Egyptian Faience – the results

Turquoise Faience beads and pendants

About a year ago, I helped organize a class taught by Alysa from Fuzzy Lizard Studios on Egyptian Faience. In today’s post I’ll show off some of the results…

After nearly a year of sitting around… the turquoise beads were completely white

It took a while to get to this point. In the class I made a number of beads and other ornaments, with the plan to get together with other classmates in a few weeks later to have them fired at a local kiln that Alysa had researched for us. I also bought two additional packages of clay-powder to make more beads, but didn’t get right around to making it up into anything.

2018 Historical Sew Monthly Challenges

I started thinking about the 2018 Historical Sew Monthly challenges in early November when a friend of mine started a Stitch and Bitch group, with the hopes of having monthly garment-making challenges. The organizer hopes we’ll create documentation for a garment in one month, and then create the garment in the next month… with the goal of having 6 projects done and ready for an A&S competition by the end of the year.

I was up for the challenge… but honestly know that I can’t duplicate my efforts, so I wanted to tag-team this group with the Historical Sew Monthly challenges as well!

Throwback Thursday: Blue corset with flocked scrolls

Blue flocked overbust corset (with flash)

I’m calling this a Throwback Thursday because this is actually a corset I made a while ago (so I don’t have any work-in-progress photos either). I made this to sell, back when I was hoping to get commissions for custom work (I’m not looking to do custom work anymore).

A bit about this corset:

This is a lightweight modern Victorian design corset with a sheer blue fabric over pink cotton. The blue fabric has black flocking and silver glitter. The pink fabric shows through the blue sheer fabric, creating a colour-changing or shot effect. (This is most visible in the photos taken with flash.) 

Third inspired-by-Midgaard hood

Photo credit ©Mysticus Photography – Me in my steel grey wool hood, along with other elements of my Viking Age Norse costume.

Steel charcoal grey wool hood

Once I had the black and grey wool-blend hood finished, I liked the results so much that I went to my stash of other fabrics from the Grandmother’s Fabric Sale and found another piece of wool, also with less than two meters. This fabric is a charcoal grey with a slight steel blue tinge to it. In sewing it I found it very spongy – it did not want to hold a press at all. (It is a tabby weave, not a crepe weave though.) You can see in the photo below my pattern – and the number of adjustments that were made before I got something I really liked.

Second inspired-by-Midgaard hood

Grey and black wool-blend hood

Sewing a second Midgaarb-inspired hood

Although I really liked the plaid hood I blogged about the other day, I thought that it was a bit short, and thought that it would be nicer with a longer, fuller capelet. I had some black-and-grey wool-blend fabric with an interesting square weave left over from another project, and so opted to cut out a second hood from this leftover, with a much longer capelet.