Time Traveler's Brunch

On Sunday, we wrapped up our little retreat with a costumed brunch at the hotel.  The theme was really open-ended so that we could explore any historical era of costume, or futuristic or steampunk or whatever.  And while I love dressing in themed groups with other costumers, sometimes I really enjoy totally random gatherings too... and boy, were we random!  LOL!  It is so much fun to see what people come up with when the sky is the limit, and we can wear anything that we want. A Hollywood Roman? Dr. Who? A Victorian zombie? An 18th c. Dutch butter-churner? A sci-fi soldier? A Baroque beauty with dreads? Heck yeah! Bring it all on!

(photo by Cynthia and Christopher)

We had some time to socialize before going into the restaurant, and it was lots of fun to take pictures around the hotel lobby both before and after the breakfast.  The food was yummy, the company was delightful, and it was really nice to have a laid back event that required so little planning and work on our part.  It was the perfect way to wrap up our weekend.

(photo by Cynthia and Christopher)

My full set of photos from the weekend can be found on flickr, and I'll be back to post more about my own new costumes sometime during the week.

If you live anywhere close to the DFW area, we hope to see you in 2013 at our next Costumer's Lost Weekend!

ghostly photography

I've been collecting "spooky" Victorian and Edwardian photography for a while now to use as inspiration for our Mourning Party.  I was amused to discover that there was such a great variety of them out there.  Those crazy Victorians sure loved melodrama!  Some are moving and beautiful, some are genuinely erie, and some are totally hilarious.  I have a collection of them up on Pinterest, and we printed out this board and used it for inspiration for our own Victorian-style photos at the Mourning Party.  I had so many pics that turned out good that I though I would post all of the ones that I have finished so far here on my blog.  


I love the ghost's face on this one. It totally cracks me up!


Our ghost shots were inspired by double-exposed photos like this one.


This one was inspired by this historical photo.  Turning your back to the camera was sometimes a sign of mourning.


Cynthia's pic was inspired by this one.


And then there were the weeping ladies.

Hiding your face behind a fan was always fashionable for the art of mourning.  (still needs a ghost for bonus points though)

And although my outfit was totally wrong for the age of photography, I suppose I could be an actress posing in costume.

Thanks to all of my fabulous friends for posing for these - it was so much fun!

Mourning Party

Regency zombie photo bomb!

The highlight of the Costumer's Lost Weekend for me was the Mourning Party. This was the one part of the event that I was in charge of planning, and I had a crazy amount of fun working with my fellow guild members to come up with ideas and make all the delightfully morbid decorations for the party.

We drew inspiration from Victorian Spiritualism for some of our activities, so we had our very own fortune teller, the Mysterious Madame Cyn (wwooooOOOOooooo!!!), who would do readings for our partygoers. I was so busy with other things that I never got a reading myself, and I am totally brokenhearted about that, but everybody else seemed to really love it. Hopefully I'll get another chance to consult with our official Guild Gypsy at some point in the future.

Oh no - trouble in the future?

We also set up a photo booth and had a ball taking some of our own Victorian-style ghost and mourning photos. I'll post more on this later today - there are just too many great pics to show you all of them here!

In the middle of the room, we had a table set up for people to make their own costumer voodoo doll pincushions. We labeled the dolls with our worst sewing demons, like "sleevils", "missing pattern pieces", "wonky hems", etc. Hopefully, we now can stab these pesky problems with pins and drive the bad sewing juju away! Some of the dolls were absolutely hilarious - I wish I had taken pictures of them all!

For the party decorations, I went to a cemetery and did a bunch of tombstone rubbings, which was such fun little project!  You can barely see them in the photos since we weren't allowed to hang them on the walls, but they made me happy, and hopefully they added a little to our mourning atmosphere.

I also made a bunch of miniature silhouettes to hang from a dead tree centerpiece, which was another fun project that you can't really see much of in these photos.  The rest of the decorations mostly came from candles, spray-painting a lot of random decorative junk black, and lots of creative draping of black fabric everywhere.  Oh yeah, and one FABULOUS skeleton chaperone to keep an eye on the party!  

I had so much fun at the party and time went WAY too fast!  I really wish I could rewind the evening and do it all over again.

As you can see, I fail at mourning poses!  

To be continued...

Costumer's Lost Weekend, pt. 1

Last weekend was the DFWCG's first overnight event - the Costumer's Lost Weekend. We are still a relatively small group, but I think our first try at a hosting a mini-con was a great success, and all the hard work that we've done over the last 6 months really paid off. I thought I would give a little recap of the weekend here to show you what our Lost Weekend (or CoLoW, as I've been calling it) was all about.


On Saturday during the day, we had a series of 7 classes covering a range of topics on historical and fantasy costuming. Unfortunately, I had to miss several of the classes during the day so I could work on some last minute preparations for the party that night, but the classes that I did attend were great! Two of my favorites were taught by my friend Ginger from the blog Scene in the Past.  She explored the topics of working with vintage patterns and Civil War costuming.  I picked up some great ideas from both of these classes, and the vintage pattern class especially got me in the mood to work on some new retro frocks.

I also taught a class on big Edwardian hair, and it was a blast to teach!  I talked about the range of hairpieces that were available in the period, how to make your own hairpieces with modern materials, and then I attempted to style 4 different Edwardian 'dos on some brave volunteers from the audience.  I learned two main things from this experience:  1) I talk A LOT and need more than an hour for a class, and 2) styling hair without lots of hairspray and teasing is very very hard!  LOL!    


After the classes were over, we broke for a 3 hour dinner break, and I was amazed by how many people stuck around to help set up the room for the party that night.  We have such wonderful folks in our guild!  After our flash mob decorating, we then started getting dressed for the evening and had a fun little pizza party back in the hotel room.  I think my favorite part of the whole weekend was getting to make some new friends and getting to know some old friends even better, so I especially enjoyed the moments like this where we could just relax and be silly and have fun together.

To be continued...