Moira's Clothes (Minifee Muscle Girl Custom Mod)

 My apologies to anyone who reads my stuff on Den of Angels, but a lot of this blog will overlap a bit with those posts. The most info ends up here, though, and is easier to Search.

 This is the clothing post for Moira, my modded Minifee Muscle Girl.

She is a Fairyland Minifee Mirwen sculpt, on a previously Male Minifee body and she's meant to be part of a Medieval-Fantasy setting, and both of those facts mean I have to make her clothes myself.

I started with her daily clothes. I try to give each of my dolls one Everyday outfit with accessories, and then some of them get a Formal Outfit, or an Armor set, or sometimes both.

I made her some underwear, a bra-like top, and some cropped short trousers.
The bra is cotton from a gunnysack towel of the kind I buy for doll clothes. It has a nice texture but is thin and light. The bra has snaps in the back for ease of changing, but she'll probably keep it on all the time under shirts.

I did make her some matching medieval braes, or underpants, which look like little shorts with a drawstring. Those, however, are for shots of her getting dressed or going swimming. Layering clothing is actually kind of impractical on a doll, so she is not wearing the underpants in any of the following pictures. Viewers of photos will assume she is wearing them, but having her actually layer them under the trousers would add too much bulk. I often "cheat" like this with my dolls' costuming, where layers are concerned.


The trousers are some kind of poly velveteeny stuff I had around, and they fasten at the fly with a false button sewn on over a functional snap. (No way am I buttoning pants that tiny, or sewing real buttonholes at that size!)

Shoes! These are often called Ghillie Brogues or "bog" shoes, and are a very simple shoe of a type worn in many parts of Northwestern Europe, from the early Dark Ages all the way into the mid- and even late- Medieval period.
I wear a similar pair when I do reenactment, so it only took a few attempts to make a version this tiny for Moira, out of thin or garment weight leather.

Her tunic is made of some cotton I had that looks like linen with its slubby large weave. I hand-sewed it, which gave me the chance to do a thorough job finishing the seams and adding some details like the decorative stitching down the sleeves.

It doesn't open down the back, because the keyhole neckline and the Minifee lock at the neck mean I can pop her head off and then easily slide this tunic on. It has 3/4 sleeves and flat felled seams, and a lot of stitching around the neckline to let it handle being played with and not fall apart.
The "belt" is just some cotton cording I had around.

I was messing around with my stash of thin leather and decided to make her some boots. They slide on and then are fastened by the tie at the top of each boot. These will be part of her armored outfit later. Her red trousers come down to the boot tops except when she is sitting. I will need to make her some other trousers for the armored outfit to avoid that, I think.

I also made her a belt pouch and a warm weather cloak, though it isn't finished yet.

Here's the whole ensemble so far. The belt pouch is more of the thin leather, with an acorn shape and a button and string closure.

The cloak is a reincarnation of a poly-cotton shirt I used to love, which had this lovely chain stitch embroidery all around the hem. I pleated it around the neckline, and I mean to add some kind of closure at the collar if I can just figure out what kind of closure I want to use, and how I want it to look. I could use metal findings, or a string closure, or put buttons on either side of the collar for a cord to wrap around or a strap to be buttoned through....

Apologies for the fuzzy quality of these pictures. It's hard to get out my nice camera when I am excited about what I am working on so these kind of shots tend to get done with a phone, in poor light. 

My health has been iffy lately so I have a lot of time lying around in bed/ sitting about on my bed. I managed the other day to do a bit of sewing.

 Close up shot: While out on a rare clothes-shopping trip, I found a clearance-priced sweater made of a loopy cotton blend knit,with some kind of foil screened onto it. This  exactly like a tiny version of a stuff that gets used for budget chain armor in film and TV.  I knew I had to use it for some mail for my dollies!

I sewed some of the fabric into an MSD sized hauberk, or "chain-mail" shirt, with the back open to slip on easily and the front split for riding, but I didn't want the edges to stretch and distort, so I stitched around them. To hide the stitches, I used that cotton swab there to dab silver paint onto the black thread I used. The open back of the shirt will get little jump rings sewn on so it can be laced up.

(Extra info:  In human scale, if you don't have a lace up back to your mail shirt, you have to do some really idiotic wiggling to get out of one. That's why they always show heroes shucking ON their mail, but you never see a hero in a film taking his mail OFF.
You have to hike the skirt of the shirt up around your middle, then bend over from the waist, aim your head and arms at the ground, and then wiggle and wriggle until the mail slides off, and hope your hair stays under your arming cap because if the mail gets caught in it, you have to rip or cut your hair free.

 It is polite in reenactment to either look away from a fighter trying to take off their mail and preserve their dignity a bit, or if you know them, you offer to help. If you know them really well, you hang around to watch and mock them shamelessly, since they can't come after you with mail over their head!)

Here's the lousy phone pic of the full effect of the hauberk. The seams I had to make at the shoulders are still visible, but I am going to make some outer fantasy plate armor for Moira to wear over this that will include some pauldrons, or shoulder caps, to hide those seams.

Watch this spot, more will be added!

QuasiMiddleAges, or What year is this Court thing supposed to be?

In case you're a new guest to my little corner of the blogosphere, I should mention that I have this medieval sort of fantasy story I've been working on for years, and a majority of my dolls are characters belonging to that story. Specifically they belong to the Court of Dun Elisedd, the group of people who are the movers and shakers of a castle in a small northern kingdom.

It draws inspiration from many, many sources, not the least of which are things like The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Prydain, Beowulf, the Arthurian mythos, and histories of many actual kingdoms. It is a fantasy story, but like Tolkien and other authors, I have something of a passion for world-building and cultural anthropology, so I have done a lot of thinking about the cultures in this world and how they interact, and what their clashing or melding means for their society.

I have trouble sometimes with keeping my historical & locational influences to one period or place. I am madly in love with the Arthurian era of war-torn, Saxon-invaded Britain, with kings and chieftains and warriors, and the simpler architecture and gorgeous celtic artistic forms they had. I also like the "Ivanhoe" period of Post-Hastings England with the Saxons and Normans uncomfortably mixing, and all the cultural awkwardness there. There are lots of things in fashion and clothing, however, that I like from as late as the High Middle Ages, 1300 or so. I try to keep my main influences in fashion, art and architecture somewhere between the Roman British era and theNorman Invasion, just for the sake of clarity and some vague unity in the whole mess.

It is well worth pointing out that I have only barely begun a dabbling study of British and European history compared to many authors and illustrators, and there's a lot more to study. It's one of the things that makes this story a work in progress.

Why base a fantasy novel on history, you might ask? Because I've seen what happens when you don't, and it looks like Dungeons and Dragons. *twitch* Not that I have anything against High Fantasy, as it's known, but it doesn't feel as real to me. The appeal of Fantasy is that you can imagine somewhere, somehow, once upon a time, it was real. My story is about real people, even if there is a bit of magic involved and they use swords and horses instead of iPhones and Toyotas. These people live and love and bleed and die, and I can't cheapen that by making everything up and having it not make sense. Their world needs to be solid, and have real weather, real troubles and real life in it.
My fantasy world cannot have everyone on the continent under just one king, they can't all speak a Common Speech with no good reason for it, and they can't have an economy based on unrealistic amounts of gold pieces everyone has and everyone values exactly the same, and they can't all have conveniently enlightened modern views on property, citizenship, women, and slavery. That's how it is in many Fantasy settings, but not in mine.