Terrafaye Seamings

costumes & sew on

[retropopcult]

Cosplayers at a Star Trek Convention, 1976

[foone]

in this house we have endless respect for cosplayers from the days before VCRs.

You couldn’t just rewatch the episode to look at all the details of the costume. You got lucky with press photos showing up in magazines or you just watched the episode/movie while sketching furiously

[silencedrowns]

thinking about that one woman who made a Star Wars flight suit in 1977 entirely from trading cards and sketching details in the theater. or stories I’ve heard about old school Trek cosplayers getting the bizarre seam placements right by photocopying magazines onto overhead transparencies and projecting them onto butcher paper.

I’m a semi old school cosplayer (started in 2001) so some of the old school techniques are still things I learned on (I’ve sketched from stuttering VHS tapes on pause and used the overhead transparency trick)… what we have access to now for costume recreation blows what they had out of the water just in terms of reference material, let alone specialty costume supplies like thermoplastics and cosplay wigs.

[ao3-shenanigans]

WE MADE IT FOLKS!!!

[terrafaye-seamings]

I blacked out after seeing your post and woke up at my embroidery machine.

Designed off @ao3-shenanigans ' image with Inkscape and the Ink/Stitch plugin. Stitched in Gütermann Dekor col 4295 on unbleached muslin/fashion fuze woven/cut-away plus.

[perfectfashiondetails]

Emilio Pucci Fall 2011

[terrafaye-seamings]

I made a Halloween costume for the trick or treaters this year: First Mate Piggy! aka Miss Piggy from the Pigs in Space sketches on The Muppet Show.

The dress is amazingly sparkly, and sheds glitter absolutely everywhere.

[saccharinescorpion]

talking about Rosie The Riveter, fun fact: while the We Can Do It picture has become the most-well known depiction of her in modern times, it wasn’t really a famous image when it was made–in fact, it wasn’t even intended to be her

the most famous depiction of Rosie The Riveter during WWII was probably Norman Rockwell’s painting 

note what she’s resting her foot on

[septemberequinox]

i fully support anti-fascist/anti-nazi butch lesbian rosie the riveter

[dancing-with-dichotomies]

Does anyone know what the pins on her shirt are?

[terrafaye-seamings]

I don't know all of them, but from left to right:

Red Cross badge-- red equal-armed cross on white field

One son/loved one in service--one blue star in a red frame, on a white field

V for victory--capital V, with "v" in Morse code underneath (dot dot dot dash), in dark blue, on a white field with red around the perimeter of the pin

A badge I haven't identified, likely stamped bronze

EDIT: May be a Red Cross Blood Donor "pro patria" pin. Stamped bronze, with a shield in the center decorated with stars and stripes, and surrounded by leafy boughs. Along the top, following the curve of the pin: "AMERICAN RED CROSS", with "PRO PATRIA" straight across the top of the shield. "BLOOD DONOR", following the curve of the pin, under the shield.

One badge obscured by overall strap

Second row:

Army-Navy "E" award-- given to companies for excellence in production of materials for the war effort.

ID badge, with Rosie's photo. "BUILDSWIFT" as company name?

[cowbuttcrunchies]

Ready to get dyeing?  Using a polyester dye is a great way to permanently color any synthetic wig.  IDye Poly and Rit’s new line of synthetic dye called Dyemore are two great options for wig-coloring - click below the cut for a more in-depth Dyemore review, as well as instructions to jump start your journey into wig dyeing.

For folks who want a physical, true-color version of this chart, you can find it in Cosplay Culture Magazine’s August-September issue!

Keep reading

[terrafaye-seamings]

The 1860s: light, airy dresses in pastel colors floating softly over cage crinolines, elegant simplicity in trims, dainty bell-like silhouette, simple and smooth hairstyles

The 1870s, pounding on the table and chanting: CAKE GOTH CAKE GOTH CAKE GOTH CA

[commodorknorrington]

@emcads ur welcome

[terrafaye-seamings]

Image sources and credits as accurate as I can make them:

(By slide, clockwise from top left)

Title slide T.1 Jeune Femme à sa Toilette (Woman at her Toilet), attributed to Niklas Lafrensen/Nicolas Lavreince (1737-1807)

Slide 1 - chemise 1.1 Before the Automobile/The Aristocat/Augustintytar’s 2007 late 18th century shift (no longer available on her site) archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20151212114924/http://augustintytar.blogspot.fi:80/2011/04/late-18th-century-shift-2007.html 1.2 Marie Antoinette en chemise, Louise Élizabeth Vigée Le Brun, 1783 1.3 Woman’s shift, late 18th or early 19th century, Museum of Fine Arts Boston - https://www.mfa.org/collections/object/womans-shift-324250 1.4 Simplicity 8162 Misses’ 18th Century Undergarments (view of shift only) - https://www.simplicity.com/simplicity-pattern-8162-misses-18th-century-undergarments/8162.html

Slide 2- stockings/garters 2.1 The Dreamstress’ Rosalie stockings - http://thedreamstress.com/2015/01/tutorial-pattern-making-your-own-seamed-stockings/ 2.2 French embroidered garters, 18th century, Museum of Fine Arts Boston - https://www.mfa.org/collections/object/garter-one-of-a-pair-46760 2.3  Shoe, stocking, and garter; Journal de la Mode et du Gout, August 1790. Uploaded to Tumblr by damesalamode, http://damesalamode.tumblr.com/post/18857280736/journal-de-la-mode-et-du-gout-august-1790-for, but may not originate with them. 2.4 Before the Automobile/The Aristocat/Augustintytar’s 18th century reproduction garters, stockings, and shoes http://augustintytar.blogspot.fi/search/label/1770%20shoes

Slide 3 - black-lacing stays 3.1 Before the Automobile/The Aristocat/Augustintytar’s 1780s stays - http://augustintytar.blogspot.fi/2012/05/1780s-stays-2012.html 3.2 still of Liam Neeson in Taken (2008) 3.3 Stays, 1785-1790, McCord Museum - http://collections.musee-mccord.qc.ca/scripts/viewobject.php?Lang=1&section=196&accessnumber=M969X.26&imageID=319508&pageMulti=1 3.4 from The Still Room Blog.  Found archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20160306114927/http://thestillroomblog.com/2012/04/22/a-tip-for-spring-cleaning-the-servants-directory-improved-1762/ , but seems likely to have come from an earlier post due to the filename. 3.5 still of Chris Evans in The Avengers (2012), digitally overlain with a dorito. Artist undetermined. 3.6 Replica 1770s child’s stays, made by the Margaret Hunter Shop of Colonial Williamsburg, http://twonerdyhistorygirls.blogspot.com/2011/07/stays-for-very-young-c-1770.html

Slide 4 - front-lacing stays 4.1 American Duchess 18th century stays for/from Simplicity 8162 -

http://blog.americanduchess.com/2016/05/18th-century-stays-q-about-simplicity.html

4.2 Couture Mayah’s pink stays - http://www.couturemayah.info/engpink%20stays.html 4.3 Redthreaded’s 1780s front-lacing stays - https://redthreaded.com/collections/historical-corsets-ready-to-ship/products/1780s-front-lacing-stays-synthetic-whalebone

Slide 5 - false bums 5.1 Period Corsets’ 17th c. Bum Roll (option without flange) - http://www.periodcorsets.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=23&products_id=46&osCsid=9970171afa2d01e7e49737a2e1ecaf52 5.2 IlFioreNero’s 18th Century False Rump - https://www.etsy.com/listing/480792629/18th-century-false-rump-in-cotton-choose?ref=shop_home_active_1 5.3 The Bum Shop, 1785. Printmaker R. Rushworth, Publisher S.W. Forres. Lewis Walpole Library - http://findit.library.yale.edu/catalog/digcoll:553752 5.4 Sarah Woodyard’s c. 1780 split bum, photo by Susan Holloway Scott - http://twonerdyhistorygirls.blogspot.com/2014/03/that-big-georgian-bum-c-1780.html

Slide 6 - panniers/pocket hoops 6.1 Korset og pocher (corset and panier), National Museum of Denmark via Tidens Tøj - https://natmus.dk/historisk-viden/temaer/modens-historie/1700-1790/korset-og-pocher/ 6.2 Woman’s Hoop Petticoat (Panier), English, 1750-1780, Los Angeles County Museum of Art - https://collections.lacma.org/node/214714 6.3 The Staymaker’s square hoop c 1740s-50s -http://thestaymaker.co.uk/gallery-hoops.php

Slide 7 - pockets 7.1 Pocket, 1796, probably American, Metropolitan Museum of Art - https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/80038309?rpp=20&pg=1&ft=*&what=Pockets&pos=8 7.2 Pocket, English, Museum of Fine Arts Boston - https://www.mfa.org/collections/object/pocket-116888 7.3 A Fashionable Frolick’s 18th century white cotton dimity pocket - https://www.etsy.com/listing/161191556/18th-century-hand-sewn-white-cotton 7.4 Still of Emma Watson in Beauty and the Beast (2017)

Slide 8 - petticoat 8.1 Koshka the Cat’s easy 18th century petticoat - http://www.koshka-the-cat.com/18c_petticoat.html 8.2 See 8.1 8.3 Before the Automobile//The Aristocat/Augustintytar’s 1780s petticoat, 2008, (no longer available on her site). Images from the same photo series are archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20151214170858/http://augustintytar.blogspot.fi:80/2011/04/printed-robe-langlaise-2008.html

Slide 9 - no-nos 9.1 Photo of a page from Tale as Old as Time: The Art and Making of Beauty and the Beast (Updated Edition), which shows a costume rendering and a publicity still from Beauty and the Beast (2017).  Cropped from a larger image. Original image by instagram user DisneyLifestylers; posted on Tumblr by everythingbeautyandthebeast at https://everythingbeautyandthebeast.tumblr.com/post/156433787576/more-images-of-belles-village-dress-from 9.2 Vixen Pirate Dress by Leg Avenue 9.3 Pink corset by ErikaRochelle on Etsy - https://www.etsy.com/listing/124659585/pink-1700s-corset-with-steel-busk-and?show_sold_out_detail=1 9.4 Still of Elizabeth Berridge in Amadeus (1984)

Slide 10 - the end 10.1 Couture Mayah - http://www.couturemayah.info/eng18th%20century%20underwear.html 10.2 Still from “Getting dressed in the 18th century”, video by Crow’s Eye Productions, Lady Lever Art Gallery & National Museums Liverpool - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpnwWP3fOSA 10.3 Still from “Getting dressed in the 18th century - working woman”, video by Crow’s Eye Productions, Lady Lever Art Gallery & National Museums Liverpool - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUmO7rBMdoU 10.4 Cropped publicity still from “Harlots” - https://www.chron.com/entertainment/entertainment_columnists/jeanne_jakle/article/Harlots-delivers-sex-galore-from-a-11022805.php?ipid=layoutrecirc_weather#photo-12599053 10.5 Fashion through History - https://fashionthroughherstory.com/2013/12/13/18th-century-underwear-photos/

[fripperiesandfobs]

Jacket, 1775-85

From Colonial Williamsburg

[caitcorrain]

You don’t know true fear until you’ve sewn over a pin and the tip of the needle has broken off and launched itself directly at your face.

[biscuitsarenice]

A Stitch in Time: Arnolfini

Ninya Mikhail, Historical Costumier [x]

[cricketcat9]

Wow, amazing!

[yesterdaysprint]

The Bystander, England, July 12, 1922

[googlemenot-deactivated20230921]

[dog-of-ulthar]

night before the con mood

[terrafaye-seamings]

So, I haven't posted much recently, but here is my Great Fairy Cotera costume I wore at Arisia! I have some modifications I want to make before wearing it to Anime Boston this year, but overall I am quite pleased with how it turned out.

[eldritchscholar]

So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:

1) Binary files are 1s and 0s

2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches

You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…

You can knit Doom.

However, after crunching some more numbers:

The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…

3322 square feet

Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.

[benegesserwitch]

Hi fun fact!!

The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:

Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.

This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer. 

But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine. 

Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:

But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!

Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,

and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.

tl;dr the textiles industry is more important than people give it credit for, and I would suggest using a machine if you were going to try to knit almost 3 megabytes of information.

[darkersolstice]

@we-are-threadmage

[systlin]

Someone port Doom to a blanket

[rolypolywardrobe]

I really love tumblr for this 🙌

[isnerdy-deactivated20190101]

It goes beyond this.  Every computer out there has memory.  The kind of memory you might call RAM.  The earliest kind of memory was magnetic core memory.  It looked like this:

Wires going through magnets.  This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily.  Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1.  Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:

You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is.  But these are also extreme close-ups.  Here’s the scale of the individual cores:

The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers.  Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.

And thanks to them, we were able to land on the moon.  This is also why memory in early computers was so expensive.  It had to be hand-crafted, and took a lot of time.

[dollsahoy]

(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)

[butts-for-days]

Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”

[costumersupportdept]

I mean let’s also touch on the Jacquard Loom, if you want to get all Textiles In Sciencey. It was officially created in 1801 or 1804 depending on who you ask (although you can see it in proto-form as early as 1725) and used a literal chain of punch cards to tell the loom which warps to raise on hooks before passing the weft through. It replaced the “weaver yelling at Draw Boy” technique, in which the weaver would call to the kid manning the heddles “raise these and these, lower these!” and hope that he got it right. 

With a Jacquard loom instead of painstakingly picking up every little thread by hand to weave in a pattern, which is what folks used to do for brocades in Ye Olde Times, this basically automated that. Essentially all you have to do to weave here is advance the punch cards and throw the shuttle. SO EASY. 

ALSO, it’s not just “little old ladies sewed the first spacesuits,” it’s “the women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed.” Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon. 

And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldn’t use pins or re-sew seams because the spacesuits had to be airtight, so any additional holes in them were NO GOOD. They were also sewing to some STUPID tight tolerances-in our costume shop if you’re within an eighth of an inch of being on the line, you’re usually good. The Playtex ladies were working on tolerances of 1/32nd of an inch. 1/32nd. AND IN 21 LAYERS OF FABRIC. 

The women who made the spacesuits were BADASSES. (and yes, I’ve tried to get Space-X to hire me more than once. They don’t seem interested these days)

[polturn]

Heres all the WIP pictures together in hopes that they help show the process for people! 

Materials used are listed as captions!!!!!!! QUQ Paper mache technique for #3 is HERE

My cosplay/costume blog shared with my 2 cousins is HERE. 

Thanks for all the kind words friends!