BatTeaEGLolita @batteaeglolita - Tumblr Blog

Excuse the difference in quality since my arms are way too weak for a DSLR selfie _^_ Yesterday our comm had a big (post)halloween meet! I’m usually not that into OTT, so this is pretty much maximum spoopiness mode for me. High-waisted skirt by Bodyline Princess Bolero by Lady Sloth Bonnet and choker selfmade Gloves from Bodyline Tights from Aliexpress Boots by Tamaris (local)

ladyslothshop

Love purple details!

frillydreamdoll

lavendorium

wearing blue + black to Valentine's meets is my tradition lol

🖤JSK/shoes - Bodyline 🖤blouse - Lady Sloth 🖤over dress - Iris Garden 🖤headdress - Moi Meme Moitie 🖤jewelry - Puvithel 🖤socks - offbrand

velvetopia

Sakura Fairy

raspberry-beret

725 - Castleton

Sparklewolfie's Wonderland: Sparkle Stitches~Ribbon Bustle Skirt

Lolita and subculture fashion and lifestyle

"Victorian" skirt how to rom Learningtoflylj"

Hello, I am totally new to this community, but I was asked over at diy_tutorials if I could post it over here to :) How to sew a two in one

Flared Skirt Tutorial

https://egl.livejournal.com/2413999.html

Just Dream Dresses🖤🥀🦇

Oath of Rose ~Rondo of Love and Betrayal~ JSK I by Alice and the Pirates

20dollarlolita

New Headbow Pattern

And how to recover fabric from a waist bow to make your own headbow.

There’s advantages and disadvantages to owning matching headbows in your wardrobe. While not necessary, I find it to be a lot of fun, and open up some interesting coordinating possibilities.

What isn’t frilling fun is tumblr’s “do you want to leave this page” dialog box being so useless that you can’t see it until you’ve already deleted your entire post. Why even hAVE THE BOX, THEN, TUMBLR? Why even have the fucking box.

So, this is post version round 2. Let’s see if this one makes it. Sorry for being disorganized, but I’m doing it from memory.

So, a little headbow history, for people new to the fashion. We’re going to go back to 2010 and 2011, to the land of Over The Top Sweet.

Tall hair. Big hair bows.

Zuko, listen, lolita is about balance, but our view of balance is impacted by trends. When your hair rises many inches off the top of your head, you need a bow that can stand out against that.

After that, the large hair bow trend bled back into non-OTT sweet. It was normal for more casual sweet coords to still have large hair bows.

OTT has largely toned down. It used to be *cue Great Aunt Pink “back in my day” voice* that even non-OTT sweet was striving to be OTT, and it bled into everything. It used to be Over The Top Sweet, Kind Of On The Top Sweet, I’m New And I Saw People Wear Over The Top Sweet And I Think That’s All Lolita Is, and Old School Sweet. Now, you scroll down Closet of Frills, and the OTT and the standard sweet are two distinctly different things.

And they have two distinctly different headbows.

See, in the past, as recently as 4 years ago, even more casual lolita could get away with the 5″ tall bow.

Life hack: take good pics of your coords now so that when you run a blog five years from now, you’ll have actual non-starbucks-selfies of how you used to wear your headbows instead of these two incoherent blobs of aggressive pink.

Which is why I developed a bad habit.

See, Bodyline loves to put on these pin-on waist bows. Lots of brands do it, but Bodyline’s are…

…incorporated into their garments with a unique focus on construction. And by incorporated, I mean tacked on like an emergency propeller to zoom your way out of bad situations.

I hate Bodyline’s waist bows. Best case, you leave them on, they flap around like weird belly button wings, they get caught on everything. Worst case, they actually rip the waist of your dress when they get caught on something.

I don’t like most pin-on bows, but I really can’t stand the ones from Bodyline.

So, in the past, when it was still normal to have big head bows, I’d slide my bodyline waist bows onto a headband and call it a hair bow.

However, these days, I feel like maybe I can’t pull off the look as well. Some of us aren’t ready to take the helicopter propeller off your pelvis and slap it on your noggin’. (Having bangs definitely helped pull off the big head bow look, btw)

So, accepting that my favorite low-class cheater trick is officially out of style, what’s a person to do? Take the bows off the headbands, stick them in a pile, and forget about them for four years?

I mean, yeah, but after that?

First, we’ve got to recover the fabric in the bows. Grab your seam ripper, grab your bow, and take it apart. Be nice and careful around where your lace is, because you’re going to want to keep that and use it again.

If you’re not recovering a bow and you just want to make a new one from scratch, congratulations on making it this far!! The post is already long and it’s going to get longer. Scroll down till you see

**The rest of the bow!**

and then pick back up with us.

Now, you have a little pile of heavily wrinkled fabric and lace.

WARNING: Know if your fabric is colorfast. If it’s not, you’re going to have a couple of hours of stretching and ironing your fabric until it looks like fabric again.

If you’re disassembling cheap Bodyline bows (Bodyline isn’t known for many great things, but being able to throw their clothes in the washing machine at the sketchy all-night laundromat is nice), they’re colorfast, and you can take the fast route. Start by throwing all the pieces and the lace in a bucket/sink of hot water with some oxiclean or other stain-remover. In my case, the hot water made the interfacing peel off the fabrics, and I didn’t re-interface them.

After that soak, and washing the oxiclean out with a little soap and another rinse, it’s time to throw them back in the bucket with some white vinegar. I didn’t really measure it volumterically, but it was probably about half a cup in half a gallon of water. You want white, distilled vinegar for this, because you’re going to have to iron it out. Any other vinegar is going to leave stains and burn your fabric/iron/ironing board, but since distilled vinegar has already evaporated once, it can steam cleanly out of your cloth.

Little soak, dry them off on a towel (don’t rinse!), and then take the vinegary, kind of wet pieces and iron them as hot as the fabric can handle. Iron the lace, too, but watch out that you don’t melt the lace if it’s on a synthetic ground like most embroidered laces.

And now you have some nice fabric and lace bits.

**The rest of the bow!**

Quick bow terminology:

Bow Part A: This is the smaller, top part of the bow, and it’s the little bow “loops”. Bow Part B: These are the longer, bottom, “tails” part of the bow. Bow Part C: The fabric band that wraps around the middle.

Some bows will try to maintain the illusion of one-ness, meaning that if a trim is applied to the A part, it should carry on to the B part, so that we can pretend it’s one piece of ribbon. If you want to do that, go ahead. I will not be doing that in this tutorial.

Bow part A is cut at 4+3/4″ tall and 13+1/4″ wide. You only need to cut one piece.

Fold it in half with the long sides touching, and sew down the long side with 1/4″ seam allowance. Now, using your iron, press that seam open and flat, and then turn the piece inside-out and press it again.

More details of this process if you want.

Two steps pictures here because my computer is more of a mess than my sewing room. First, take your (now right-side-out) Bow Piece A, fold it long ways, and mark the center line. I marked by pressing it with my iron.

Second, take some of your lace, and trim the edges. If your lace is beading lace or another kind of lace meant to be put somewhere other than on a hem, you might not need to do this.

Sew two pieces of lace down the center line.

You might be looking at mine and going, uh, Pink, uh, that’s not remotely even. And you’d be right. However,

next, you’re going to fold the two short edges into the middle, and then you can’t see where mine was uneven.

Is it better to have it be even to start with? Yeah, probably, but if I waited until I did things perfectly, I’d never do anything.

BOW PART B.

My pattern that I made yesterday says to cut two pieces at 2+1/2″ by 9+7/8″, but these pieces of fabric that I had weren’t long enough for that. In the end, I just had to adjust proportions as I went. However, the green bow that I’ll show a high quality picture of later was 9.875″ long.

So here’s 2.5″ by whatever this piece of fabric was.

Pick one of your sides and sew your lace all the way around the edge.

A couple of tips that I didn’t photograph well enough: Line the raw edge of the lace up with the raw edge of the fabric, so that the lace is pointing inside. If you leave it pointing outside, it’ll be stuck inside the bow when you turn the piece to front. If you clip into the back edge of the lace once at each of the corners, you can go around corners a lot easier When you’re at the corner, take a few seconds to move the lace around so that you don’t sew the pretty edge of the lace into the seam and hide it away.

Once your lace is basted on, put your other piece of fabric onto it, sew around the edges (leaving a hole), and turn it to the front.

It’s easiest to leave the hole in the middle of one long side, because it’ll be hidden by the bow part c

Speaking of which:

Fold Bow Part A into a loop with the tails tucked in the back, and sew it down onto the center of Bow Part B

I found it really helpful to fold the bow into a W shape and tie it together with some thread, just to keep it in the right place.

Bow Part C is a piece of fabric about 3″x4″. Size is not super crucial.

Fold the two long edges in to overlap (almost folding it in 3rds).

Wrap it around the middle of your bow, and fold one edge so you can get a neat little finished edge.

Sew that little loop on.

Now, for the headband.

Start by taking your last piece of fabric and making a long continuous bias strip with it. Doing it on the bias will make sure it stretches and doesn’t fray.

Cut a triangle off one edge of your rectangle, and then make marks every ¾ of an inch. Make sure that you’re marking along the bias, not on the straight of grain.

When you get to the other end, cut off the rest so you have your bias parallelogram.

Fold it and match lines so that you’ve got a spiral going down the whole piece (this is much better explained in the continuous bias tutorial, but if it feels like you’re pinning it completely wrong, you might be doing it properly. This is fiddly)

When you’re done, you’ll have a tube with a seam that spirals down one side (which is why the pinning feels strange when you’re doing it right). Cut along your line to unwind your continuous bias strip.

You can also do traditional bias strips, or just use a ribbon.

Stretching as you go, wrap the bias strip around the headband, and glue it at the end. I use this specific super glue, but Aleenes’ Fabric Fusion works too, if you don’t like super glues.

I cut two little strips and hand sewed them onto the bottoms to cover up the stiffness from the glue and hopefully hold everything together better.

(Yes, I swapped out another project while the piano one was drying).

Now, take a while, sit in front of a mirror, get the loops where they look good, and tack them into place. Take it off and put it on several times during this process, and get it to a place where, every time you put it on, it looks good.

This is why I think it’s important to have an individual headband for every bow you make. It lets you affix things in a place where they look nice, and you don’t have to worry about pinning them every time you put them on, or them going rogue throughout the day.

For this one, I set it off at an angle, and sewed little cascade folds into the B part of the bow. I messed around with several angles and ideas before deciding that this one was the best for this specific bow.

Don’t I look so thrilled to be wearing it?

I was going to take a full coord shot with it and the matching dress, but it’s raining, so instead of having a picture that’s cute and relevant, I’ll just tell the story of the time that I was trying to get an outfit picture in the dress this bow matches, but I fell, stepped in my fish’s hospital tank (it was on the ground), and had to rush off and get him clean water that wasn’t contaminated by my shoe, which is how I was rushing around, holding a fish in a plastic cup, trying to find the water conditioner, with my petticoat dripping everywhere and getting shoe prints of water all over my bedroom carpeting.

The fish was fine. His name was Fierce Mango. Everyone remember to lolita responsibly.

20dollarlolita

Heyyyy if anybody wants to print this pattern, here’s a PDF. Due to the way the scanning worked, there’s a really big overlap between the pieces, so here’s piecing instructions:

Between piece A and piece B, there’s a gap. In the space between that gap, there are drawn two ½’s of a :) guy and two ½’s of a :D guy. If you have either a :) or a :D on your paper, you’ve got the right lines matching. If you aligned it and got a half :) and half :D then unfortunately you’ve got a big :( and you need to move the papers closer together.

This does not make things any easier than the tutorial was.