Over mountains and forests and trees - Costume updates

It's been just under three years since I completed my 1979 World Tour costumes, and I stated at the end of my post highlighting my costume recreations that I had a couple more costume variations and accessories in mind to make eventually.

It may have taken a good 32 months, but I finally got around to working on those items, namely the 1979 Polar Capes, Bjorn's other jumpsuit, Frida's 1980s Japan look, and her Gimme Gimme Gimme dance pants.  Technically speaking there are a couple of more items and accessories that I could make, like some white shirts with blue and silver stripes that Bjorn and Benny would sometimes, and by sometimes I mean very very rarely wear, but those aren't really costumes, just clothing items that for some reason the boys' liked to switch up every once in a while.  And even more technically speaking, Agnetha's purple sparkly top that she wore in the second half of the show had an upgrade when ABBA were in Japan and had one of the shoulders removed, but I don't want to make a permanent change to the sparkly top I already made and I don't feel like making a second one, so yeah.

But anyway, I digress.  I'll start here with the polar capes, as ABBA the Museum has titled them.

For some backstory, the first time I ever attempted to make these 1979 capes was in 2012, and I literally took some shiny pieces of fabric that were rectangular and not triangular, and they were atrocious.  This is the only image I can find of it, and it's trash and barely looks like anything.

Then in 2015, when I first tried to recreate the 1979 white tour costumes, I made two identical capes for my Agnetha and Frida dolls out of a very stiff satin that I had purchased from Walmart.  I hated working with satin then, and despite how much I have to work with it in my ABBA costume recreations, I still hate it.  Back then, on my first attempt, I was having trouble attaching the satin ribbon I used for the stripes to the white cape, even tried gluing it on, and it was just a pain in the butt.  Ultimately, I ended up sewing the ribbon on, but was never 100% happy with it.  somehow I managed to make two decent looking capes, and I honestly thought they were fairly good and was even going to just reuse them for my 2022 versions, with the only change being folding under and hemming the edges that I had previously left just serged.

Then ABBA the Museum came out with a replica polar cape at their store, I can't specifically remember when, but I was able to tell that my capes were actually wrong in terms of design.  But I wasn't worried because I realized remaking it should be simple enough because I already had all the colors I needed - because I had seen this image of what I thought was a close-up of the capes (but is actually I believe of Frida's skirt piece haha) from the ABBA the Treasures book, I figured the stripes weren't actually satin and were instead the same stretch fabric that was used for the stripes on the white jumpsuits themselves, so I technically had everything I needed to remake them.

I dilly-dallied quite a bit on actually making the costumes, and in that time, ABBA the Museum remade their polar cape with a more accurate fabric, and in doing so, somehow shifted everything over and made it all off-center.  But since the pattern itself was seemingly accurate and the only issue was everything oddly being shifted over, I decided to purchase it for myself and was actually quite happy with it.  I really liked how it draped, and because I now had this replica cape to compare fabric to, I was able to get a better satin that would hopefully drape better on my dolls, because if you remember, the original satin I used for my capes had been a bit stiff.

Rendering of the actual pattern on ABBA's costumtes

Rendering of the pattern on ABBA the Museum's costumes

But it was as I was cutting out all the stretch pieces to sew over the white triangular satin base, I realized that even the ABBA the Museum cape's pattern was inaccurate.  Even worse, I have no idea why I thought sewing stretch fabric onto slippery satin was a good idea because it was one of the worst ideas I have ever come up with. I tried sewing it on again and again, pinning everything into place, hand stitching (which I am still very bad at), and ironing on interfacing to the interior... Overall terrible idea.

So I went back to my original idea of using ribbon.  Thankfully I have been collecting ribbon in the right color for quite some time, and color wise it looks really good.  Unfortunately I'm still not happy with them haha.  (I also realize I put the two silver/gray stripes at the top of the capes in the wrong order, but that can be fixed theoretically if I ever feel like dealing with this monstrosity again.)  Sewing slippery satin ribbon on top of satin is still a pain in the butt, and it also made the nice thin, drapey satin too stiff with the amount of layers.  

At least visually (aside from the error on the top two stripes) it looks fairly good, but it's too stiff and I feel like it's still kinda sloppy.  Maybe someday in the future I will remake them again should I come up with a better method, but for now this will do.

Next, I made Frida's 1980s costume variation that she chose to wear rather than her matching white costume to Agnetha's while in Japan.  The only real change or difference is that Frida wears a jacket and thigh-high blue boots (the same ones she wears in the Take A Chance On My music video) rather than the matching skirt piece and white boots.

I made the jacket out of the little bit of stretch fabric I had left over from making the jumpsuits, same for the stripes and lining, although it's not actually lining, just blue trim around the edges.  The blue boots are not accurate in any way, just visually look similar enough to Frida's actual boots. I whipped the whole jacket up at around midnight, so if it looks a bit sloppy that's why, but overall I am quite happy with it.

And next we have Frida's Gimme Gimme Gimme pants that she would put on while performing Gimme Gimme Gimme haha.  I had made thse once before out of tulle back in 2015, and it ended up being too sheer.  

If you look really closely on these snapshots from the In Concert footage, you can see that the fabric actually has a little bit of a sparkle to it, and I would guess that the pants are made out of a chiffon of sorts.  I don't have and couldn't find a sparkly chiffon, so I purchased some sparkly tulle and layered that over chiffon.  If you ignore the ugly seams on the ties and waistband, I am quite happy with the way the pants look and drape.

And last but certainly not least, we have Bjorn's jumpsuit. I don't necessarily know if there's a pattern to when he'd wear this jumpsuit over the white satin one, but he can be seen wearing this during ABBA's Wembley shows as well as in Japan.

It's a very simple jumpsuit construction-wise, although the long purple stripes that run along the entirety of one side, from the right shoulder along the top of the sleeve as well as the bottom of the sleeve all the way down the side of the bodice and trousers.  I used satin ribbon for that.  I also used the same fabric that I used for Benny's white costume.  I don't know if that is accurate, but it was the only one I had on had that looked similar enough.  I'm actually quite happy with it, and the belt is just a simple band made out of purple stretch fabric.

 And that's all I have for now.  I'm thinking it would be fun to tackle the 1977 tour costumes yet again, but that would involve sourcing a ton of fabrics and I don't particularly feel like doing that right now haha, but that might be my next project.  We'll see. :)