Project 8, part 2 – Your Biggest Fan (Part 1 here)

Welcome back to the Steampunk Utility Belt project! This week I got all the prep work finished for the project, and boy, was it more than I anticipated! There are a lot of fiddly small pieces to all the various pouches and straps in the pattern, so my first order of business was cutting out every piece of fabric and interfacing (including some exotics like fusible fleece and even fusible foam!).

When I sew, I like to have everything prepared beforehand. Every button ready, all the pattern pieces cut and darts marked, and so on. This way, when I’m in the mood to actually sew, I don’t have to do any of the “boring” work – I can just sit down at my machine and make the magic happen! I’d be interested to hear if other people work this way as well, or if it’s just me; let me know in the comments!

The pattern cutting took a couple of nights all on its own, but the real marathon was fusing. Part of the problem – utterly self-inflicted – was that the instructions call for a heavier weight of fabric than I selected. Since I really wanted to use this lighter cotton, I also had to add a stabilizer to all the non-lining pattern pieces – which meant in many cases fusing the stabilizer, and then fusing the foam/fleece interfacing to the stabilizer!

I also had to make some decisions during this process. As I mentioned before, I already knew I didn’t want skirt-lifters, and was planning to draft a parasol-holder. After several attempts, I determined three things:

1. I’m too short for most of my parasols to be strapped to my waist, particularly if they’re dangling from straps. All but one of my non-collapsible parasols were hitting my ankles – or worse – the floor. I also worried a bit about color transfer either to or from some of my parasols. (I have one in particular from Alice and the Pirates that’s known for color bleed if it happens to get wet.)

2. If for some reason I must attach a parasol, my collapsible ones all have a ribbon on the handle which I could attach to one of the clips intended for a fan belt, or alongside the phone pouch.

3. This is a utility belt, and parasols are fripperies. Clearly they don’t belong on it. 😉

Very good; no parasol-holder then. Whew! But wait, another decision had to be made: whether to make the small or large fan pouch:

In my defense, my day job has been extremely busy and full of decision-making lately, leaving me little brainpower left for this sort of thing, but I truly agonized over this. Finally, as you can see from the picture, I just gave up and decided to make both sizes (and hoped I had enough clips/D-rings). I also utilized this strategy later in the week at the optometrist’s office when faced with purchasing new glasses – fortunately for me, my husband was kind enough to give the thumbs-up to just getting the two frames I couldn’t pick between! 😀

Fan storage may seem silly to agonize over, but fans were extremely important to the Victorians. Joseph Addison said “Women are armed with fans as men with swords, and sometimes do more execution with them.” Well, that might be overstating it a bit, but fans were very popular accessories throughout the Victorian era. They changed in size throughout the era, and were particularly large in the 1880s.

They could be in satin, paper, lace, or even made entirely of feathers! And of course, there was a whole flirtatious language of fans to allow women to communicate silently and tastefully with other people at balls.

The fans used from the 1860s onward typically were modelled on fans from Japan, where they have seen similar cultural usage in dance, theater, and intrigue for centuries. There were even war fans, tessen (literally “iron fan”), mostly used as signaling devices! They are still used today in theatrical performances such as noh. For example, “In ‘Hane-ōgi,’ the actor holds the outer rib of the opened fan with his left hand, places it on his right shoulder and moves it rapidly forward. This motion depicts the release of an arrow.” As steampunk celebrates the anachronistic, the complex, and the obsolescent, I simply had to ensure that I could carry the right fan for the occasion at all times!

Now that all my pieces are assembled, I’m ready to get sewing (and fanning, should we have another heat wave!). So join me in the next installment, when I begin attaching all these strange pieces together and hoping that I haven’t missed any important bits! 😀

Project 8, part 1 – Steam-what?

Welcome back to Mukashi no Sewing! It may be a little ambitious, but I’ve decided to work on a second sewing project alongside the Victorian Undergarments one. This project came about because I attended Virtual Costume College 2021 at the end of July, and the one workshop I decided to take part in was for sewing a steampunk teacup holster. It sounded fun, and of course I love tea – so why wouldn’t I want to be able to take a teacup with me wherever I went!?

Unfortunately Finn dislocated two toes (!!!) and the resulting flurry of vet visits and hound care meant I had to miss the actual workshop. Don’t worry – he’s recovering well! He’s just a little upset about having both back feet wrapped all the time, and he’s very upset that I won’t allow him to zoom for another 6-8 weeks. Poor little dude! However, the delay meant that I found out that Sherry also produced a pattern for a whole steampunk “utility belt” to carry such necessities as the aforementioned teacup holster, a fan, and a phone pouch.

Jeff Vandermeer, author of The Steampunk Bible, somewhat jokingly describes steampunk as “Mad Scientist Inventor [invention (steam x airship or metal man/baroque stylings) x (pseudo) Victorian setting] + progressive or reactionary politics x adventure plot.” The Victorian setting of steampunk, fuelled by such historical literature luminaries such as Jules Verne, Shunro Oshikawa, and HG Wells, was what originally drew me to the styling, but I stayed for the philosophy. Vandermeer writes, “Steampunk focuses on the Victorian era not only because of its aesthetic and technology, but because it recognizes within that epoch issues similar to those facing society in the twenty-first century.”

He goes on to say, “Steampunk’s key lessons are not about the past. They are about the instability and obsolescence of our own times. A host of objects and services that we see each day all around us are not sustainable. …Once they’re gone, they’ll seem every bit as weird and archaic as top hats, crinolines, magic lanterns, clockwork automatons, absinthe, walking-sticks, and paper-scrolled player pianos. …The past is a kind of future that has already happened.”

The Victorians struggled with many of the same societal problems we face today – racism, the rise of nationalism, the rapacity of industrialization and capitalism, and the effects of centuries of colonialism. Steampunk as a literary genre imagines a world in which we never advanced beyond steam as a technology, but instead advanced as a society to be more inclusive, cooperative, and creative. As an aesthetic, it fights against the mass-produced and instead glorifies the hand-made and peculiar. Turns out, that’s just my cup of tea! 😉

So, I decided to sew the full utility belt as a fun side project! Instead of the skirt-lifters (I prefer my skirts unlifted, thank you!), I will be drafting a parasol-holder that can clip in to the belt. The fabric I chose was given to me by my Aunt Susie; it originally belonged to a late friend of the family and I’m very excited to use it for this project! Join me in the next installment, when I will spend probably hours fusing differing weights of interfacing and regretting my life choices! 😀