You’ve seen the belt, the mantle, and the over robes. Now it’s time for the final piece to my masterwork. It took me a long time to settle on a design for the base robe that all the others would be worn over. I wanted it to be opulent, but not too busy. I wanted it to provide textures that simply weren’t in the rest of the outfit. So I settled on using a simple dark purple satin. It was going to be very basic, fabric wise, just that one fabric, and with opulent trim at the neck and sleeve cuffs. Then miraculously that Mirror Fabric that I ordered in december 2014 finally showed up, six months later!
It was beautiful and perfect! Now that I finally had my hands on it, I was compelled to use it. But most of it would be concealed if I used it for the majority of the base robe’s fabric. I already had a metric ass-ton of purple satin, so I came up with a design that would allow me to use primarily the satin, while implying that there is another layer of robes made out of mirrored cloth.
One of the key things I wanted to convey asside from opulence was this wizard’s origins in warm climates. I figured a big drapey sleeve that looks like it’s gathered together by broaches rather than sewn might call back to chitons and togas of ancient greece, and set about patterning it in muslin.
Instead of just gathering the sleeve tops I actually pleated them. I also scalloped the gap between the joining points, which will be sewn to eachother and hidden by the broaches.
Sadly the rest of my mid-production photos got corrupted, So I’ll have to try to explain how I pieced the robe together from shots of the finished work.
To start off here’s the finished sleeve. Super Sparkly!
This angle shows off the brooches better.
This is a close up of the sleeve trim. It’s a little hard to tell here, but there are small mirrors worked into the embroidery, which ties in with the mirrors on the inner leaves.
The layers of the base robe, absolutely sparkle in the sunlight.
Here you can see the inner ties that hold the three inner layers together. I partially sewed two leaves to the inside of the right hand side of the robe.
Here’s a close up of the inner leaves, with the main robe pulled away.
The inner leaves from the inside of the robe. You can see that they are only stitched to the robe along the top,
The outside panel of the robe ties with a ribbon at waist height. This is also a pretty good close up of the collar trim.
The outer panel untied.
And now, my favorites shots of the complete outfit from the photo shoot:
