Inaugural Post: Blue-jean bustle

So... Paula made this awesome blue-jean bustle skirt for Steamcon last year. And I am a copycat. Well, sort of.

I don't even have a picture of hers, because I am lame, but she must. Or she could take one. And maybe I can get her to post it. That'd be sweet.

But! I have in-progress and completed pictures for mine, which is almost as awesome. (Read:It started with a couple pairs of pants that were so worn out I felt bad every time I wore them:

There was a pair of black ones too that I thought about using to make the whole thing a skirt, like Paula's, but I didn't end up doing it because, well, the bustle stood on its own well enough. Also, I couldn't bring myself to cut apart the green shiny pants, because who doesn't need a pair of green shiny pants, even if they're like ten years old and show the wear? (Note to self: Make a pair of green satin cargo pants, so you can finally retire those.)

Anyway, I resolved on the blue jeans and the corduroy for the bustle, and I made it into three layers. The bottom, longest, is both legs of the cords, sewn up the middle and gathered up:

The second, middle layer, is one leg of the blue jeans, pleated at the top. These are horizontal, so it's significantly shorter and slightly wider than the corduroy layer.

The puff is just the other leg of the blue jeans, tied into a circle. The massaging here was to get both sides to be the same width, since the jeans flare out, and tying the knot tight enough that it doesn't look, well, lame. 

A bow helps. I ended up putting a button in the center of the bow, too, mostly just because I could.

Er, then it's just a matter of sewing them all together and keeping them mostly centered. Cords to first blue-jean layer:

And then add the puff.

I'm skimming over part of it - which is the waist band. I ended up using the waist band for the corduroy pants, and reattatching it as the bottom-most layer. Since I wanted this to sit a bit higher on my waist than the cords usually did, I needed to take the waist band in slightly. And I don't have pictures, because that was the hard part/the part I hadn't planned, so it involved a lot of futzing with the waist band and the dress form and pinning and trying it on and then replacing everything and frowning at it because it didn't look right. 

But! All put-together, here's how it looked on the dress form!

And here's how it looked on me, at, Nova Albion. You can see a couple of the St. Clair Aeronauts in the background. And you can see my striped corset and matching spats on me.  Unfortunately, I made those so long ago that I don't have pictures of the process.

This was my third-ish attempt at bustle-ry. I really love the idea (which I can't take any credit for - Paula is the genius behind it), and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. The problem with it is, since it's designed to be worn as a top layer (otherwise the bow wouldn't show and the puff would get squished) it tends to fly everywhere when I'm dancing. We were swing dancing that night, and seriously it ended up around at my stomach sometimes.

Of course, that music was super fast, so sometimes my corset got jostled out of alignment as well. It's not too surprising the bustle took a hit.