18th Century Picnic

On November 15th, the DFWCG hosted an 18th century picnic at the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens. I have to say that seeing the lovely period clothing that everyone made was an inspiration. And the few hours we were able to spend learning to dance and playing badminton just weren't enough for me. I hope that we can do this event again in the future and maybe spend more time learning about the period and playing games.

Here are some of my favorite photos from the day. All photos by Crandall.

The whole picnic party.

Relaxing on blankets. Man it was a beautiful day!

A little badminton?

Our fearless President teaching us a period dance.

Dancing!

The rest of the photos can be found on the DFWCG's Flickr stream.

All-Con 2010

The preparations are underway. The DFW Costumers Guild has officially signed on to be a part of All-Con for the 3rd year in a row. And as the coordinator of our involvement with All-Con, I can proudly say that I'm already pretty excited about it!

In 2009 the DFWCG offered panels on Steampunk 101 and pattern re-sizing. We also hosted a pattern and fabric swap and we photographed some lovely costumes when we weren't busy talking to fellow costumers. For the upcoming year the DFWCG would like to step in even more. This week we have begun organizing a committee so we can brainstorm to bring even more exciting panels to the table.

In an effort to bring con attendees the panels they want to see, the DFWCG would like to hear from you. What panels would you most benefit from? Is there a craft you want to learn? Are you a beginner who just wants to understand patterns? Is there an historical period/fantasy realm/movie costume you'd like to know more about? Send us your ideas and we'll do what we can to pull the panel together.

In the meantime, Happy Costuming!

Need motivation for those 18th Century Stays??

18th Century Stays is a blog all about just that - 18th century stays.

If you'd rather follow the blog on Live Journal, someone has made a feed for LJers here.

DFWCG Summer Business Meetin

Please join us on Sunday June 14 for our Summer Business Meeting. Whether you're a paid guild member or not, we'd love to have your input on our future projects. See ya Sunday!!

Proper Corset Materials

What are the proper corset making materials? That's one of the first questions that anyone looking to make their own corset asks. And honestly, anyone looking to buy a corset should be asking the same questions. Right now over on the Live Journal "corsetmakers" community there is a debate over whether cable ties can be considered a "Proper" corset material. You can see the debate here.

What are your thoughts on this debate? Is steel boning really the only "proper" material when it comes to boning a corset? What about the fabric? Is Coutil really the only right foundation material? Or is "proper" to you simply what gets the job done?

Does the answer change whether the corset in question is for sale or for personal use?

And finally, what materials have you made your corsets with? What successes and failures did you experience with each kind of material?

All-Con a success

Well, it's Monday morning and we're all back at our regular lives now. The blitz of All-Con has passed and hopefully we all came out of it richer of friends, knowledge and, yes, Cool Stuff.

I had planned to blog so much more during the weekend. I should have known I would be so busy talking to people and running around that I'd barely have any time to blog. Ah well. Such is life and the fact that I didn't blog because I was busy talking to people about the Guild is not a bad thing One Little Bit!

All of our photos we took are uploaded to Flickr now under the tag allcon2009dfwcg. You can also check out the DFWCG group on Flickr to see who of our Guild Members attended All-Con. We're missing pics of one or two of us, but I hope to get those photos in soon. Since we were so busy talking to people we also didn't have as much time to take photos of all the amazing costumes walking by. Next year I would like to try setting up a better area for Photos so we can get All of you. There were truely some amazing pieces of work walking around this weekend. Thank you all for the inspiration!

And speaking of next year, I have informed All-Con that the DFWCG would like to continue to work with them next year and that we would like to step up our involvement. So if there's anything you can think of that you would like to see us offer at All-Con, please let us know. You can comment here, or also come see us at our Yahoo Groups board.

In the meantime, we will be having a meet and greet at Scarborough Faire for Opening Weekend, and we'd love to meet new people and chat. See our Events page on the website for all the details.

New friends

I just wanted to say that it was very nice meeting all of you yesterday. I really enjoyed hosting the Pattern Re-sizing panel and now that I've gone through it in real time with real people, I think I just might be able to finish that slide presentation with some additions that were brought up in the class. I think if I finish it, I may post it up on our guild website.

Don't forget to stop by our club table and introduce yourselves and tell us about your costumes! I'll continue to take pictures all day today. Hopefully I'll get to take more today than I did yesterday.

Also, please bring us your unwanted patterns and fabrics. We'd love to have any and all of it for our fabric swap. And who knows, maybe you'll find something you need while you're there, For Free!

Photo preview

It's about 3:30 on Saturday afternoon and we've been so busy talking ot people at out club table that we haven't been able to catch many people for pictures. But here's a peek at a few favorites so far.

Look for weekend Blogging

Hi all. This weekend is the much anticipated (by me anyways) All-Con convention in Dallas. I plan on being Very busy at and around our Club Table this weekend. In addition to greeting everyone who walks by, I plan on playing photographer for the Guild. We'd love to take Tons of photographs of All the great costumes around the con, so please stop by our table and indulge us!

I'll be posting all photographs on Flickr under the tag allcon2009dfwcg. If you search that tag, you'll be able to find each and every photograph I take. I'll also be giving out little Photo Op tags to people whose photograph I take and the tags will have the Flickr tag on them in case anyone forgets.

Also, if you've signed up for our Yahoo e-mail list, please let me know who you are. I have Guild Groupie tags for you to add to your Con Badge. You should be able to tell who of us are Guild Members by the badges we are wearing. And I'm working on getting other little special tags made for fun too, so even if you've resisted us thusfar, we'd still love to meet you and see what you're wearing.

Happy Con Prep!

Flickr announcement

A message from our President on Live Journal:

I wanted to let you all know that the DFWCG now has its own flickr group! Yay!!!

http://www.flickr.com/groups/dfwcg/

Sharing your costuming pictures with other guild members just got a whole lot easier! A lot of you already use flickr, and those of you who don't, flickr is a feature of yahoo, so you just use your same login info from the DFWCG yahoo mailing list to get started. If you have any costume photos already on flickr, we would love for you to add them to our group. After you join the DFWCG group, you can just select a photo (either individually, or in batch organize), and click the "add to group" tab.

Guild members and all other DFW costumers are welcome to participate in this group. Share your pics from any guild or non-guild event. The more pictures the better!

Let me know if you need more thorough instructions for joining or posting pics.

Welcome and Intro

Hi there, and welcome to the DFW Costumers Guild Blog.

Please be patient with us regarding content. At this time we are in the process of testing things for a move from Live Journal to Blogger. We are trying to take into account the needs for All of our current readers and members so everyone can read our blog in the way that is most convenient for them.

In the meantime, if you've found us and we're not live yet, please feel free to visit our website. We also are active on Yahoo Groups. That's where most of the magic happens, actually. And if you're on Live Journal, we're still posting there and may continue to keep that account open for RSS feeds in the future.

Happy Costuming!