Ember
Member
In an effort to get this costume back on track due to busy work and an astronomical lack of motivation (it's sat in a box since February 2012!), I'm creating a progress thread for it here 
This first post is all things I posted when I first started working on this costume, will try to keep it updated as I make more progress!
For the longest time I wanted to do this costume but was always put off by never being able to track down suitable fabric for a portion of it. That changed about this time last year when I finally found the fabric I'd been searching for for absolutely years - shawl fabric for Padme's Picnic dress
This is my dream Padme costume, and the shawl fabric was really the only thing preventing me from making a start!
Was scouring eBay late at night doing yet another search for 'rose embroidered valance' (and other searches to that effect) when what should appear - the elusive curtain fabric with the accurate 3-cluster flowers! I believe this may be the Wal-mart curtain which came out about 10 years ago and was used by a lot of Padme meadow costumers at the time. The only difference between this fabric and the movie fabric is that the flower clusters are a touch more spread out on the curtain. I may embroider on extra clusters or transfer clusters from offcuts onto the shawl to fix this, we'll see. The netting will obviously need dying as well.
A couple of years ago I'd found some scarves with the embroidered vines and roses but I was never happy with them because each scarf wasn't wide enough to get a complete shawl out of. I really didn't want to stitch the 2 scarves together because that would have left seam lines. Comparing the embroidery with the curtain fabric, the roses on the scarves are a fair bit larger than those on the curtain, as you can see here (curtain=left, scarf= right):
I think you can still get the scarves, they were sold by a bellydancing store on eBay.
I already have a number of other bits and pieces for the costume - petal-shaped sequins, undyed silk chiffon, fabric dyes and embroidery yarns, and have ordered ribbons for the sleeves and headband. I'm just trying to track down a good fabric for the corset! Who knew undyed crushed silk could be so hard to find?
Due to the heavy amount of embroidery this costume has this is most definitely not going to be rushed. I currently intend to do all embroidering by hand (wouldn't trust a machine near the fabric!), my target finish time for this costume is for the Episode 2 3D release in 2013.
----
Not being able to hunt down correctly-coloured chiffon means I need to dye white chiffon the colour that I need. Was a bit worried about how much the white crinkle silk chiffon I got shrunk back on itself after pre-washing it! Was glad to see that dampening out the silk chiffon and having it weighted as it dries added a number of inches back on, thank goodness!
I've been hunting out corset fabric for a while now, and stumbled upon the perfect golden fabric that doesn't need dyeing! I ordered swatches of the fabric in gold, white, and off-white so I could dye the non-gold swatches if the gold was the wrong shade, but the gold is perfect, and is one less thing for me to worry about dyeing
Here's the swatch (Crushed Dupion)
So happy with it, but it's very delicate and will need a lot of stabilisers before it can be embroidered! It'll also be a little while before I can afford to order the *rather expensive* fabric seeing as it's pure silk :confused **update - fabric was bought, and it's slightly lighter than it appears in these swatch shots. Seems a touch more accurate being lighter, so no real issue there**
I'm quite happy with the blouse pattern that I did, and will make a mock-up with it over the next few days.
I have the headband ribbon, it's perfect! I thought it may be too bright, but it's a nice khaki-olive green with gold edging that matches the screen-used ribbon very nicely
Crystals for the brooch arrived, there are enough little ones for at least 20 brooches! Also got a small number of 'centrepiece' crystals.
Figured I'm spending all this time effort and money with silks and embroidery on this costume that it would be a crime to use acrylic rhinestones on it. Decided to go for Swarovski crystals. More costly, but definitely worth it in the end
I don't like how the screen-used brooch has assymmetrical colours. I may match it, or I may pick a colour scheme that complements the costume's colours (roses, golds and greens) and has symmetry to it. Or, I may do both so I have an accurate one and a symmetrical one
Am also tossing up between a brooch-pin or rare-earth magnets to fasten the brooch to the shawl. Don't want to go damaging the shawl with pins, and magnets will have the brooch right up against the fabric. The shawl is supported by the shoulder straps, so the fastening will just be holding the ends together rather than supporting the weight of the shawl. At this point I'm leaning towards using magnets. **Update - went with teensy rare-earth magnets**
---
Was a click away from ordering a large spool of undyed ribbon which could be dyed the 5 colours needed for the hair and arm details, and came across suitable silk ribbon in a huge variety of colours so that I just need to match colours rather than worry about dyeing ribbon!
Samples ordered, and will have comparison shots of the various colours once they arrive.
----
Spent a day dyeing small crinkle chiffon swatches trying to get the colour for the blouse and skirt. After a few various experiments with varying colour ratios and dye-times with RIT Golden yellow and Tan, I got a colour I was happy with
All the chiffon (for the outer layers) was dyed after spending quite some time working out and scaling up the ratios, weights and measurements from yesterday (I hate leaving things to chance when working on a costume!).
Here's how it worked out!
The right upper 3 were left in jars of varying dye ratios for an hour to get an estimation of the hue when fully saturated.
The left upper-4 are swatches from the same dye pots, but with the addition of a new ratio partway between two of the saturated swatches (the vertical one in the centre. This turned out being the swatch I liked most.)
The left bottom 2 are from some of the dye pots but were pulled out after only a few mins and turned out far too light.
Finally, the right bottom-most 4 are swatches of the dye I liked most (more tan than golden yellow), pulled out in 10-minute increments to determine how long to keep the fabric soaking.
On the far right of the photo is the final fabric, as it is now.
It's a lovely wheat colour, a little different from the swatch I tried to match it to (the horizontal one in the bottom right corner), but I think it's closer to the proper colour than the swatch
---
Early chiffon embroidery progress!
---
One finished sleeve **which is as far as I've got with the embroidery :confused **
I also have all the ribbons!
Ordered a silk ribbon swatch card, and the 5 ribbons on the right are the colours I now have spools of They're slightly narrower than the movie ribbons at 13mm (think the movie ribbons are 18mm?) but looking through exhibit images and screencaps, these ribbons seem to be the closest colour-matches I could find.
---
This is as far as I've got, I hope to resume work on this before Christmas!
This first post is all things I posted when I first started working on this costume, will try to keep it updated as I make more progress!
For the longest time I wanted to do this costume but was always put off by never being able to track down suitable fabric for a portion of it. That changed about this time last year when I finally found the fabric I'd been searching for for absolutely years - shawl fabric for Padme's Picnic dress
This is my dream Padme costume, and the shawl fabric was really the only thing preventing me from making a start!
Was scouring eBay late at night doing yet another search for 'rose embroidered valance' (and other searches to that effect) when what should appear - the elusive curtain fabric with the accurate 3-cluster flowers! I believe this may be the Wal-mart curtain which came out about 10 years ago and was used by a lot of Padme meadow costumers at the time. The only difference between this fabric and the movie fabric is that the flower clusters are a touch more spread out on the curtain. I may embroider on extra clusters or transfer clusters from offcuts onto the shawl to fix this, we'll see. The netting will obviously need dying as well.
A couple of years ago I'd found some scarves with the embroidered vines and roses but I was never happy with them because each scarf wasn't wide enough to get a complete shawl out of. I really didn't want to stitch the 2 scarves together because that would have left seam lines. Comparing the embroidery with the curtain fabric, the roses on the scarves are a fair bit larger than those on the curtain, as you can see here (curtain=left, scarf= right):
I think you can still get the scarves, they were sold by a bellydancing store on eBay.
I already have a number of other bits and pieces for the costume - petal-shaped sequins, undyed silk chiffon, fabric dyes and embroidery yarns, and have ordered ribbons for the sleeves and headband. I'm just trying to track down a good fabric for the corset! Who knew undyed crushed silk could be so hard to find?
Due to the heavy amount of embroidery this costume has this is most definitely not going to be rushed. I currently intend to do all embroidering by hand (wouldn't trust a machine near the fabric!), my target finish time for this costume is for the Episode 2 3D release in 2013.
----
Not being able to hunt down correctly-coloured chiffon means I need to dye white chiffon the colour that I need. Was a bit worried about how much the white crinkle silk chiffon I got shrunk back on itself after pre-washing it! Was glad to see that dampening out the silk chiffon and having it weighted as it dries added a number of inches back on, thank goodness!
I've been hunting out corset fabric for a while now, and stumbled upon the perfect golden fabric that doesn't need dyeing! I ordered swatches of the fabric in gold, white, and off-white so I could dye the non-gold swatches if the gold was the wrong shade, but the gold is perfect, and is one less thing for me to worry about dyeing
Here's the swatch (Crushed Dupion)
So happy with it, but it's very delicate and will need a lot of stabilisers before it can be embroidered! It'll also be a little while before I can afford to order the *rather expensive* fabric seeing as it's pure silk :confused **update - fabric was bought, and it's slightly lighter than it appears in these swatch shots. Seems a touch more accurate being lighter, so no real issue there**
I'm quite happy with the blouse pattern that I did, and will make a mock-up with it over the next few days.
I have the headband ribbon, it's perfect! I thought it may be too bright, but it's a nice khaki-olive green with gold edging that matches the screen-used ribbon very nicely
Crystals for the brooch arrived, there are enough little ones for at least 20 brooches! Also got a small number of 'centrepiece' crystals.
Figured I'm spending all this time effort and money with silks and embroidery on this costume that it would be a crime to use acrylic rhinestones on it. Decided to go for Swarovski crystals. More costly, but definitely worth it in the end
I don't like how the screen-used brooch has assymmetrical colours. I may match it, or I may pick a colour scheme that complements the costume's colours (roses, golds and greens) and has symmetry to it. Or, I may do both so I have an accurate one and a symmetrical one
Am also tossing up between a brooch-pin or rare-earth magnets to fasten the brooch to the shawl. Don't want to go damaging the shawl with pins, and magnets will have the brooch right up against the fabric. The shawl is supported by the shoulder straps, so the fastening will just be holding the ends together rather than supporting the weight of the shawl. At this point I'm leaning towards using magnets. **Update - went with teensy rare-earth magnets**
---
Was a click away from ordering a large spool of undyed ribbon which could be dyed the 5 colours needed for the hair and arm details, and came across suitable silk ribbon in a huge variety of colours so that I just need to match colours rather than worry about dyeing ribbon!
Samples ordered, and will have comparison shots of the various colours once they arrive.
----
Spent a day dyeing small crinkle chiffon swatches trying to get the colour for the blouse and skirt. After a few various experiments with varying colour ratios and dye-times with RIT Golden yellow and Tan, I got a colour I was happy with
All the chiffon (for the outer layers) was dyed after spending quite some time working out and scaling up the ratios, weights and measurements from yesterday (I hate leaving things to chance when working on a costume!).
Here's how it worked out!
The right upper 3 were left in jars of varying dye ratios for an hour to get an estimation of the hue when fully saturated.
The left upper-4 are swatches from the same dye pots, but with the addition of a new ratio partway between two of the saturated swatches (the vertical one in the centre. This turned out being the swatch I liked most.)
The left bottom 2 are from some of the dye pots but were pulled out after only a few mins and turned out far too light.
Finally, the right bottom-most 4 are swatches of the dye I liked most (more tan than golden yellow), pulled out in 10-minute increments to determine how long to keep the fabric soaking.
On the far right of the photo is the final fabric, as it is now.
It's a lovely wheat colour, a little different from the swatch I tried to match it to (the horizontal one in the bottom right corner), but I think it's closer to the proper colour than the swatch
---
Early chiffon embroidery progress!
---
One finished sleeve **which is as far as I've got with the embroidery :confused **
I also have all the ribbons!
Ordered a silk ribbon swatch card, and the 5 ribbons on the right are the colours I now have spools of
They're slightly narrower than the movie ribbons at 13mm (think the movie ribbons are 18mm?) but looking through exhibit images and screencaps, these ribbons seem to be the closest colour-matches I could find.
---
This is as far as I've got, I hope to resume work on this before Christmas!
