tenthousandjackals

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my boy has been caged and the cage and rusty hooks are what i have decided will replace the belt! its starting to come together a bit more now!

i really need to source a dress form or get around to making one bc the rig i have this on currently is so not working.

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Vivienne Westwood gown from SS94 “Café Society” Collection

©Victoria and Albert Museum

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pat mcgrath for maison margiela couture ss24

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maison margiela artisanal 2024 ‘broken doll’ development

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Maison Margiela couture spring/summer 2024 Design: John Galliano - Makeup: Pat McGrath

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just spent like 6 hours making a train and i think i hate it

like it does look better with the full skirt but idk i think i need to distress the edges bc it just looks too.. idk, clean? i think that makes sense

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i have made myself a companion!

his name is yorick

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i finally just decided on the chains! the belt wasn't having the same effect as i would have liked so i bit the bullet and added the chains to the waist yesterday.

i think i'm happy with it!

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i'm kind of torn here because i really want to add the rusty chains and hooks to the dress but i'm just not sold on the belt. i don't think i like how it lines up and the belt seems chunky in comparison.

Scrapping the belt and going back to the drawing board!

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Addams family member concept:

A tree-hugging, nature-loving, hippie aunt. But she loves specifically all of the most disgusting and horrifying things in nature.

She admires the way predators eviscerate their prey. She finds the lethal mating habits of insects romantic. She always offers people fruits and snacks, forgetting that they're poisonous and most people haven't developed immunity.

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adding the lace has been tricky because i want it to still look very dainty and delicate but i also plan on hanging rusty hooks on chains off of the dress as well so.. balance, i guess.

the hem of the wedding dress was still too stark and tidy so i distressed the hem a bit and then painted some mud stains on. i only painted the very inner layer and left the organza on top. it turned out pretty nicey and i think i'm happy with it thus far.

parts of it wont be visible unless i am in motion but i would still like to know that the details are there. i might be making extra work for myself at this point but this is enrichment in my enclosure right now

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at this point i was thinking to myself that i really liked what i had done with the fabric so far, but that the costume needed several more elements before i could be happy moving forward.

first, i wanted a petticoat. porcelain dolls almost always have lovely full skirts and are heavily adorned with lace and ribbons. this was a must.

second, sleeves of some kind. you don't see vintage porcelain dolls in spaghetti strap dresses, and i had a certain image in mind that i was determined to create.

i still had a petticoat from a costume a few years ago, it was a bit dicey and didn't quite sit beneath the skirt the way i wanted but it worked. but i didnt have any floaty blouses or ruffled collar shirts that would suit.

so i went to the local op shops (thrift). all of them. i knew i would be able to find some variation of a blouse. and then i found this baby

a literal porcelain baby. and he was already a bit dodgy looking, which was perfect for me! he wasn't what i was originally looking for but i snatched him up anyway!

BUT!

i found an incredibly tacky wedding dress from the 80s. it had giant ruffled shoulders, obnoxiously voluminous and lacey sleeves and a full skirt. it was the exact size to fit under my dress!

i'm genuinely upset that i didnt take a picture of it in store, but i was too excited and immediately zoomed home with my goodies.

i only have one photo of the dress before i began staining and altering it for my costume, and sadly its not a very clear photo of the dress at all!

i apologise for being a bit goofy looking but i was in the process of pinning a bow on. but do u see my vision? the porcelain doll look is starting to come together!

as for the dolly i picked up! he has been transformed. behold! my awful child

i will also add some moss and lichen to him as well, although i am not keen on trying my hand at embroidery again. but i really like how gnarly the texture on his face turned out

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so because i don't have a dress form or anything remotely human shaped to hang the dress on while i work on it, i resorted to hanging the dress from my ceiling while i worked on it.

this contraption is a stool with a laundry basket on top of it, covered in old towels. there isn't any boning in the bodice because the dress was originally pretty cheap and cheerful so in order to keep some sort of shape to the dress i wrangled a medium sized memory foam pillow into it and pinned it in place.

unfortunately the only room in my house with enough natural light to work with is my loungeroom, which faces right onto the street. so i can work with natural light but the caveat is that everyone who walks by my house gets to look at me in my deranged crafting mode wild eyed and covered in fabric paint

i think i spent about 6 or 7 hours painting some more details onto the skirt. trying to make something look weathered was a whole process. i painted some green/yellow/grey splotches around the moss patches, because i wanted them to blend in a bit more seamlessly. in this picture it is still drying, but the splotches ended up looking somewhat like grass stains once it had dried.

i wanted the hem to look a bit muddier but not completely soaked so i darkened it just slightly using some brown and grey. by this point it was past 4pm and because its winter here that means i lost the natural light so i finished for the day

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embroidery time! my useless but beautiful assistant spent some time in the hoop as it was necessary for her to climb inside and scream

the embroidery took me absolutely ages. it was very slow progress as embroidery isnt really a skill of mine and i had to concentrate extremely hard to formulate actual patterns.

it was slow but steady work. i was aiming for something that looked almost reclaimed by nature. i didn't want the colours to be overly saturated and bright as much as i wanted muted natural tones. i think i did an okay job, and if not, well - there's a tonne of skirt to distract from the shoddy embroidery!

the image in my mind is steadily becoming clearer! at this point i have done around 30 hours of hand stitching. not a boast about my stitching, but a shameful admission that i did spend about a week using every spare minute to embroider. i started this project 140 days before halloween, and ideally i would like to be finished in time to wear it on halloween

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This is the dress i started with. i figured it was reasonably flowy and i liked the tea length skirt. i feel as though porcelain dolls often have tea length full skirts.

its 100% cotton so it was easy to dye and i was able to do it using natural dyes rather than rit, because i wanted the colours to look sort of organic and naturally occuring.

seeings as it was somewhat experimental i just boiled some salt water, threw a few earl grey teabags in the pot and added the dress. the result was a gnarly green/grey fabric which i was really pleased with

a side by side of the dress after the dye

the next thing i did was use brown onion skins to make a sort of dappled grungy effect on the fabric. just sprinkled the onion skins in amongst the fabric and folds and steamed the entire dress for about 2 hours (topping up the water intermittently. i didn't just whack it on the stove and leave unattended for 2 hours)

i thought i had taken pictures of this portion but i can't find any. i do have a picture of the onion skin dye but it was after i had already begun the embroidery (which was the next step) but this was the result of the dye.

the very dark brown patch in the bottom isn't dye, though! it's a burn bc i am not very clever or cautious

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so its been a number of years since i have been able to make myself a proper costume of any kind, halloween or otherwise. because of the state of my health this year i've found myself at home often with a lot of time on my hands.

i decided that this year i would make a porcelain doll costume for halloween, and this sideblog is just somewhere to post the progress pics and so forth. i'm probably not going to tag my work bc its so v so-so and beginner kind of thing that i would be a bit embarrassed to see it with all of the really impressive cosplays/designs/craftwork that people on tumblr create.

porcelain dolls are already a little spooky in my opinion, but i decided that my costume would be a porcelain doll or beloved toy that had accidentally been left outside and begun to rot. ideally i would like people to see my costume from afar and think 'thats quite pretty' but upon closer inspection to realise that the doll is weathered and broken.