After two more hours of work today, I have FINALLY finished feathering the peacock bodice front! I have it pinned to the bodice but still need to baste it on (it doesn’t get permanently sewn to the bodice because it will be removed for laundering). It is gorgeous. Here is a photo:

The photo does a pretty good job of capturing what the final thing should look like. The white teardrops are placeholders, and will be replaced by more “teardrops” of trimmed peacock feathers.

I think it will be stunning.

By the way, if you are one of those “Must try this at home!” kids, feathers are a bit of a pain to sew on. You have to sew them down in two places to prevent them from twisting. The finer feathers more or less have to be sewn by hand. You have to be careful not to split the feather while stitching it down…

…peacock tail feathers can be sewn on by machine, but again, you have to be careful, stitch it in two places, and don’t hit the shaft of the feather with the needle, or the needle will cleanly split it in two, leaving you with a ruined feather.

It’s not impossible, just sorta complicated. It helps if you have about twenty or thirty hours to spare, too. (“Do not try this at home, kids!”)

Anyway, it’s gonna be gorgeous. I just can’t figure out which day to wear it on.

The tie-dye tutu, by the way, came out nicely but not as bright as I had hoped. I will probably sew some gold sequins on it to “tart it up” a little – but it will have to wait until AFTER I finish the other tutu.

I am taking tomorrow off from work, perchance to sew some more. 🙂

I was looking gloomily at a VERY boring white silk tutu – interesting design, sure, but executed all in white it turned into a big fluffy nightgown. I was trying to figure out how to embellish it and give it some shape and/or color interest while keeping the design lines, and drawing blank after blank.

Finally I reverted to my college days and remembered that white can mean only ONE thing…tie dye!

So, rather than taking a high-risk path and trying to dye a spiral or something (which I know how to do…but one screwup will mess up the entire thing, and I don’t have spare tutus on hand in case I mess one up), I decided to scrunch-dye it. It’s pretty simple. You soak it in a 50-50 water-vinegar solution, then scrunch it up into lots of tiny little rumples – the smaller and more irregular, the better. Then you drip dye on it with a syringe, in different colors. It works best if the colors blend well, because they will flow into each other whether you like it or not. In the end you get a bazillion shades of all the colors you mixed, plus a pleasant rumpled pattern from the dye. Normally I do it in flame colors but this time I decided to do it in blues and purples – not sure why, bright orange/red/gold might have been more apropos to the Ride. But blue and purple it is.

I started by baking it in the oven to “set” the dye, but lost patience after an hour or so and stuck it in the microwave. Three minutes in the microwave brought it nicely up to temperature, then I rinsed it out with water and have hung it to dry in the shower stall. Tomorrow I’ll find out whether it was an act of brilliance or a complete disaster….

I have finished the Elizabethan tutu! and my, it is gorgeous. Almost exactly as I’d hoped it would be. I’d like to have done it with a little less slapdash style – doing a proper muslin first, then sewing it with the care that kind of pattern rates – but that would have taken me a good week and I had more like a day and a half. Nonetheless it turned out great, and I am very happy. I still need to hem the bottom edge, but other than that it’s complete.

Here is a sneak peek at it; the photo entirely fails to do it justice, but if it weren’t such a bad photo I wouldn’t be posting it. 😉

And now, enough timewasting: on to the next one!  I still have to do one entire tutu (purple top and iridescent maroon/blue), finish up putting feathers on the peacock-feather tutu, embellish the white tutu, and finish the armholes of the champagne tutu.  I also need to make a gold tutu-bottom and a black tutu-bottom.  It’s looking like I’ll be taking Friday off as well.