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Lots of progress
Mar. 21st, 2010 07:46 pmRight now, it’s looking likely that I’ll be able to have at least a preliminary version of Count D’s artbook kimono done in time for Anime Boston. ^_^ I started appliquéing last week and got a lot of work done this weekend. Finished appliques for both sleeves and the top! Still have to do appliques for the bottom, get the rest of my fabric, and cut and sew everything. I think a few more evenings should take care of the appliqués and the sewing should be relatively easy. But I also have my panel to review for and a few things on older costumes to touch up so one thing I’m not sure about is whether I have time to learn and practice how to tie an obi. I might just make a sash that closes with snaps to use temporarily if I don’t.
Here’s about half a sleeve. This is the part that’s visible in the picture. I had to make up the motif placement for the other side and most of the other sleeve since they weren’t visible in the reference. I'm a bit disappointed that the water design doesn't seem to be showing up that well in the photo after all the time I spent painting it; it's more distinct in person.
Appliquéing the sleeves went quite a bit slower than I thought it would simply because the pieces of fabric were so large. I had to keep turning them to do all the curves which meant a lot of pulling and pushing sections of the fabric that I wasn’t working on through the little space under the sewing machine’s arm. -_- The stabilizer had to be put on and removed for each appliqué as it was done; I originally tried to just iron on one big piece for the whole sleeve but it made it harder to turn the fabric and it came loose since I was pushing the fabric around so much. It was a lot easier doing samples on small pieces of fabric! The first sleeve took me about 10-12 hours but I guess I’m getting a bit faster with practice since the second only took about 8 1/2- 9 hours. The sleeves and the top took about 3 whole spools (over 650 yards) of the gold thread. (I got lucky with the thread since I decided to just try ordering from the place in Oregon I linked last time and it got here in 3 days instead of the 6 they estimated for NY delivery.)
Here’s about half a sleeve. This is the part that’s visible in the picture. I had to make up the motif placement for the other side and most of the other sleeve since they weren’t visible in the reference. I'm a bit disappointed that the water design doesn't seem to be showing up that well in the photo after all the time I spent painting it; it's more distinct in person.
Appliquéing the sleeves went quite a bit slower than I thought it would simply because the pieces of fabric were so large. I had to keep turning them to do all the curves which meant a lot of pulling and pushing sections of the fabric that I wasn’t working on through the little space under the sewing machine’s arm. -_- The stabilizer had to be put on and removed for each appliqué as it was done; I originally tried to just iron on one big piece for the whole sleeve but it made it harder to turn the fabric and it came loose since I was pushing the fabric around so much. It was a lot easier doing samples on small pieces of fabric! The first sleeve took me about 10-12 hours but I guess I’m getting a bit faster with practice since the second only took about 8 1/2- 9 hours. The sleeves and the top took about 3 whole spools (over 650 yards) of the gold thread. (I got lucky with the thread since I decided to just try ordering from the place in Oregon I linked last time and it got here in 3 days instead of the 6 they estimated for NY delivery.)
