The Dark Avalon Scrolls

So havocthecat was talking about costuming for a LARP, and it got me thinking about my big foray into costume design in college.

As part of my theatre major/minor [it vacillated during the entirety of my college career], I had to take a costume/makeup design class. It was intended to give us the basics of doing costuming and makeup for theatre. I was hyped for it and, despite a fear of sewing machines, threw myself into the class wholeheartedly. Amusingly enough, I ended up doing better with the costuming than the makeup. Go figure... LOL! This was also when I fell in love with sergers. When I have the money, I will have one of those babies in my craft room, damn it!

Our final costume project was to design and make a dress for a 1/2 size mannequin. I ended up with THE most difficult dress of the whole class. Why, you ask? I was designing for Lwaxana Fucking Troi. I'd watched all of her eps from all 6 seasons of TNG [current at that point -- you do the math] and did basic sketches of Every. Single. Outfit. she wore. I swear, I had probably at least 30 different designs that I'd sketched out, if not more. Then, from those sketches, I designed a composite dress. It was all done in lamé [gold, peacock blue, and fuchsia], black lace, and a white polyester material with "polka dots" in an iridescent material. It had Cinderella sleeves, a split skirt with a lacy underskirt, an inset diamond in the low-cut bodice, and a train. A train! It was supposed to have a Peter Pan collar, too, but that got dropped when my prof [a professional costumer] said that they're a bitch on normal sized clothes, let alone this size.

I worked my ass off for the entire portion of the semester we were allotted to work on it. No one else had a dress that complicated. I raided the fabric closet the very first day for ideas and found all of the lamé and the iridescent polyester stuff. I may have found the black lace then, too, but I don't 100% remember if I did at that point or within a day or two. It was finding that material that gave me my idea, as I'd initially been planning to do something relatively simple. Yeah, that idea got thrown out the fucking window the minute I laid eyes on that lamé. LOL! Not only did I do the multiple sketches, then design the composite dress, I made the pattern and did a muslin mock-up before touching my lovely materials. I would speed through my classwork on making costumes for the current production [but didn't skimp on that, as it was part of my grade, too], so that I would have extra time to work on that dress.

I had that dress all done and looking so fabulously beautiful. I'd planned to get a doll in that same size and get it all done up to look like Lwaxana, then present the whole thing to Majel Barrett at a con. And then I just wanted to present her with the dress. And then I ended up no longer having the dress due a series of unfortunate circumstances surrounding my move to TX and my father being a dumbass about forgetting my stuff in the garage's attic when my childhood home's last mortgage got foreclosed on. I still miss that dress. It was so damned awesome!

I never got pictures of that dress, outside of what my prof took [as she took pics of all of our projects]. Though some of my classmates might have taken pics, too. I should check with them on FB to see if they did and still have them. If not, I may have to see if I can redesign that dress again, just to have the drawing of it, if nothing else. I loved that dress. If I EVER get to do some sort of costumed affair and lose some more weight, I totally want to wear that dress.

*melancholy sigh*