Reasons for writing this blog

I am a big fan of all kinds of costuming. Where I come from, carnival is celebrated for weeks and every weekend there's a ball at a different village where people dress up, get drunk and dance to (mostly) terrible music. "Historical" costuming for me started out when I tried to recreate a dress from a Victoria Francés Poster for carnival - it needed a corset, but all buyable corsets were waaay to expensive for a mere costume, so I started researching ways to make my own. The costume ended up looking terrible (by my standarts today), still I wore it: it was the first costume I had ever sewn on my own. Atfer that , I kept sewing as one of my hobbies. I did it very scarcely and hardly ever any big projects, but i kept learning. A couple of years later, after watching (and reading) a LOT of Jane Austen, I decided I wanted to make a Regency dress. Having gotten better at Internet research, I stumbled upon my first costuming blog (the hungarican chick). With the help of that post and a modern, high-waisted shirt, I drafted the pattern for my very first Regency dress (I'm way too cheap to buy commercial patterns, also I seem to be unable to use them to my satisfaction). I really like the result, although I can't wear it (at the moment) because I made the bib too small to actually cover my chest. I'm planning to take it off, cut and sew a bigger one and attach that to the dress, but only after i've made proper undergarments, so that hast to wait.

The very much too small bib-front of my dress

 Of course, there are other things I would do differently if i made another Regency dress (I only read about the diamond back after I finished the dress), but still I think it's a good start.
Another year or so later, a friend invited me to visit her hometown in july, because there's a huge renaissance festival going on, with the whole towncenter dedicated to the festival and almost all the townspeople dressed up, so I decided I finally needed a dress for that period.

This time, I did some actual and extensive research: what year was the event the town is celebrating? (1530's). What was the appropriate dressstyle for that era, and where can I find some period pictures of what I want to wear? (I ended up looking at paintings by Breughel, sometimes called "Bauern-Breughel", meaning "peasant-Breughel" because he painted the simple people's life). Sadly, those paintings couldn't show me what I was looking for, but I found another great website: Elizabethan Costume. They have tons of infos and also a lot of Tutorials, which I ended up using for the construction of my Green Gathered Kirtle:

The GGK

This is the first costume I made that is actually wearable and that I am really proud of. Even though I had to rush the sewing (I only have a sewing machine available on weekends, when I'm at my parent's) it turned out perfectly and the way I imagined it. I can't wait to finally wear it in july.

In all these years ( I started sewing sometime in 2009), the internet has been a great help for me. I'm mostly self taught, so when I encounter difficulties my first step is always to go to the internet and look for someone who's already done what I'm trying to do and has recorded the steps it took them to do it. Since I now feel I am at a level where I can actually share knowledge instead of just consuming it, I am starting this blog for other people like me who might be trying to do things I've already done.

Besides that, this blog is also meant to share my successes and failures with you, (hopefully) get and give helpfull tips and - and this would be the icing on the cake - to meet other costumers/sewers/crafters in my area, since I hardly ever have opportunity to actually wear my costumes (carnival focuses more on the silliness and, lately and regrettably, sluttiness of costumes than on their historical accuracy/prettiness).

All that said, on with the sewing!