getting the pockets finished neatly. Lots and lots of topstitching turned out to be the secret.

Snips and snails and ?? tails

A project from a couple summers ago. I decided that, clearly, for this costume I needed a tail. So I scrounged around in my fabric stash and came up with the remnants of the fabric I had bought for the corset that went with my wings (a project I promise to post another day), and some random black fabric, and a pile of plastic grocery bags (because I was running out of time and didn't want to pay for batting.)

It came out impossibly well for the amount of time I actually spend on it (for once, I got it right the first time!)





Basically, I just sketched a tail shape onto the fabric and sewed it up. The spines are just black cotton duck - once again, I just sort of sketched them onto the fabric, cut out two, stitched them and turned them inside out. All I had to do after that was just sandwich them in between the layers of the tail fabric so that they'd stick up from the "spine" after the tail was flipped inside out.

The plastic bags don't hold up super well in the long term - they tend to compress - and they rustle. Not the ideal stuffing material, but hey, it worked. (That seems to be the refrain in all my projects...)

The dreams of fish, and sailor's songs

+5 to you if you get the reference.

So, yesterday I ran some experimental dye batches - I'm still looking for a nice deep turquoise, emerald, and sapphire (can you tell I like jewel tones?) What I got was not at all what I expected... but it was rather nice all the same, I think. For your perusal:





Isn't it a nice sea-colors set?

After that, I experimented with hand-painting (when I do a batch for real, I'll post in-progress pictures). I was trying for blue-green-purple, but my green seems to have mutated to a dark greenish blue. Still, it's interesting, and I seem to have mixed a nice blue-violet. And now I know how to do it.






I adore bamboo. It doesn't matter what horrible colors you dye it; the sheen makes it beautiful. (Well, possibly with the exception of the terrifying BRIGHT YELLOW GREEN!!! that I managed to produce last time I did some experimental batches. Eugh.)

Upcoming: hand-painting some plain fiber, because I'm contemplating an experiment with silk paper that will become a book cover or somesuch if it comes out well. First I need to dye the fiber, though. I'll post in-progress pictures on the off-chance they're useful to someone.