Last weekend saw B and I traipsing around Kansas City, hitting up craft stores and thift stores and a long overdue visit to
Fabric Recycles in Overland Park. The place is like a curated thrift store for sewers of all flavors. We walked out way poorer, but with a lot of nifty finds. One of which was the motivation for my latest impulse project. I've been meaning to do something for Bastille Day for several years. So many pictures of lovely late 18th century costumes showing up from dinners and picnics around the world, and I wanted to play, too. Nothing happened this year, but I figured it might work out better if I got on top of getting a costume ready. At Fabric Recycles, I managed to find the perfect ribbon for making cockades. Now, that wasn't my whirlwind project for the week, but it did motivate me to start working on a hat for the costume.
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| Thrift store find: generic straw hat with plastic flowers hot glued to the brim. |
I picked up a straw hat for something like a buck. While it's not a great quality of material, it worked just fine as a base for a late 18th century hat. For inspiration, I just browsed the fashion plates I'd saved to Pinterest and a couple of modern tutorials on re-coverings straw hats. The puffy crown idea came from
Venifice, and the pleated brim from
Koshka. I ended up deciding that the tri-color ribbon was just a little too in-your-face for what I wanted. I'll save that for making cockades and instead just focus on making myself a costume in the red, white, and blue palette.
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| Ta Da! |
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| sans flash, the colors really come through. |
The red silk is a nice low-slub dupioni that I salvaged from a blouse picked up at a thift store a few years back. This project was an exercise in compounding trims. I'm really pleased with how much texture and dimension I was able to get out the different combinations. The sashes were made by attaching a strip of braid to one piece of blue ribbon, then sandwiching a single piece of the pleated white ribbon between two pieces of the blue, making them pretty from both top and bottom.
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| Blue ribbon and gold braid picked up in the LA Fashion District last CoCo. White pleated ribbon re-homed from (I think) my mother's stash at some point. It looks like it could be her handwriting on the label, at least. |
He may be a bit too bourgeois for a Bastille Day outfit, but I gave this fella a tail and some gold detailing and he just pins on. Now if I could just figure out his name.
