CoBloWriMo – Costume Blog Writing Month
The prompt for today’s CoBloWriMo is “Visual Source” – and once I read that, I immediately thought of Pinterest!
Now… a lot of historical costumers look down their nose at Pinterest – but it’s not the beginning and end.. for me it’s just a jumping off place. Plus, there are so many awesome bloggers who have their images on Pinterest – with links to all of their great resources and thoughts – not to mention photos of their progress!
For instance, when I was doing my Byzantine costume, I started on Pinterest. I knew that I didn’t have time to do a LOT of research, so looking at the visual sources – not to mention the visuals of all the other costumers who had done Byzantine costumes of their own – was a great place to start.
I used a number of different visual sources to find commonalities between different styles. Interestingly enough, there were enough mens and womens costumes that had similar elements. I made a pin board, and also pinned jewellery artifacts, and other things too.
11th Century Byzantine costume (without the cloak)
From these original visual sources I looked at the drape of fabric, cut of the neckline, cut of the sleeves, where trim was applied, and the shapes of trim as well. These sources also informed me about accessories… though through diving down some of those other sources, I added the hat which I didn’t see in any of the original visual sources.
For more of this costume, please visit my Pinterest board, or my blog posts about this costume.
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Dawn's Dress Diary 