Manuela needed a costume for Raks Spooki, New England’s largest and longest running gothic belly dance festival, featuring dancers from the homelands of HP Lovecraft, Stephen King and Edgar Allen Poe.

The costume is actually two piece and I used acrylics in three different painting sessions to get a modulated grayscale going so as to lend an extra dimensionality to the bones. In addition, every corpse needs some worms! In the pictures they are in her hands. They are 18″ dowel rods painted black, with two ping pong balls hot glued for the eyes. Some light flowing material cut into strips was fed through an eye hook in the top and then a brightly colored piece of a boa was hot glued in between the eyes for an upstanding and outstanding hairdo. Manuela will be doing  a routine where she will be using the worms to dance and fly through the air. I love puppets!

For those who are interested in attending some otherworld performances:

“Raks Spooki IV” A Gothic Belly Dance Event  Sun Nov. 15th, 7pm

The Regent Theatre, 7 Medford St. , Arlington , MA

Spats! Those functionally decorative foot and ankle protectors from yesteryear. Why, even Scrooge McDuck wore a pair! They can still be seen about being used as protection in various industries and occasionally as a fashion statement.

A pair was needed for a dance routine with a ‘Putting on The Ritz’ flavor.  Construction looked pretty deceiving as usual. The weirdness came in when doing measurements of the rapidly changing topography over the lower leg, ankle and foot.  I preferred to try and make something that fit properly as opposed to just wrapping a sack about the ankle. As usual, a mock-up in linen turned the trick and after some adjustments we were ready to go. When I unzipped the mock-up, the pieces were so oddly shaped that I basted it all together again and refit to be sure. In the end, I had a three piece pattern.

The spats were made of a silvery brocade with a rose pattern. This lustrous material really is not adequately captured by the camera. Attachment was made with velcro inside while the buttons performed an ornamental touch outside. The inside layer is heavy interfacing to help keep material upright along with and elastic that the shoe is actually slipped through to keep it all in place while moving about. They looked great and worked just as well. Plans are in the works for a tall pair with a military feel to be made out duck cloth.

In my rush to post the costume, I forgot to include the sketches. I only had two weeks to get this together so I opted to go for silly. The first sketch was just that and we were hunting through a used clothing store for possible materials when we came across a silk bathrobe with an obvious reptilian pattern. Suddenly, the first sketch vaporized and there  in my mind eye shuffled Geisha Godzilla. I could see it as plain as day. So we got the robe and I did a second sketch. The robe went through some major alterations and I added the fuchsia cherry blossom brocade to the arms and trim on the edges. I created a sash and a small pack out of the same material. Then followed the hat, gloves, sandal feet, the o so obvious tail, and finally the panel dance skirt. A bit of work to say the least, ha!

The dance freak in my house has been keeping rat maze crazy the last few weeks with costume work. The newest effort turned out for a burlesque gig was what we call Geisha Godzilla. It was a fair bit of work but it got done. Not pictured are the collapsible buildings that I put together so she would have something to kick and stomp while on stage. Music was from Blue Oyster Cult  and the Creatures both who have done a song called Godzilla. If you have questions about construction, I will be happy to respond. And now without further ado, I present………………..Geisha Godzilla.

Just completed two belts for costuming.

The first one is for belly dancing. The backing is a richly textured rust corduroy like material on which was laid a yellow satin.  Alternating fringe and matching trim were all hand sewn to this base and some coins were laced through the longer trim.  The front section being 16 inches long and the rear section 18 inches long, they are connected by scarves of a neutral gray.  The belt is tied on at the sides.  This feature allows for easy on and off and for placing scarves at the hips.

The second belt is more of a cobbling together effort and is for steampunk outfits.  I found two four-inch belts with double buckles while rummaging through some boxes at the local Bldg 19. This is a big discount chain store in our area. The price was so ludicrous that I realized, I could take them both and make a larger waist cinch belt.  It was all relatively simple to do. Measuring at 1 inch intervals, I drilled 27 holes about a quarter inch from both edges on each belt, affixed the grommets and then laced the whole thing together with a 6 yard silken cord.  It is put together in such a way that the cord can simply be removed and replaced with a cord of a more desirable matching color dependent on the outfit color. There were also some holes in the belts already placed that had decorative stitching about them and I suspect some sort of concho’s were supposed to go in them. We rummaged up some old Victorian looking buttons and I hot glued them right into the holes making sure that the glue came up the backside and formed a plug. Voila, relatively nice looking outfit for el cheapo : )

Think, I will get that celebratory beer now.

Manuela has been invited to dance at a local convention called TempleCon and the motif is steampunk.  She asked me to create a bustle for the outfit she had in mind.  So, we started digging into the piles of material that seemed to have accrued in the house and we did indeed find something that had great texture, some sheen and folded well.  I then went out onto the web and looked at bustles.  What information I could find was either you got to pay me to tell you, that there was no real way to do it or that there was actually a very specific way to do it.  Paying you to tell me ain’t working for me and the specific way was in an old book from the late 1800’s that I was going to be unable to get.  The not so specific way seem to be a matter of folding things and arranging them till you got what you wanted.  Sounds like a plan to me.

The piece of material that I had to work with could have been a bit longer.  Initially, I cut the length into thirds and then worked each tier individually connecting them all at the waist.  The clothing dummy that I had built earlier in the year was indispensable to this process.  As you can see from the pictures, I pinned the first piece of material to the waist and then started pulling from the bottom up trying to discern a process to follow.  With each try, I recorded what I did with drawings in a very step-by-step manner.  It didn’t take too much foresight to realize that I would eventually find something I really liked but unless I recorded it somehow, there was no way I was going to be able to do it twice.  On the fifth try, I got the first tier of the bustle process together.  I then took the folds apart, followed the drawings and sewed it back together step-by-step with small tacks of thread to hold the folds in place.

The second tier was simply a repeat of the process.  The third and fourth tier are actually one piece of material folded over so that the third tier falls short of the length of the fourth tier.  These two tiers were actually folded inward as opposed to outward.  Again each step of the process was drawn on paper and when I found what I wanted, I simply followed the instructions.

I have done some other work and alterations on the entire costume and Manuela will be using it this Saturday coming.  We shall see how it goes!

This costume was concepted back in early summer and pretty much completed in a leisurely couple of months because it was slated to be used for a Halloween burlesque gig. Well, that never materilaized and instead it was used at the Burlesque Bootcamp in downtown Providence this weekend. I am really pleased how the concepting came close to the actuality.

The costume got put through its paces in the act she had developed and am I glad I reinforced a lot of those seams. Really just do not need the clothing falling apart off cue!  Cheers!

Mick wanted a costume for Halloween belly-dance activities that included wings. Wings are a sort of extended customized cape with sticks or handles that allow the performer to swirl them around as she is dancing, much like a really large veil. So I sketched up an appropriately macabre zombie voodoo ghoul cool bat chick outfit.

So off we went to our very favorite local fabric mill, Lorraine’s, and started rummaging through their cutprice materials. As usual we came home with a much more than what we sought but we did get what we needed.

There is quite a bit of material in a set of wings. Taking measurements from the ones she has in her costume wardobe, they were at around 104″x 60 ” for one wing! So the material to build these must be light because that it quite bit of weight to get floating and wheeling about.

I decided to build a single long wing across the back at 120 inches plus whatever length needed for the sticks. The fabric we had was off 60″ bolts. The tension in the back would be relieved by a split to the lower back. It was fairly simple outfit with two pieces of material: one sheer black for overall effect and one for visual texture. The ends were ragged up individually by eye and then each one had a rolled hem applied, stretching the material enough to lettuce the edging. The two pieces were attached to each other with a basting stitch with intermittent back-stitching for reinforcement.  Arrow shafts are just dowel rods so I used a couple of old defunct ones I had. They were cut, shaped, painted and ended up being just at 27 inches. These got encased within the sheer material.

All in all, it was relatively easy to make, cheap and works quite well as the pictures show. They look rather spooky and reminiscent of a death shroud in the wind. Mick has already used them at some shows this season with success and has had some offers for them but she is not quite done with them yet.

A week later, I managed to return to finish the dress form. The cardboard form was translated into a piece of 3/16″ luan. This was taped to the bottom sealing that end. This time, I carefully stuffed the dress form keeping an eye on the dimensions. Amazingly enough, I ended up using about a third less material than on the original stuffing. Once up at the shoulders, I noticed the form of the upper chest cavity was tending to round out and on it’s way to looking like a Victorian matron’s bustline.  I placed a, 16″ length,  piece of wood, end to end at the shoulders within the cavity and really stuffed a lot of the batting underneath it so it would push the wood up as it tried to expand. This worked well as it pulled the shoulders back and flattened the upper portion of the chest into what was a more natural slope. The neckline being high enough for my use was simply closed with tape.

 A luan board was cut to fit the stool base. It was taped down and the finished dress form was taped to that.  I used  a couple of shingles between the form and the stool top to level the form. That’s about it. It looks terrific and I am already thinking of making one for corset work. I suspect, I will use this one for awhile first to find out what sort of kinks may need to be worked out on the next model.