Mom's blue doublet

My move is today. After two solid weeks of work, the household is finally ready to go. I am anxiously awaiting the moment when I can get started, but in the meantime am trying to think about something else.

I sent my mom pictures of my skirt that I've been working on, partially to show off, partially to encourage her to send up the sewing machine already. ("See how much labor you'll save me if I don't have to do all this by hand?") When I explained the waistband application tehcnique that I messed up, she knew exactly what I should have done, but said the way I fixed it was a good idea. She's one of those people who's good at everything, particularly artistic or crafty things, and she taught herself to sew quite capably in order to make the various costume pieces that her two theatrically-inclined children required over the years.

Probably the nicest and most labor-intensive thing she ever made was when Casey was cast as Romeo in his school's production his senior year of high school. Unimpressed with the rather slapdash job the woman in charge of costuming was doing, she designed a beautiful blue doublet and made it herself. It's a beautiful thing, totally reversible with blue crushed velvet on one side and a shiny tapestry-like blue and metallic on the other. With my larping and Shakespeare, she gave it to me and I have found a lot of use for it. Brenda wore it when she played the Duke in Comedy of Errors for Hold Thy Peace, and more recently Plesser wore it to play Damon in my show To Think of Nothing. It was quite serendipitous that I had it, because I always knew that I wanted Damon in blue as well as somewhat Elizabethan. (Actually, now that I think about it, it was worn by the original Cassander the first time the play was put on at my high school, which I found inappropriate for a number of reasons, but I didn't have anything to do with that production besides the writing of it.) Here is Plesser wearing it as Damon:

Mom said she learned a lot while making it, and that whenever she came across something in the instructions she didn't understand, she would try the technique out in miniature on separate fabric so that she would make sure she did it properly before trying to apply it to the doublet. I think this is a great idea, and plan on adopting this method myself. It's still short of making full muslin, which is something I think I'll need to move into the more complicated the things I try to sew become, but it looks like a good idea for teaching myself new techniques.