Yes, Virginia, You CAN Steampunk Christmas

Season's Greetings, everyone!  The days are getting chillier and shorter, and thoughts are veering toward Christmas, even for those of us who strenuously avoid such thoughts til Halloween and Remembrance Day are over. 

This is a post far longer in the making than needed, for which I apologize.  When I had to create a steampunk display for our group's table at a Christmas Faire, I started the seeds of this article.  While creating the visual display of steampunk, I decided I should have a section fitting in with the Christmas theme, so I decided to investigate Steampunking Christmas.

A bit of Googling online (see below), and I found some great steampunked Christmas images, including the Steampunk Santa, by CyborgNecromancer (found here on deviantART), Ms. Koobickle's Steampunk Santa in Airship, from her post in 2009 at her blog, and some awesome embroidery designs on Urban Threads.  There were several others images I found as well, but these ones particularly caught my eye.

The Steampunk Christmas crafts I've encountered range from from Jennifer Dove's crafted Christmas card masterpiece (apparently made with stamps, gears, weights a lot, and it even ticks! details here), to Desert Rubble's wonderful polymer Steampunk Santas, on Deviantart here and here.

 

And of course, there are Christmas ornaments for a tree with a difference.  I quite like ValerianaSolaris' polymer ornament made from a glass ball and Fimo.

Jen, at Epbot, posted an article about steampunk Christmas ornaments, showing off some beauties she found, including this stunner below, which she names The Ultimate Steampunk Pine Cone of Craftiness (awesome!) and which a fellow crafter sent to her!  

In addition to these, there are many steampunk Christmas collages, gift tags, and Christmas trees bedecked with gears out there.  Then there are the many vintage images of Victorian & Edwardian Christmas cards with a very steampunk feel to them, as this small selection from my vintage image collection shows:

So, the whole point of this post is to say, Yes, Virginia, you CAN steampunk Christmas.  And from all the cool stuff I've seen online, we really, really should.

A Time-Travelling Chemist-Druggist, or, Steampunk Quackery

Greetings, all, and Happy Haunting time of year.

As you settle in with your cup of tea, allow me to, once again, apologize profusely for the infrequency of my sessions here in my Salon.  The ever-difficult battle between making a living for myself so I can keep myself in the fashion to which I've become accustomed, organizing events for the local steampunks, and generally having my fingers in too many pies, leaves me little time for costuming and far less time to share it.

However, I am now able to update you one of my latest endeavors.  At the start of this year, I decided it would be a fun idea to create a steampunk quack doctor or chemist/druggist.  This would be a heavily prop-oriented ensemble, versus costume-oriented.  A quack remedy chemist would be all about the medicines, cures, and promotion. 

I quickly lost myself in research into quack medicines, which is a fascinating subject, and covers easily almost three full centuries.  Bizarre nostrums, paregorics and cures really peaked in the 1700's, and were still quite rampant and weird right through the Victorian era.  It wasn't until the early 1900's that controls started coming into better effect.  Caroline Rance's amazing website, The Quack Doctor was a huge inspiration, and place where I lost many, many hours of fascinated reading.  

Creating a quack persona was one thing, but to steampunk it up, I decided she should be a time-travelling chemist & druggist.  Of course, she must have a set of phenomenal credentials, so I created the credentials of PC, DC, TTE and OMG (because why not!).  In order, that becomes Pharmaceutical Chemist, Dispensing Chemist, Time Travel Expert, and OmniMateria Goods (allowing me to use, animal, mineral, vegetal, and manmade components in my medicaments). Using my own initials and the surname of a favourite SCA persona I'd created years before, voila, T.L. Swyfte, Travelling Chemist. came into being:

This is the design I created for my advertising.  This small sign ended up as a small card in my hat, the inside panel of my medicaments box, and the front page of the advertising booklet of my products, which I created.

I had a convenient medium-sized wooden box I'd picked up at a thrift store with a mind to use it for something, and voila, this became my portable product display, with the addition of a front closure, side catches and two side rings to hold the leather straps to enable to carry the box around.

The truly fun part of this persona was creating the list & descriptions of my products.  Hours and hours of research inspired me to create a selection of my own nostrums, all carrying my trademark name, Swyfte's, and several of which were almost wholly taken from actual medicines from the past.  

Once I'd come up with a list of products, I selected my favourites and wrote up an advertisement for each one, and with the assistance of the many wonderful copyright-free vintage borders and graphics you can find on http://thegraphicsfairy.com/, created the small ads for my product booklet.  I printed the booklet in black and white, with only the cover in colour, deliberately restricting myself to two colours, to keep things more Victorian in feel.  

A stack of my product booklets

My frontispiece of "company" advertising, and the advert for my Solar Re-Animating Solar Tincture, which is based on an actual quack medicine (and the advert not much different from the original - I just added vampiric conditions to zip it up.  Would have added zombification, except I was running out of room.

Of course, every quack druggist ought to have a paregoric to cure everything.  With dodgy claims of "safe" opium.  I'm quite proud of my Combobulating Serum - entirely my own concept.  Who among us doesn't have days when we wish for some serum of this ilk, to clear our befogged and discombobulated minds! 

Other chemists will produce plasters, but only Swyfte will give you Daily Reassuring Plasters, to both ease your discomfort and to soothe, reassure, and comfort.  And our Defibulating Lozenges are quite popular - reveal untruths by plying suspected fibbers with our cleverly disguised lozenges daily! 

Of course I had to include our own Coca Wine - given it was such a common product that even in the 1890's this could be purchased from your Sears Roebuck catalogue!  And what steampunk gentleman hasn't longed for impressively manly moustaches and muttonchops?  Achieve them with ease with our powerful tonic.

Ah, Time Travel's attendant unpleasant side effect for so many folks - pesky hiccoughs!  Annoying, and downright dangerous if one happens to find oneself trying to discretely hide from predatory beasts (or men) in a past or future aggressive setting.  Our lozenges will help!  And we had to have Ambition Pills (another actual "medicine" from quack history.  And the advert wording very much taken from the original.

The back cover

The next step was, of course the "products" for display.  I purchased small bottles online and whenever I saw appropriately-sized bottles. Playing about with the advertisements I'd created and more fun graphics, I created labels for a selection of my products.

Putting together products, advertising, handouts, and the box, resulted in my travelling case below, which I then carried strapped around my neck and waist.

The joy of this persona is that the clothes are far less relevant.  I took an old military hat, added a pin (Girl Genius trilobite!) and tucked in an advertising card.  The rest was just shirt, corset, long skirt.  Here is the final product of my time-traveling quack chemist, BEST SCIENTIFIC Medicaments in hand - ready to hit the hallways and hawk my wares!

And finally, before I go, I would like to once again thank my main inspiration and sourcing for this concept, Caroline Rance, creator of the fabulous website: http://thequackdoctor.com/, and author of Kill-Grief, and most recently, The Quack Doctor (available on Amazon.ca and elsewhere).

Quick and Dirty: Tricking out a Thrifted Skirt

Greetings, again.

Today I'd like to post a brief how-I-did-it piece, on tricking out a skirt I found at a thrift store that was closing (which meant the skirt cost me 90¢!)

Below is the skirt, which had an Italian label and is made from 100% cotton.  

Front (taken with flash)

Back, taken without flash

The skirt was pinned up entirely randomly, at different height levels.  It also had two braided ties (?) at the sides, made of the same skirt fabric, which were very long, and in these photos, can be faintly seen, clipped up at the top to loop them.  I considered keeping the braids, but they were at a height and angle which I found difficult to work with attractively.  Since I was going to be wearing a corset over the skirt, I ultimately decided the extra bulk was unnecessary, so I unpicked their stitches to remove them from the skirt (and have kept them just in case I find another use for them).

Skirt pinned to dressform under corset.  (Braided ties still attached)

After staring at the skirt awhile on the form, I decided I wanted to trim the hem, and definitely embellish and accentuate the pinned-up portions.  So I went and sorted through my accumulated trims and buttons, etc, and ended up starting at these selections:

Trim I have from previous projects & shopping trips

Buttons bought online

I went a bit nuts, and began pinning things to the skirt on the dressform.  (I was also working on the corset at the same time, and pinned things all over it too.  See separate entry earlier on the corset mod)

I decided to attach the fairly stiff, light tan & white striped, narrow ruffle trim (which was slightly elasticized) to the hem, and use the fancy buttons to accent (and reinforce) the pinned-up sections, with some of the plaid ribbon dangling down.  

Upon deciding this, I pinned the striped trim to the entire hem.  Turns out when laid out, the hemline was a huge rectangle.  Pinning elasticised trim is frustrating (and turned out to be pointless ... once the machine hit it, my pinning was moot, as the pins took up more trim than sewing did, so my pins were all off).  After I was done sewing, I measured the hem circumference ... 19 ½ feet of hem.  Yikes.  No wonder it took forever.  After sewing, the skirt looked like this:

I wasn't happy with how much the hem now stuck out, but realized, when worn under the corset, it wouldn't be so bad.  At this stage, it took me a week to figure out exactly where to go next, what to do with the pinned-up parts, and with the braided ties (which are still in place here).

Since I only had 6 of the large fancy buttons (3 really cool, 3 slightly less cool), I decided to use small brass buttons for the smaller, less prominent tucked-up bits.  And I decided to add some coppery-ish soft ribbon, in addition to the plaid ribbon, to accent the pinned-up parts.  When attaching the ribbons and buttons, I took care to use the opportunity to reinforce the tacking, since the fabric is thin and I was worried there would be tearing eventually in the original tacking.

So, the plain cheap 90¢ skirt ended up looking like this:

And like this, when worn with rolled stockings this April at Norwescon 34 in Seattle:

So, this goes to show you can buy a cheap skirt at a thrift store, and with trim on the hem, dangly ribbons, and buttons, trick it out a little.

Thanks for listening, and as usual, feel free to comment below!

Quick and Dirty: Steampunk Work Apron

Greetings good folks.  Today's focus is on on example of Quick and Dirty steampunk costuming - how to make cool costume pieces without lots of skill, money, or time.

It was approximately a year ago that I decided to finally embark on making some steampunk outfits (having been planning and accumulating brass bits for over 2 years).  There was a general sci-fi/fantasy Convention coming up (Norwescon) in a couple of weeks and, in typical fashion, I decided to make new costumes.  Of course, this meant I had little time.

I wanted a steampunk work apron of some sort.  I had little time, less budget, and was costuming in a hurry.  I decided to find something I could modify.

Hurrah for thrift stores!  I found this large burgundy sleeveless tunic-dress at Value Village for about $5, and decided to use it as my base for a work apron.

Front

Back, with ties

I decided to make it more apron-like by cutting up the centre back to open up the tunic, with the plan of using the back ties to close it.  After cutting it open in the back, I cut and reshaped the garment from the top of the shoulders down to the hem, again to make it more like an apron.  I also removed the ties at the front neckline.

Front with ties removed

Back reshaped - seam binding to finish inside edge

Closeup of reshaped back

This now needed that quintessential workapron necessity - pockets.  I had some scrap reddish-brown leather, and I cut these to the size I wanted and attached them using my sewing machine.  I also made a leather keyfob for a belt out of the scrap leather, and decided to enlist one of my leather belts to wear over the apron waist.

With 2 lower pockets and belt

Detail of keyfob (and keys!)

Still, this was clearly not done.  I decided to add a third pocket above the lower one, with a built-in keyfob / hook, and to add brass findings to detail the outer corners of the pockets.

 

The third pocket ended up being further divided, and decorated with more brass findings.  To finish, I added a small pocket high up, and to close the slit in the neckline, I made a small decoration from broken pocketwatch parts, a freshwater pearl, and a tumbled garnet. 

Third pocket, divided in sections and decorated.

Neckline decoration & small pocket added

This was looking much better.  A wearable steampunk work apron converted from a old oversized tunic-dress.

And voila, the final product - 3 views, 2 different presentations: 

It might not be a show-stopper, but it is effective, all the pockets proved to be super-handy at Cons, and I liked the result.  This was an easy, quick and dirty conversion of a cheap garment into a decent steampunk costume piece.  Proof that you don't have to get complicated, have awesome sewing skills, or spend lots of hard-earned money to do steampunk.