The Fashion In Shrouds

I think the point of the meme may be to illustrate how bad at least I am at coming up with something to gush about for eight days straight - I'd say I failed spectacularly. Well, well!

On Sunday we had lovely winter weather, cold and bright and sunny, so I went for a walk with my mother. Saw no less than two different plants in bloom, outside in Sweden on the winter solstice, how about that? A hellebore, of course (not one of mine, sadly, the Helleborus niger in my garden is one of those late-blooming strains and although it has small buds, they probably won't open until February or March) and a colchicum in my garden. Extremely late to the party, that one.

On Monday I started work on a slightly more casual wiggle dress in black cotton twill, which is fun. I've been wanting a uniform dress that doesn't show acres of cleavage for a while, and on Christmas day I'm going out, so I'll try to get it finished for tomorrow night. I'm really looking forward to that, the Christmas club nights are usually a lot of fun - people you don't see that often come home to celebrate Christmas, and all that. Kommando XY are playing, which is always a hoot, and Daniel and Anders are DJ:ing, so the dance floor will be everything I want it to be too.

Bodice and skirt cut separately, for once, rather like a shirtwaist with the bodice buttoned in front, a regular shirt collar, breast pockets, shoulder straps and a double cuff-like sleeve treatment. The skirt has an inverted box pleat at center back. I'll be using the grey plastic three crowns buttons and make a fabric belt for it, I have a couple of very nice vintage, chromed and grey belt buckles that I really should do something with. Not sure which belt buckle I'll use yet, though, both match the buttons well and I like them both. The buttons look almost exactly like the grey three crown one in the photo, by the way, apart from the different material.

Yesterday I discovered that the black twill I'm using is not the thin, stretchy twill I thought it was and planned on using, but a heavier one with no elastane content that I bought for using in the planned corset dress; bummer. I had completely forgotten about it and was sure I only had one large piece of black cotton twill, and so assumed that this had to be the the right fabric, even though it was a lot less stretchy than I remembered it. Stupid not to check properly, but oh well.

Now I'm going to do some work on the dress, and then go over to my mother and help preparing the Christmas dinner. We're having our usual peaceful Christmas; me, my mother, a good friend of hers and my younger brother. No other relatives, no drama and everyone doing pretty much what they want to do. I am enjoying my Christmas, I hope you are enjoying yourselves too. Merry Christmas!

I got the main fabrics for the dress yesterday - the pink dupioni, which is eye-wateringly bright in large amounts, and pink cotton to flat line with. There was a dupioni in the same red as the warp in the pink fabric, which I assumed would work as a contrast, until I looked at them next to one another. It doesn't work. At all. The hot pink brings out a strange, rusty tomato shade in even cool, true reds and it looks awful.

So bright red is off the list at the moment and I'm considering burgundy instead, but I am rather stumped at the moment. Will bring a pink sample and hunt for contrasting fabric tomorrow and next week. Bummer.

Also got some silver cord for the Panzer dress - have added some of it to the shoulder straps, and I'm thinking of putting the rest together with a small silver tassel I had lying around to make a sort of... yeah, whatever that cord and tassel thing draping between the collar and/or lapels and the shoulder strap is called on uniforms.*

Finally found a source (in Swedish) that gives clear and reasonably comprehensive information about the various three crown buttons, by the way; as far as I've gathered, the grey metal ones are M/1939, the gold and silver coloured ones are M/1960, a furlough uniform. The gold colour is the standard, with the silver ones used only by a few regiments, which would explain why they are harder to find, of course. I'm guessing that the grey plastic version is from one of the 1950's or 1960's uniforms, too - M/1959 or M/1968. Nice to get that sorted out.

*Aiguillette or possibly lanyard, it turns out; ägiljett in Swedish. The Swedish uniform regulation is very useful for this kind of stuff, apparently. And I did make an aiguillette sort of thing with the rest of the cord.

Various military style and other buttons and buckles, most of them still waiting for projects - suggestions welcome. The black pea coat buttons on the far left are reserved for that skirt, but it's easy to get hold of more of them.



Clockwise from bottom left: vintage 1930's/1940's metal belt buckle, American  Navy pea coat buttons, another vintage belt buckle from the same source, elderly grey plastic suspender buttons (I have tons of these and get a lot of use out of them, they are a great, fairly unusual warm shade of grey and a nice shape), black vintage glass buttons, huge black vintage metal button, vintage American Red Cross button (upside down), modern metal buttons with five-point star motif, vintage Swedish uniform buttons with three crowns on a horizontally striated background, modern black plastic buttons with star motifs and a button-like thing with a raised star - this hasn't the usual kind of button back, it looks more like a rivet of some sort. No idea what it is.

I also got a couple of pins along with a couple of larger purchases in our favourite antiques shop, just outside Sundsvall. Cheap little plastic and metal pins like these, given out to participants in marathons, sold for charity projects and the like are a dime a dozen, and most of them are not very interesting. There are cute ones, though, and they tend to cost next to nothing, so I try to go through those little boxes and bowls of single earrings and cufflinks, buttons and worthless trinkets that a lot of charity and antiques shops have for things like these.

( More stuff ahead. )

Here it is.






That button isn't really sewn on crookedly, I just missed that it had been twisted a bit when I took the photos. Nothing short of seeing it in person can do the fabric justice - it's that striped cotton I've been talking about, and I can't get over how stupid I was not to buy up a couple of extra meters of it while it was around. Now it's sold out, and I'll regret that for the rest of my life. Bah.

Anyway, I like how it turned out - the buttons and the fabric go very well together, and the buttons really stand out. I'll wear it out tomorrow, will try to snatch a few minutes to get a few decent photos of the thing on me. The dummy does a good job of showing it off, but it isn't wearing the matching garrison cap...

In other news, the European Figure Skating Championships are in full swing and I'm positively wallowing in it. God, I love tacky, glitzy figure skating costumes! I love the melodrama, the big gestures and the incredible skill, strength and grace of these people - figure skating makes great television, and it's at that dull time of the year when you often don't have anything better to do around bedtime anyway.

Been busy working, traipsing around Malmö on a short weekend trip, seeing Laibach and a few other bands I don't care that much about, a couple of friends I do care very much about, and finally battling the mother of all colds. I won, but it took a while, and it was no fun at all.

The glove project hasn't made any progress, didn't really have time for it before we went among a heap of work projects, so I made another black garrison cap to match another little black wiggle dress with military-inspired details for the Malmö expedition instead. I'm getting good at it, and I have no less than four almost, but not quite identical black garrison caps now, to match two dresses, a skirt and a jacket. Maybe five, or six, I may have forgotten one or two. I don't think anyone notices much difference between them, but I feel good knowing that it's not just made of a similar plain black fabric, but the same plain black fabric as the dress, with a matching button in front.

Malmö was fun, even with that cold sneaking up on me; Laibach were very good, if not quite as good as they were at the start of the same tour a little over a year ago in Stockholm. Still, it was completely worth traveling down for, as I think it's pretty likely that we will not get to her the Volk songs on coming tours; and electriXmas, a one-night industrial festival that was held the same night in co-operation with the Laibach gig at another venue across the street, was fun, too, with a couple of good bands and lots of fun people to watch. I wore one of the aforementioned black wiggle dresses with matching garrison cap - ( picture behind cut. )

Now I'm having a couple of weeks off, and I think I'll use some of the time to work on a few projects of my own - I really need to begin working on some corset projects for a planned show, but I'm low on hardware at the moment, will have to do something about that. I am going to do some work on a pretty simple waist cincher for myself, in a gorgeous, sturdy black cotton fabric with a narrow, textured black-on-black vertical stripe pattern - it's hard to describe, rather simple, but incredibly pretty. I'll have to get some pictures of the various items I've made from it - that skirt I split during the Nitzer Ebb show, for instance.
The corset is going to have a functional button closure over the busk, anyway, because I'm sick and tired of looking at busks, but I love buttons. I happen to have the perfect buttons making their way here across the Atlantic as I write - namely, these babies:



Black plastic, American Red Cross. No idea how old they are - not very, I think, which is just as well, because that means that they will hopefully stand up to gentle machine washing. Pretty, pretty, pretty! I'm fond of uniforms, military styling and details in general; I've even done a tiny bit of collecting in the past, although mostly just female uniforms that I could wear myself, most of them nurse uniforms. These buttons speak to that side of me (mostly they said "buy us! buy us!").
They will be gorgeous on a strict little corset, with a pencil skirt in the same fabric, a plain cotton shirt with short puff sleeves, striped cotton shoulder straps, buttoned down with a couple of these, and a garrison cap in the same striped cotton with yet another one of these buttons in front.
Lovely.