Costuming for Santarchy

I was gifted an old fur coat in October by a friend, with instructions to "cut it up and make something with it."  It's been sitting draped over one of the chairs in our dining room since.  I was thinking last night that I wanted to go on the Santarchy pub crawl scheduled for this weekend, but I didn't have anything to wear!  (Completely forgetting about this outfit I'd made for Steamcon two years ago - doh!)



But then I thought I could throw something together quick enough for today, and I had a bunch of yards of a tan upholstery velvet in the stash, so I started cutting at 4pm last night.  I've done so many of this style of outfit in different permutations now that I was confident I could get it all done and get plenty of sleep and be ready for tomorrow.

The skirt and coat went together quickly, in under an hour actually.  The first snag came when I started deconstructing the coat.  Fur everywhere, and there was sand caught in all the hemmed seams.  The living room ended up looking like a whole shelter full of cats had gotten into a fur-flying argument, and one of them had knocked over the litterbox while they were at it!  This is even after using a pair of embroidery scissors to cut the coat, trimming close to the hide!  Then I started hand sewing strips of fur onto the hems and little bits of loose fur kept clogging the thread.  And to make matters worse, at 9:30 I realized I was about a yard short trim, so I was waiting at the door when JoAnn's opened up at 9am this morning.

I did finish everything, though, at exactly 10:21 this morning.  The initial rendezvous point was scheduled for noon.  I even had time to powder my nose before getting dressed!

I kept the collar of the collar intact for the bolero jacket, and paired the suit with an antique beaver hat I won at a charity auction last month.



I'm particularly proud of the purse - I cut 8 evenly spaced slits in the band of the hat that matched the coat and threaded two ribbons through, then sewed a tassel at the middle of the hat, which became the bottom of the purse.  Instant reticule!



I had a short length of a tasseled fringe left over from a previous parasol project, just enough to go on the back of the jacket:



Still need more practice at applique work, but I'm getting better:



A sprig of holly from the tree in our backyard added a festive touch.





Next post, pictures from Santarchy this afternoon!



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