My Cloak Sewing Experiment

Every now and then I have to give myself a challenge. If any of you have been following my blog for some time now, you know that I draw and paint well and I'm a pretty confident artist. But could I be a good seamstress? I don't know. I can sew things together like pillow cases, sachets, scarves, ponchos... yet I have no clue how to sew from a pattern and have never learned how to use a sewing machine. Hence I have no sewing machine. I sew from hand. I don't trust sewing machines anyway. Why, you ask? Because I had a bad experience when I first attempted to use a sewing machine... I accidentally sewed (or sown?) thread into the tippy-top skin part of my right thumb and it hurt like crazy. Let me re-phrase what I just wrote: I don't trust myself with a sewing machine. I make crazy miscalculations all the time. I don't think like a seamstress or a craftsperson, I just get an idea and do it until I'm beating my head into a wall! My latest planned disaster-for-now? I decided to creatively recycle two old patchwork skirts of mine (they were torn and not even good enough for Goodwill but the material is so pretty, I couldn't throw them out, even after 15 years!) and sewn them together, cutting the top half of them into a hood, and made something like a cloak.



I often like the idea of a challenge more than the attempt at making it an actual goal, and sometimes I sign myself up for a goal that is "too big for me to chew" but I hack at it anyway, determined to make a mess into success. My attempt at sewing a cloak has become an epic experiment that has proven to be a big headache as mid-way into executing the project I realized that a rectangle does not match a circle pattern... The old mid-1990's style skirts are circular and flare out on the bottom. The velvet I picked for one side of the cloak was cut a rectangle and did not flare out at the bottom and therefore did not cover the lower half. I had to cut V-shaped parts out of the velvet and had to cut the velvet rectangle in half completely. So now, after two days of hand-sewing the garment, I am left with a lop-sided, sloppy-looking cloak that needs a helluva LOT of work. My idea can still work, but I am going to be left with a different-looking cloak than I at first imagined I'd make.



I knew it wouldn't be that simple to make, and that I was taking some chances, especially working without the consultation of any friends who are more handy with sewing projects than I, but I WILL make this look somewhat decent. I still have plenty of material to work with and may add some black lace to flare out from the velvet. What I have yet to do, too, is make the hood more sturdy and sew the skirts better to the velvet to keep the velvet from sliding around. The happiest thing about this is that this project will keep me busy and distract me from winter depression. I long to make the cloak into something that I can really wear at festivals OR for Halloween. At this point, I have some work to do... and I've only just begun.

Check out some of my results below and let me know what you think:



Notice the little "spirit orb" near my face? Neat, eh? Maybe it's a sign I'm going to need some divine intervention to finish this project!







In the last photo here you can still tell that my cloak is basically two skirts sewn together over bits of wine-red velvet. I'm not sure exactly how this will turn out or where I'm going with it, all I know is that I'm going somewhere... and hopefully at the end of my experiment I will have a nice Gypsy-esque-Steampunk kind of garment. Stranger things of mine have been created out of whimsey.