Tag: Costume

Larp Shirt

It’s possible that you’ve seen the shirt before, I wore it during Carnaval last year. However, I made some small modifications. I added another layer to the sleeves, because I was afraid I would be cold. I think it helped so that was nice. I also chose to loosen the string that ran along the top of the neck opening, so I could wear it below the shoulders.

It’s based on a free pattern from Burda style (here), which  I adapted to have long sleeves (basically just drew the line of the sleeve a lot longer, until it hit my wrist). I normally have a hard time wearing off the shoulder items, because I feel the need for hiking them up. However, the straps on the skirt made it feel as if there was something on my shoulder, so it didn’t bother me at all.

Of course a picture:

It’s quite hard to see the double layer, but if you click the picture, squint and focus on the attachment of the right sleeve to the bodice, you’ll see the bodice is lighter in colour. I know it’s all wrinkly too, that’s because I wore it for an extended period of time, and it hasn’t been in the wash yet. It will be, sometime soon, and then I’ll iron it, and it will (hopefully) look all nice again, this is just an indication of how it looks.

Tomorrow, part three: the over dress.

Larp Skirt

For my bottom half I made a skirt, red with two blue stripes down the front. I also added a gazillion pockets to it. I was playing a character that liked to collect things, preferably shiny things (buttons, coins, helmets..), and had to keep them close.

Eventually I had the skirt finished a couple of hours before I had to leave for the actual event. With all the stuff in the pockets, it would be quite heavy so I added straps to the top to keep it in place, which worked quite well, although they did lengthen a bit over time and I had to open the buttonholes higher up on the straps. There was no pattern for the skirt, just a couple of trapezoid pieces stuck together, I added in the blue because I felt I did not have enough room to move. The blue certainly did help, and I like the pop of additional colour.

Anyway, here is the final result:

 

Left the real finished product and right the original idea. They do look somewhat similar right?

I just counted the pockets and there are 40 individual pockets to put things in, although there are only 31 pieces of fabric attached. Some bits were divided up into three to hold small vials of herbs and beads.

The left bottom side (right when I’m wearing it) is still empty, that is because I figured that if I would be really bored I could whip out the needles that were in the white pocket that was the most left one still on the red fabric. From the grey pocket in the middle at the bottom of the skirt I could take the thread and from the big black pocket on the back (you can see a bit to the far right) I’d take a piece of fabric and attach it. It turned out that there was no need for stitching more pockets on, but the bits of fabric did help as towels to clean our bloody hands, after an earth quake.

So the skirt, its pockets and their contents proved useful. Tomorrow we will visit the top under layer: the shirt.

 

Larp Costume

So the past weekend I spent running around a camp with tents in the woods. That’s not how I was supposed to view it though. You see, I was running around the city of Ravenskeep, with all its magnificent buildings, including a nine story high tower of the magicians governed by Arcanus (quite difficult to imagine if you just see a tent).

However, you cannot pretend to walk around a magic medieval setting without a somewhat period costume of course. Ok, mine was not very period, but it didn’t have a zipper, so that’s one thing at least. I did make it by machine, but that was because of laziness and time issues.

The next couple of days I will post a series on the complete costume I made for the first 2012 Ravenskeep event. It will go from bottom to top and under to over. Starting with the bottom part, the skirt, tomorrow.

Ps. Can anyone explain why zipper always shows up as being wrong in the WordPress spell check? I do not understand that, since I thought zipper was a nice and common word that people do actually use..  (also, why is WordPress underlined with the red line.. they should know their own name, right? Or am I even more of an idiot than I already thought?)

Queensday

The next village over always celebrates Queensday by also putting down a big tent and having a party in the days before (or after) Queensday. Yesterday me and my mother visited the bingo night, we actually both won something, not enough to cover the costs but it was still fun. Tonight there is a party with music and everything in Tiroler style. So my parents needed outfits. This morning we shopped around the closets to find something which we could see as the Tiroler style stuff we saw on the pictures we googled. I found a dirndl type skirt, my mom a shirt with a tie at the top and I fashioned her an apron from a bit of white fabric.

We made my dad substitute lederhosen by attaching ties to a pair of shorts we found in his cupboard. The amazing thing was that I had pretty much the exact same colour fabric in my stash as his pants were. So that’s what I did today, made silly costumes for my parents.

Result:

Costume(?) Plan

In May I’m going to go to a LARP with a friend of mine. For this I need an outfit. I have a plan, and it is quite costumey, and I don’t know if it’s going to work, but I hope so.

I’m envisioning myself in a skirt that has a lot of pockets. The character I want to play is somewhat like a magpie, always collecting shiny things. And not shiny things, and wanting to know everything (ok, maybe that’s not magpie, but it’s fun). So I want to be able to put all the stuff I ‘collect’ into something, in this case, a skirt. I want to make the skirt out of a red-ish linen that I’ve had for a larp purpose for years (it’s the only bit that is big enough for the skirt I want to make). Then I want to add pockets, a lot of pockets, in different kinds of fabrics. I found bits in blue, red, black, more blue and more red, so that should be fine. I also have some wool left over from my mantle. This could serve well as pouches I think. I have made a sketch (see below), I just haven’t really figured out what to do with the back. I can’t really put stuff in pockets, if I put pockets there. Since sitting comfortably is quite a priority for me, especially if I’m going to be running around the woods for days, I need to be able to sit if I’m tired.

Any ideas?

Here’s the sketch, the text is in Dutch, and also not very interesting:

Sketch

The third figure is empty, because it’s a template since I cannot draw freehand figures very well. I can draw one half of the figure, and than fail at reproducing it, so I scanned it and copied and pasted and voila!