Unintentionally In-Character Cosplay Sewing, or, Make Everything Way More Complicated Than It Needs To Be, Ignore Severe Personal Discomfort, And Swear A Lot
The Murder Robe progresses.
Good news: It is now a three-dimensional, wearable garment! And I even have the back pleats pinned in place, to be stitched down tomorrow after work.
Bad news: I decided to flat-line it to get a slightly heavier weight of silk than the nightgown like in the movie. I’m guessing they just used...you know...heavier silk, but that wasn’t an option for me in the color I liked best, so. Here we are.
Have you ever hand-basted together 60-inch-long, 26-inch-wide panels of incredibly slippery silk that constantly wants to bubble and slide out of place?
I have. I very have. (Also the fabric is greener than that IRL; my phone camera is just weird.)
And that’s before I got to finishing the seams.
Obviously the structural seams could be actually stitched by machine. But the finishing work- that’s got to be done by hand. For someone who constantly swears that lightweight silk is the devil, I sure do spend half my life felling long seams on the stuff.
(Gotta chant my encouraging mantra: The movie costuming team sewed the whole thing by hand. The movie costuming team sewed the whole thing by hand.)
It’s a good thing I had today off, because I was able to bang out all of that and, as aforementioned, get the pleats pinned down. The pleated section in the movie is narrower than I thought- it’s not the full back of the robe, contrary to my initial impressions. Lacking a dressmaker’s dummy or a friend to help me, I measured the width of my shoulders (14″), lined up the ends of already-stitched robe shoulders with the 1″ and 14″ marks, and pleated down the back panel to fit in the space between. In the initial try-on, it looked pretty good.
I’m a bit flummoxed as to how the ties work, because they don’t show from the back at all. thought maybe they were anchored at the center back under the pleats, but I’m not sure the pleats would fully cover them in that case. Perhaps they’re stitched in at the side seams? If so, I’m going to be rather put out, since I already seamed AND felled those. But whatever I end up having to do to make it look right...
Oh also the front edge and the part with the pleats are finished with bias binding. Which I have to make from my...half-yard or so of remaining silk.
And I still have to set in the sleeves. And the arm-holes are doing something wonky that I’m not sure how to fix.
I said it before and I’ll say it again- if you didn’t want to go on a murder spree before you started this project, you definitely will after.
.(But still- I’m going to have my own copy of the Murder Loungewear. 22-year-old Marzi back in late 2015 is speechless.)
