Work in Progress Wednesday

As dull as it is to be reading post after post about sewing these costumes, just imagine living this life.  Ugh.  I am so sick of sewing costumes.  And right now I should be hemming pants, doing some detail work on Mrs. Potts, making Babette's feather duster skirt, and making a shirt for Lefou because, oops, he doesn't have one. 

Anyway,  below we see The Beast's jacket, with yellow ribbon pinned on as trim.  The blue fabric was so very light weight that I ended up lining it to give it more body.  I love the lining -- it's  shiny paisley, and has a definite Las Vegas vibe.  

The pattern is view A of McCall's 6143.  One could argue that view C would've been more Beast-like, but it also had more possibilities to turn out incredibly dumpy without a bunch of fittings.

This needs gold buttons, by the way.  Except the tech director claims he never saw a bag of gold buttons; Thalia and I have clear memory of him bringing in a bag of gold buttons.  In other news, everyone backstage is very tired and cranky, and sort of not caring about little things like buttons anymore.  Also, when I took this into the studio, the yellow ribbon looked green with the combo of blue fabric show-through and fluorescent lights -- again, I didn't really care.  

Click on photos to enlarge, if desired.

Oh, crud, I just remembered I thought this jacket needed to be hemmed since The Beast is short.  Again, oops.  Tomorrow is another day.  Moving on.

Belle's blue dress.  Belle wanted something comfortable, and easy on-and-off.  We decided to use Simplicity 4139 the Dorothy Dress since the blouse is supposed to be sewn to the jumper, plus we knew it fit.  I left off the collar of the blouse, substituting a neckline slit made by sewing on a little interfaced rectangle of fabric, then slitting it down the middle (we did a bunch of these with the Shakespeare costumes last month).  Then I finished it off with bias tape around the neckline just like I did for the Beatrice and Hero blouses.

I thought I could just make the jumper top a little taller in the very front, then attach the straps.  But that turned out to look silly.  And very Dorothy-like.

So I ripped that blue bodice back off the blouse front, and drew another pattern front with strap integrated.  And made a facing for it.  For the sleeves I simply extended the lines of the little puffy Dorothy sleeves until they were mid-forearm-ish (not that I measured anyone's arm for this -- it was pretty much a random guess).

Note that I pleated the skirt instead of gathering.  The material was bulky.  And I'm sick of gathering skirts.  Also, instead of 3 iterations of the skirt piece, I only used 2; I whacked one in half to use for the back, and used the other for the front.  That was plenty of fullness for this outfit.

The sleeve has a serged edge, folded up to hem, then a tuck tacked down to give it a more finished shape.

In the back the straps are simply sewn in between the bodice and the facing (the pattern doesn't have a facing, but it isn't that hard to make up those pieces on the fly).  White zipper, blue thread sewing it in on the blue part of the dress, white thread on the white part (be impressed by that attention to detail -- it doesn't come up very often in this adventure).

Then we slapped on an apron left over from Annie ... we had made a boatload of aprons for that, did I blog about it?  Hmm, no clue.  Anyway, I tacked the apron directly onto the front of the dress, and then she can tie it in the back however tight she wants it.

Okay, back to sewing.  Tomorrow is dress rehearsal.