More Leicester Details

3 days of sewing. In my mind that means a ton of progress, right? Kind of. Until I can do a fitting for the doublet I'm working on all the other little things so after I finished the collar and epaulettes...

here they are...

(and yes the collar is exceedingly tall at the moment, will mark the correct height during the fitting)

...I moved onto cutting the sleeves, which will be open along the front seam with buttons. I decided to eke the lining out of what was left of the bronze. And when I say "eke" I mean master-the-expert-level-pattern-tetris-challenge.

I hated to have the one piece on the weft but as lining it shouldn't be noticeable.

I'm currently in a conundrum about trimming the damn things so that's on the back burner for now...

So I moved on to the hat!
And because I have an apparent allergy to buying/finding trim I decided to make the hatband from some of wine velvet and some gold trim. I want to sew on some blue navettes too if I can find the right ones. But if I thought making the skirting and epaulettes was tedious boy was I in for it...

There was supposed to be a video of making the band here but apparently even Safari thought it was too tediously mind-numbing to subject the internet to.

Basically it took two-and-a-half episodes of Star Trek:TNG to finish putting the trim down on this, oh say about 40inch strip.

so naturally I wanted to kill myself.

I also found some of this beautiful fabric to make some piping out of :

And I'm trying to do something unique around the brim so it kind of looks like this right now:

(I haven't cut out the crown-hole yet)

The hat project materials group-photo:

And here's the whole outfit sneak-preview group photo!

mmmmmmm shiny.......

Current plan:
Finish Hat
Find/Decide on trim treatment for sleeves
Make Sleeves
Fit Doublet
Finish Doublet
Finalize closures and Tie-In points at waist
Kiss it farewell and send it off!