Costume - Second Session

A few days ago I made some tiny baby steps towards making my first Arabian costume.  Today I did a bit more work.

In trying to decide exactly where to cut the patterned fabric that I want to use, I decided that I wanted a "frame" to use, versus a solid pattern piece.  So I drew two more pattern pieces on card stock and then cut the inside out of them, leaving a frame around the space.

For a comparison, here's the solid pattern piece on the fabric...

... and here's the frame.  I like this WAY better for deciding what I want to cut out.

Up above is the long piece that drapes over the horse's back and down below is the rear panel that sits over their rump.

I'm having a bit of trouble deciding on the whole color scheme.  My plan all along was to do two shades of pink, and then have white as the third color.  Now I'm leaning towards the trio of brown, pink, and white - or brown, and the two shades of pink.  It's hard to see in these pictures, but the scalloped design around the rose pattern is brown in color.  It's very subtle, but I like the idea of using brown in the costume, versus running the risk of looking like someone poured Pepto-Bismol over the horse (too much pink?).  There are hints of green in the fabric too, but I though that might be tricky to pull off, so I've decided (I think) that brown and pink will be in there, but for the third color... another pink... or white...?  I'm not sure yet.

Here are some of the floss and ribbon colors that I was considering today:

After studying the fabric through my frame pieces - and studying the book - I changed my mind on the style of costume.  Instead of the type with a long panel over the horse's back, I think this fabric would work better with the style of a rear panel and small side panels.

So, I repeated the pattern piece and frame cutting to get the frames for that style.

I might still shift the rear panel around some (the bigger one on the bottom), but I like how the smaller side panel looks; the rose design fits in there about perfectly.

Here's my model with some scrap fabric pieces haphazardly stuck on to try and eyeball the panel sizes.

And that's where I left it for this session.

Next time I think I'll plan on actually cutting out some of the rose fabric and try to nail down the colors of floss and ribbon that I'll be using.