Final Construction Pictures

Slid into home with the costume at 5:00 Friday afternoon. About 2 hours before the performance. My life as a dare devil, adrenaline stunt junkie. I started this project about March 15th and have been working steadily since then. These final two weeks have been hectic!

This is basically just a gallery of pictures from the last week of construction. I'm too tired to do much more. I sewed two feather boas together....

And added a beaded tassel to the ends for the piece that Tessie hands Gypsy in the final act as Gypsy goes on stage for the first time.

I sewed two springs each on the bra butterflies and stitched cord elastic on either side of the skirt butterfly like struts. This really makes them move like crazy when Cindy dances as Tessie. One of them broke during dress so I reattached it by sewing through the length of the spring from the butterfly to the bra.
This is the finished headpiece with ends trimmed and finished in the brocade, edges beaded and a bead piping to hide the join of the leather to the brocade.

Here's a closer picture of the headband edging and beaded piping.

This is the Flexifirm or Trimtex backing on the skirt that supports the 2 pounds of beads and the heavy butterfly. I stitched it to the inside top of the skirt at the waistband, stitched through the butterfly with a heavy duty leather needle pulling it through with pliers. The thread is doubled, waxed heavy polyester Guterman. The picture was taken before I attached the two side struts of elastic.
I airbrushed some markings on the wings and hand painted others. Embellished with gold and silver foiling and crystal stones. Covered the glue boogers up with Guterman microfine glitter. You can never catch enough lights.

See them stones! See them glitters! See the mess I made?

Back view of the wings. I put bias godets at the center back to fill in space. They look terrific when they move. Note on sewing silk gauze. Save yourself some headaches. Set your machine to a close and wide zigzag stitch and zigzag the finished edges as you roll the edge of the silk in front of the feed dogs. If you pull on a bias edge, you'll get this fluting as seen in the picture below. The seams end up being about 3 mm wide and almost disappear!
This is the outside wing shape. Lighter areas of violet are airbrushing - not finished. Not shown are the silk skirts on the back of the bra and the cascades on the brocade skirt.

This week I work on an extra 1930s dress and cloche hat for Sky. I will do a bit more embellishment on the silk to finish the costume for Cindy. Hope to have a picture of Cindy in full regalia shortly.