Patterning Moiraine Sedai’s White Tower Dress | The Wheel of Time
this video is brought to you by nordvpn but more on that in a bit [Music] the wheel of time turns and ages come and pass and any tv series that shows up in my life this full of historical parallels gratuitous textile metaphors and gorgeous costumes immediately has my attention thus began this wholly impulsive reconstruction attempt of moraine's white tower gown as seen in the new wheel of time tv series this is in fact a project that has began at 11 30 at night completely on impulse but here we are this is a deceivingly simple dress it looks simple in terms of pattern and construction but it is not simple in terms of all the structural business going on so this is a project that i think i will start off very enthusiastically and slowly descend into madness once i can learn how to channel some one true power i have been aiming to roughly figure out exactly what pieces i'm going to need to start draping i'm just at the moment puzzling over the sleeve because we have a number of things going on she's got some significant flare going on on the outer edge of the sleeve which suggests that there's a seam there we know she has got a seam down the front of the sleeve here being led to believe that this is a four piece sleeve i'm also very much trying to rationalize the seeming reality that invisible zippers are a thing that exists in this world in this period and yeah i'm not sure how i'm going to tackle that we're going to cross this bridge when we come to it [Music] [Music] [Music] i have gone ahead and i've marked out the style lines for approximately where all the pattern pieces are supposed to sit on the body as you can see this is a relatively simple pattern we've only really got this middle piece here that just sort of comes straight down this is gonna need to get a bit more hip spring because she's got this padded roll that comes off the edge here and that's something i'm going to have to play with in paper because there is nothing to drape off of there it's completely structural and i think that's going to be a running theme for this project in that there is quite a lot of sculpture going on up here and i'm not entirely sure how i'm going to work that out but we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna tackle that when we get to it [Music] so [Music] [Music] and then [Music] it is time that i told you a little secret it's actually not at all secret and many of you already know what it is but i spent the better part of last year writing a book in which i finally compiled in one central location all of the tips and tricks that i use in my reconstruction work so step-by-step instructions on how to do various hand stitches of course as well as working with textiles so the anatomy of the cloth the behavior of various fiber types and weaves i say this because sadly the whims of social media algorithms and the delicate pacing of consumable stories by today's standards do not often permit me to go into great instructional detail in my youtube videos so if you find yourself wanting to know a little bit more about grain lines and how different fabric types behave those concepts which i will be employing in the draping process which you'll see in this video i will leave a pre-order link for that below and for those of you who are just here for the vibes and to watch a dress be magically channeled before your eyes without the exposition dump of how the wheel weaves the pattern of the cloth literally allow us to proceed [Music] it is the next morning here is where we are so far we have cut out well we have draped the bodice pieces i have traced over them on the stand to get the actual pattern shape so i just cut these out and i will transfer these to paper in a minute i'm going to work on some of the more complex drafting bits first up we have the collar which is just that sort of stand collar we'll do the sleeves in a minute because we need to warm up first i have not draped a stand collar since i was at university this incidentally by the way if anyone's looking for some draping tips this is the textbook that we used in our university draping class [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] this is just an absolute basic sleeve slope where this is not the final pattern at all i'm actually going to trace this onto some other pattern paper and start working out the cuff flare but what i've basically just done is drafted up a basic sleeve to my arm measurements just so that i have this basic functioning working block to make it a little bit more fitted i just slice this at the elbow fold it a bit my cap height isn't quite tall enough but that this doesn't matter because this is all going to be drafted separately anyway roughly try to get a sense of this shape this is all done by completely by eye and i think i will determine the actual proportions and shapes of things once i get it into muslin and can see it in three dimensions on a body i've also gone ahead and i've pulled out these are sleeve pieces drafted off of the ulster coat pattern from the keystone jacket and dress cutter which is from 1895. this is going to be super useful these arms are a bit too bent too much shaping but this is a two-piece sleeve pattern and this is something i'm going to want to reference when i start cutting this into three pieces at least there is a seam down the outside right here there is also a seam on the inside of the arm where a standard two-piece sleeve seam would be which means there's a seam sort of forward under the arm and kind of backward under the arm so i think she's got three pieces in this sleeve the other thing that a lot of modern sleeve sloper either drafting instructions or patterns will not usually instruct you to do is to add a little bit more room here this is effectively a gusset so rather than having to put one in separately this is a theatrical trick and also a historical trick either the arms like cut a little bit higher or just with a little a little bit more room out here so that there's more length between the under of your arm and your waist as well as just a bit more fabric there so that you can raise your arms without having to distort the entire garment this is also something that the 1895 drafting instructions have you do here is where we start to get sculptural and i have a decent guess at how this is supposed to go i've just gone ahead and i've traced the curve that we get from this here in order to get this to stand out this shape actually needs to be inverted this way so that the inverted shape of that curve with this curve makes it sort of have some structural integrity as with several elements of this this is all just sort of done by eye for now and just as a placeholder primarily to use as a jumping off point because it's a lot easier to go in and tweak stuff that already exists rather than to just try and shoot in the dark and get it right the first time completely some guess is better than no guess at all we'll see how this works [Music] just done a little mock-up of this leaf pattern real quick i did not mark all of the seam lines going on on the sleeve pattern i just decided i would put it on the stand and decide on an actual form where the sleeve seams need to go since there are so many seams shoulder configuration was actually deceptively simple all i really had to do was literally just take a dart out of the top of the shoulder and then draw a line that continues down the front there i'm just going to cut out this shape make two of them and that will create this curved shaped shoulder i also feel the urge to point out that it looks like alana has got a little shoulder seam configuration something going on in her gown as well so maybe this is just like an isodie cultural thing where you just you put piecings in the shoulders because reasons or something but i'm down for it [Music] [Applause] y'all [Music] [Music] friends we have the beginnings of a more rain here theoretically we are not finished i haven't drafted up the skirt the skirt won't need a pattern drafting because it's just three and a half meters of cartridge pleated rectangles anyway we are not talking about the bolero right now because i cannot think about that right now for now we just have the main gown pattern before i get too excited i should say we have draft one of the gown pattern what i'm going to do now is i'm going to make this up in muslin and just check the pattern check the fit check to see that all of my drafting is correct normally i dread the mock-up stage but in a weird way it's i find mock-upping a pattern that i've drafted myself actually kind of thrilling because it's the moment of truth it is the moment that you get to see the garment come together you get to find out and see if it actually works it's kind of exhilarating in a weird way [Music] for the most part we have the beginnings of a gown i have already done a bit of pinning and fitting hard and if she's a bit lumpy in places but i've just got a couple of little things that i need to alter just proportion wise this is not the skirt by the way this is just a petticoat stand-in for now i'm not mocking that up i just had a little bit of alteration to make at the waist here i've just taken in a little bit of this that was just a little bit too flared for what i think the proportions of this dress should be i've also just dropped to the waist a little bit because it's a bit high progress is being made well i guess onward to pattern corrections now [Music] i know it's like basically night outside but it's not even three o'clock and i'm kind of feeling a little bit motivated to go out into the world and begin my fabric search it might be a little bit too late to go out to goldhawk road but there are a couple of fabric shops in central london which i would like to go and investigate here is what we're looking for in regards to fabric so the fabric from what i can see in the original gown it looks like a very specific brocade that i'm probably not going to be able to replicate it basically changes color in every single scene i think it's got a cross weave of some sort of like purple toned metallic some patches of this brocade look to be satin woven others are not the main thing that i'm going to be looking to replicate are the weight of the fabric and the color it's got to be a very crisp silk you know like taffeta or like duchess satin that when you fold it it folds like paper and it's just very nice and crisp that will help to achieve that nice smooth tailored upper bit that she's got the skirt on the other hand looks very lightweight so this is where i'm becoming a bit confused and it might be possible that the whole bodice bit is just interlined to the heck with something else so that is also a possibility if i do find something that is the right texture and color but is not the right weight i could just interline it or flatline it with something the other thing that i'm pondering is the ballero the whole upper leather jacket type thing i'm going to be looking for options for that i'm kind of a little bit hesitant to make it out of leather as much fun of a skill leather work is and as much as i would probably really really enjoy making that i'm rather not inclined to use real leather for a thing that is a costume piece and is not something that i'm going to be wearing every day and needs to last me decades for the rest of my life potentially i am a huge proponent of using real leather for things that need to be durable and need to last and will in the long run be more sustainable than pleathers and plastics that will continually need to be replaced but i am not a proponent of using leathers for throwaway objects that do not need to serve that purpose so i'm going to be looking for some alternatives to that leather and i also don't really want to use pleather either because again it's just plastic and i don't you know it's this is a costume piece that i'm doing purely for fun it's probably not going to be worn anywhere so i don't want to consume that if i don't have to i might try and make it just a completely different thing with a similar shape colors textures but it is inherently a different garment it is effectively a small jacket a little ballero so i might look for some wools possibly a felt if i can sort of mold and sculpt that or just some sort of maybe a textured brocade or something so we didn't have much fabric lock in central london this afternoon so i'm gonna go probably tomorrow morning to goldhawk road and see if we can acquire some of the silk i did however i caved and i purchased an invisible zipper i just could not for the life of me figure out a way to get a nice invisible seam closure in the back using historical methods i guess invisible zippers are canonically accurate within the period of this world i will still be hand stitching this into place because i do have my standards and i will stick to them however i guess we're gonna do this [Music] nine fabric shops i have been to so far and i have not found the right thing in one of them this fabric is proving to be as difficult to source as the dragon reborn but in the spirit of madame sedai we will we will we will continue [Music] from shop number 13 we have some options not quite the right weight they're a little bit too light which i'm a bit worried about anyway i'm going to continue to have a look around every single fabric shop on goldhawk road before i make a decision [Music] i think i might have found something that will work in shop number 14 but i'm gonna keep having a look around and we'll see [Music] okay i have been to every fabric shop on gold hawk road totaling 23 fabric shops that we have been hunting for this fabric in and so far i've not found anything better than that one potential option at shop number 14. there might not be enough of it i'm crossing all of my appendages that there will be so here we are here is the fabric the longer i look at it the more i feel like this was a good decision at least this was the best decision of the options that exist to us in london i don't know if you can see but it's a satin but it's not the shiniest of satins which is good because i'm not really a fan of the shine however they only had 2.8 meters of it which is not nearly enough i can just tell you that right now i need probably about at least a meter and a half in length just to get that very long front bodice piece i need at least three meters for the cartridge pleated skirt and the cabbage left over from cutting the bodice does not help because i need full length rectangles of this fabric in order to stitch those all together and make the skirt so i don't have enough fabric and i know that and i did have a look around a couple of the other stores to see if i could find anything that vaguely matches this in color at least so that i could maybe do the skirt out of a different fabric that's very similar to this or at least piece the skirt together out of another fabric i didn't find anything immediately i only went through like two additional stores because i was done after going through 20 fabric stores this morning so the skirt is still to be determined what i might do is i might at least get the bodice and sleeves cut and get a start on that i might end up with a good maybe a bit more than a meter and a half to put towards the skirt which i can put on the front of the skirt and then do the whole back train bit out of a different fabric i think i want to interline the silk satin with a taffeta just to give it a bit more body and a bit more stiffness it doesn't need the most because the satin is nice and stiff enough on its own but i think this will just help to give it a little bit more crispness and structure i've undecided which one to use this golden taffeta it's a bit lighter weight than the black taffeta which is much stiffer and more structured i'm also just narratively struggling with the concept of black as a color i don't feel like maureen would be lining her clothes in black i mean i haven't made it through to the end of the book so i don't know where she's going this one on the other this is the color of swan's dress in the film in the show so oh that would that would just be fun just sort of secretly having that color that's her dress lining okay i think that's the answer to that so here's the situation i have laid out the pattern pieces just to sort of get a sense of what our yardage situation looks like we are at a bit of an impasse with this friend which has to be that long that means we do have at least this amount of yardage that has to be devoted to the bodice bits you need between usually three and four yards of fabric i could get away with three because this is quite heavy silk but we have one here so we are two thirds short in terms of fabric which is a little bit annoying not that we didn't know that this was coming the plan for this is i'm going to go ahead and cut all of this out and whilst that gets done i can continue my search for the dragon reborn the fabric reborn duplicated this fabric so i've been doing some investigation and as it transpires the writer of the original wheel of time tv series robert jordan has at some point stated that the technology of the world is relatively based in late 17th century technology by our present standards minus gunpowder you know what this means friends we shall be reconstructing this entire gown using only late 17th century sewing methods so we're not using sewing machines for the actual construction of the final gown it's going to be entirely hands-on late 17th century although with the inclusion of invisible zippers for some reason so now that we have a pattern and we have done a mock-up and we have done pattern corrections and we have a rough pattern of where to go from here it is time to start stitching i mean granted there are as i'm sure many of us already know neither beginnings nor endings to the mock-up process but this is a beginning [Applause] [Music] a dressmaker in third aged harvalon how long would it take them to make a gown like this have just made a grievous error [Music] this video has been brought to you by nordvpn the fastest virtual private network service dedicated to keeping your online browsing safe public wifis are just that public meaning that anyone including your internet service provider has the ability to peek at has the ability to peek at passwords and payment information and leaves you open to malware attacks a vpn re-routes your internet activity through an encrypted network disguising your online identity and keeping your data safe but i know safety is not nearly as romantic and enticing as roguery and flagrant defiance of nonsensical rules which is why let's face it most of us use vpns for the geographic mobility benefits when your ip address is masked streaming sites and research databases don't have the ability to block content based on your geographic location with a click of a button 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bernadette for a two year subscription plus one additional month at a huge discount it's the loom that weaves the wheel spins the thread which the loom weaves the loom weaves as the loom wills doesn't have quite the same ring
2022-01-09 20:17
