Steampunk Eton Jacket

It’s almost Halloween – Yipee!!!!!

This year we are having a Steampunk Mad Hatter Tea Party in my front yard, complete with Hatter, Hare, tea, croquet, coffee for adults, and revolting amounts of candy for the kids.

I decided to recycle the 2009 Steampunk costume I wore in New Orleans to be a sort of adult Alice, but the costume needed some adjustments/repairs. So far I’ve fixed my smooshed top hat and repaired the heel of my granny boots. Last time around I wore a bolero jacket that looks a lot like an Eton Jacket. I’ve had it for years and it fits me just fine when worn with a long sleeve shirt. Unfortunately I didn’t remember this when I made the sleeveless top for my costume and the jacket just feels too big without sleeves inside. I thought I was going to jerry-rig a fix by adding a collar, folding back part of the front and hiding it within the structure of said collar, but that ended up sounding like way too much effort with a not terribly satisfactory result. So a new jacket it is!

Bodice of Eton Jacket, in progress

Since I don’t have a lot of time I have to go with an existing pattern

 

Instant Lunberjack just add…

a knit beanie-beard!

What a clever and simple hand-made Halloween costume (and would be really cute for little kids. Picture it.). Lots more to be found on Etsy.

 

How to be a Weeping Angel, Dr. Who Style

This year, before we decided to go ahead and revisit our Steampunk Mad Hatter Tea Party, I was thinking about doing a mono-chromatic sort of black and white movie costume. I was thinking silent film star or Gorey character. Then I ran across this costume:

Dr. Who "Blink" angel costume via penwiper on therpf.com

This is one of my favorite costumes – ever, I think. It makes extremely clever use of some pretty basic materials – fabric, yarn, a hula-hoop and paint – to recreate the nasty intentioned statues from the show. I was particularly impressed with the technique for the arms and hands. Penwiper used pantyhose to make attached hands/arms/upper body piece and painted them to look like stone. She achieves great looking individual fingers and didn’t need to paint her arms. This made the costume a lot more flexible (in terms of not having to worry about getting paint on things when she moved) and much more realistically stone-looking texture. This is a technique that I will definitely consider incorporating in to a future costume. Her process is detailed here.

 

Exceptionally Creepy Halloween Costumes of Yesteryear

Haunted Air, a book by Ossian Brown (previously of the band Coil, who did the darkest version of Tainted Love ever), showcases some of the creepiest Halloween costumes I’ve seen in a long time. Texas Chainsaw Massacre / The Hills Have Eyes / House on Haunted Hill creepy. The images date from 1875 to 1955. It’s amazing what can be done with limited materials and in an age before mass produced costumes, TV, and holiday marketing. Of course  TV and more sophisticated marketing were around in those later years, but people still thought differently about Halloween; it wasn’t a mass-market holiday.

The images shown in the original post (via BoingBoing) are largely about the masks. I’ve really loved masks ever sine I took a couple mask making classes quite a few years back. A mask can make or break a costume. It’s not only about the way the mask looks, but about how comfortable it is to wear, how heavy it is, and how well you can see out of it. I would hazard a guess that the creepy Haunted Air masks were pretty cumbersome, but I’d rather see trick-or-treaters wearing similar things than a pack of Power Ranger, Disney Princess and Spiderman look-a-likes. Though I wouldn’t want to run into  them in a dark alley.

 

This Might Be a Less Than Stellar Idea – Shoe Heel Fix DIY

At some point I managed to damage the heel on one of my Victorian boots. Cracked the front section of the heel clean off!

Now I’m sure I could take my boots to the local shoe repair man and have them fixed up in a jiffy, but why let someone else do something when I can try to fix it myself? (Please note, there is some sarcasm pointed at myself here – there is nothing wrong with paying the professionals to do what they do and if I wore these boots every day, I would. This is a temporary fix that I acknowledge may not even last an evening.).

This is where poly-clay comes in. Work it into shape, bake it in your oven and, in this case, apply the piece with sturdy glue.

 

After baking the piece (10 minutes for each 1/4″ of clay at 275 degrees – don’t over bake!) it’s is ready to be applied. I’m going to attach it with Gorilla Glue, which has epoxy-like qualities. Considering the boot material I *should* be able to pry it off without absolutely destroying the heel when it’s time to take it to a real cobbler.

I’ll let you know how this works out for me.

 

Top Hat Transformation DIY

I have a great Steampunk costume that I made in 2009 when we enjoyed Halloween with friends on Frenchman Street in New Orleans. In the crush of reveling bodies I never managed to get more than a head-shot of my own costume. The hat unfortunately did not survive the plane ride home. This year we’re doing a Mad Hatter Tea Party in my front yard (see Dogs and Cats Living Together… Mass Hysteria!” My Favorite Holiday!) and I’m recycling the costume that my friends have never seen.

The Humble Bowler Hat, Pre-Transformation

The quick fix for the hat is a hat conversion. I’m going to take a bowler hat I have and transform it (temporarily) into a top hat. The beauty of this transformation is that it doesn’t require any special tools, just the existing hat, some fabric, flexible poster board, a lining fabric (optional, but I’ll explain why it’s a good idea) some glue and tape. I used Tacky Glue, but you could go the hot glue route. I didn’t feel like burning my fingers.

1. Measure around the hat, where it attaches to the brim – on the outside.

2. Measure the height of  the crown. The top hat must be at least this tall. A good top hat height is 6″.

More instructions after the jump. 

 

“Dogs and Cats Living Together… Mass Hysteria!” My Favorite Holiday!

Steampunk Mad Hatter

You may be shocked to learn that Halloween is the Rogues’ favorite holiday. No fussing with presents, time spent at your family’s traditional religious establishment, no tree killing or egg coloring, just “fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes… The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!” * And more people wearing costumes than you’ll find outside a Ren Faire or Living History town. I love it!

So what are my Halloween preferences? Personally, I find it wrong to wear my ren faire costume for Halloween. Many faire people do. The same for my medieval attire (though I’m not part of SCA – it just seems wrong, not enough like a costume). My love of all things pirate makes it less wrong display my pirate self, but then again, that’s just another part of me. I want a costume for Halloween!

Steampunk White Rabbit

Last year I may have accidentally started a Halloween tradition in my front yard – a Mad Hatter Tea Party – a Steampunk one, to be exact.

 

Mad for Steampunk – A Steampunk Mad Hatter Tea

This costume was originally made for a Halloween Steampunk Mad Hatter Tea Party. The tailed vest is is a Rogues of Thread original design, made from a flat-folds find and is terribly synthetic and hot. It’s red and gold striped, lined and collared in black satin. This was my first attempt at a Mad Hatter’s hat. While visually successful, it wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world. Considering that it was more prop than head wear, I’d still consider it a success. I’ve learned much about hat making since then. This hat will need to be recreated at some point in a wearable style.

   

The rest of the costume is mostly made up of secondhand store finds: cotton velvet skirt, a silk blouse, red stockings and Swiss Army WWII goggles.

 

All images by The Rogues of Thread (bythebodkin.wordpress.com) and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, unless specifically attributed elsewhere.

 

A Steampunk Halloween (2008)

 Halloween brings out all sorts of strange creatures. What better time for intrepid explorers to go hunting?

Just in case you thought we Rogues were all bodkins and thimbles (thimbles are for the weak willed!), here are a couple custom steampunk weapons we’ve added to our creature hunting arsenal. All steampunk guns are original designs made from copper, brass, glass, leather and optics, with precision Swiss clockwork internals, hair-trigger action and minimal recoil.

 

All images by The Rogues of Thread (bythebodkin.wordpress.com) and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, unless specifically attributed elsewhere.