taimatsu no monogatari

Today has been as good as yesterday! I had a slow start, and woke up feeling very floppy and groggy and generally headachy. I therefore wimped out of meeting The Girls for moose and juffins, and instead spodded online for a while. Criossants and ham brought restored vigour and vitality, and I embarked upon the task Robert had spent the previous day enabling - he spent yesterday moving my bookshelf (my very own lovely bookshelf which has been marooned in the yucky dining room for two years!) into the back room upstairs, into the space vacated by the small bookshelf (which is now in the bedroom on top of a chest of drawers)! He'd cleaned it and everything, and put all the books in boxes for me :) I was very happy indeed when I came in last night.

So I got to organise my books! I have almost two shelves of theology/church history/religious-topics books, which makes me feel like I have a brain, and I have my nice copies of Austen all together, and all my Trollope in one place, and all the plays and poetry together on the bottom shelf. It's lovely and wonderful and I'm very pleased. Some of the spare books are now stacked neatly in a box.

Then later I was even more useful. As Robert had moved the bookcase the dining-room was quite a bit less awful than it had been (he'd also thrown out lots of stuff), and so I could get into it and extract all my fabric which has been lying around getting covered in fluff and hair and dirt and yuck. It's in five boes total now; one box of clean fabric (stuff which was put in there when it was brand new), one box of dirty fabric which can be used for peasant costumes, one box of dirty fabric which cannot be used for peasant costumes, and two buckets of scraps divided on the same principle. It's all neat and out of the way! It's great!

Must eat tasty crispbake, going cold.

Bladelands is set in a specific time-period and location, unlike Shards which is much more go-as-you-please fantasy. So I need to make new costume (I would anyway) which is appropriate to the setting. This means at least semi-authentic medieval European (specifically French). I'm using this post to collect some links to relevant information online.

( Links cut to save friends pages. )

I have finally got started on the dress I would like to make for Shards. I am basing it on the Elizabethan Corset Pattern Generator bodice alteration, as I have used it before and know I can get a decently-fitted bodice out of it. Then I want to attach a wrapped skirt. Imagine, if you will, that you attach a big piece of fabric, at around one-third of the way along its length, to the back of your bodice, at your waist. The shape of the fabric is not important, it will be whatever drapes right - for now, a big thin rectangle. I want to attach the top corner of the short side to my waist on the far side, like a normal wrap skirt. But the long side, instead of wrapping round my waist the other way, I want to pull up the front of my body and attach at the opposite shoulder (with a button and loop).

This looks great in my head and when I doodle it on paper, but in practice it is not draping correctly. The swathe up my front, if it fits correctly at the side of my waist, is too tight over my breasts and looks odd. If I loosen it it gaps at the waist. I may have to make a tuck in the drape, which was not really the idea.

The costume is 'tribal fantasy' and is intended as a special occasion dress, which in practice will need to be easy to move in and quite warm. I will probably make detachable sleeves for the bodice so it will work in winter and summer, and a pair of leggings.


This is a rough attempt at a representation of what I'm after. The heavy black outline is the front drape - the green dashes indicate the location of the underneath drape at the waist.

Does anyone have any thoughts, comments, ideas, tips, or any clue what I'm even on about?