Orange and Teal ‘Steampunk’–Part 1

I have a friend who has naturally dark curly brown hair and an elusive hourglass figure. Aside from causing me extreme envy, her appearance has always has always given me the slight impression that she would be better suited to a different era. Perhaps it’s just my love of Victorian and Steampunk style clothing, but I’d been dying to get that girl in a corset and bustle for ages. So, for her birthday last year, I decided I would make it happen.

Narrowing down a general concept for this costume was extremely hard; mostly because I have hundreds, if not thousands, of reference pictures of Victorian style photos saved on my hard drive. ~ I might be a slight bit obsessed ~. Should it be a historically accurate garment, or a full out Steampunk creation complete with gadgets galore. Ugh, it was so hard to decide.

I wavered on this quite a bit. I didn’t really want to do a historically accurate gown, because part of the reason I wanted to put her in a corset and bustle was to show off her amazing figure. On the other hand, without discussing it with her first ~ due to the birthday surprise ~ I didn’t want to go with some super gadgety outfit in case it wasn’t to her liking. Plus that would have required me to learn about engineering such gadgets in a limited time frame. I plan on learning how to do these in the future… but I didn’t want to spend a month making a costume only to have the accessories be subpar.

In the end I decided to go with a design a bit down the middle. It’s not even close to historically accurate, but it’s also not crazy out there. I decided to leave off any ‘Steampunk’ embellishments, that way she could play it up whichever way the occasion called for.

 

The one major design choice I did make was bright colors. I haaaaaate how drab most Victorian and Steampunk clothes are. And there’s no real reason for it. ~ They did use color in the Victorian Era people! ... Perhaps not these colors, but colors none the less! ~

Now that I had a design, I was off to find the fabrics…

Click here for Orange and Teal 'Steampunk' - Part 2
Click here for Orange and Teal 'Steampunk' - Part 3
Click here for Orange and Teal 'Steampunk' - Part 4
Click here for Orange and Teal 'Steampunk' - Part 5