CYPHAN Outift -- the brainstorming

Does that really say November 17th?!  Wow...  I'm really not keeping up my "Daily Blog" promises am I?  Wow...  Oh the guilt! 

But let's put my tardiness aside for a moment and get back to the topic at hand -- what am I going to wear to the Browncoat Ball at CYPHAN in June?

It will be no shock to any of you that my favourite Firefly character is Inara. Between her beautiful clothes, dark good looks, and Asian vibe, I just love her. If I lived in the Serenity Universe, I'd totally be a Companion. No doubt! And Inara gets to go to all those lovely Balls...

But I'm not the kind of person to duplicate one of Inara's costumes exactly. I'd like to get a little more creative than that. So I looked in my stash to see what I had that made me think "Inara would wear that!"

A number of years ago a friend gave me a box of clothes that belonged to his deceased wife. He told me they were 18th century clothing she had commissioned and I, not knowing if they were going to be historically accurate or crappy costumes (or even my size), took them with thanks and decided I'd look at them later. What I found in the box was two saris, a red flounced petticote and a brocade choli. Go figure...

Although I love Indian traditional dress, these items have hung in my dressing room for the better part of a decade with no intended use. Remembering that the costumer designer for Firefly used a lot of saris in Inara's costumes, I decided that this was a good place to start. So today, I pulled them out and gave them a look. One is bright red and green and reminds me a little too much of Christmas. But the other one... maroon with hot pink borders! I grabbed a piece of shot orange silk taffeta I had just laying around and draped them on my dress form:

Look at those colours!!!  The top is the pallav, that part of the sari that gets thrown over your shoulder in the nivi drape.  The maroon is the body of the sari and the pink at the bottom is the lower border of the sari.

Looking at the way I'd draped the sari and taffeta on the dress form began to give me ideas...  What does this arrangement remind you of?

It reminds me of the Natural Form Dress Package we sell from Truly Victorian (pictured at right)! Do you see it?

I would like the bodice to be a little more revealing and "ballgown-ish" than this, so I'm going to cut the neckline more off the shoulder and decrease the size of the sleeve (perhaps remove the sleeves entirely).

In the next installment, I'll be putting my aubergine corset on the dress form and cutting the tie-back underskirt!

Stay Tuned...