Bellatrix Diaries . . . . part 2

Time for the next chapter in the Bellatrix dress diaries . . . mwah, ha, ha, ha! Okay, that didn't come off sounding as evil as I wanted it to . . . must have something to do with Monday morning . . . (shakes her evil laugh generator, sighs, moves on)

So, progress has been going swimmingly for Bellatrix; the dress went together a dream, as I chronicled in the last post. It only waits for the eyeletting on the sleeves, with Tab can now do since I reset my homepro tool with the correct die for it (I love my setting tool! If I could marry an appliance, we would be heading down the aisle. Maybe that's the solution to my singlehood? Hmmmmm.) The dress also needs some more decorsation and distressing, but it's pretty much complete. That leaves some other details.


The bird-skull necklace. I had a lot of fun sculpting this, maybe a little too much, if you want the truth;) Working from the original, pictured above, and a few pics of a repro by Snapdragon (thank you!), I got this:

I don't really wannt to antique it, but I may, just because it's very bright in pictures. It's slightly bigger than the original as well, but I liked it so much when I was done that I didn't want to start all over again and make a smaller one. You can't have too large a bird skull, I always say!

Onward to the leather corset. The under-base was black twill, put together like a standard under-bust corset and boned with 1/2" spiral boning and 1/4" white bones surrounding the grommets in back. Once the foundation was complete, I moved on to the leather patchwork outer-layer.

I started with several reference images where I highlighted the patchwork lines, and I used the excellent action figure for a decent 360 view. I then laid out my leather pieces, started drawing, and sewed each piece together on the machine. I worked in small sections, so as not to confuse myself with how some of the smaller bits went together! Once the entire thing was sewn together using a leather needle on my machine, I sat on my couch, popped in a movie, and started the laborious hand-sewing of all that decorating stitching. Using a wide-pointed leather hand-sewing needle (made with a spade point to create larger holes in the leather), I looped black soutache around each seam. It took several hours, but I was very happy with the results! Then, I hand-stitched the leather to the twill corset, following each seam so it was very secure and didn't pull or gap anywhere. The leather goes to to the grommets in the back, but stops just before them; I didn't want to try to grommet through two layers of twill and leather!

I'm quite pleased with what we've got so far, though the grey streaks in the wig reflect the light from the camera's flash too well! In person, they are much ore subtle than they appear here;) I'll probably post one more entry before this Saturday; just five days to Chicago Comic-Con!