if you want to know how I ended up ripping seams out of a £5 ballgown so I could reach
a letter opener I had tied to my leg with Mistcloak ribbons, congratulations:
you're my kind of weirdo. my name is Jill Bearup and I'm a stage combatant which means I pretend
to fight people for fun and fiction and if I look a bit familiar it might be because of
swords in dresses, fighting in dresses, or hiding daggers in dresses. There's a bit of a theme.
I found myself captivated by all of these story snippets on TikTok about lady assassins who hide
these beautiful daggers in their ballgowns also TikTok seems have a real thing about two people
flirting with each other when one of them has a knife to the other one's throat and this video
is gonna get demonetized isn't it. Good thing we have a sponsor today isn't it? This video is
sponsored by brilliant more on that later. Anyway my first thought reading these was
'yes but would it actually work?' so I thought I'd give it a go for science on my own property
because you will note that I live in the uk and I'm pretty sure I'm a youtuber is not sufficient
legal defence. if I end up on the BBC because some eejit decided to follow this tutorial and
got themselves stabbed I will be very displeased okay? with that disclaimer out of the way
LARPers and authors your time has come. There has historically been a style of
women's dress that had slits in the overdress and then there were pockets which were tied
around the waist but the thing is if you're hiding a knife unless it's really really small
or your dress is really really poofy you might want to be a bit more discreet than that and
most modern women's dresses do not have these slit in the side for pockets feature
or indeed any pockets but there we are. also all of the fantasy scenarios seem to
specifically envision the knife being attached to the leg rather than being in a pocket so let's see
what we can do. My first step as my first step often is was to go on ebay which in the year of
Our Lord 2021 is not actually the best place to go for second-hand ballgowns probably because people
haven't had so many balls to go to recently can't think why but evidently someone had been taking
Marie Kondo's tidying lessons to heart and decided that this Morgan and Co ballgown did not spark
joy and it was on sale for five pounds including shipping so i ordered it based on the fact that
it looked like it would roughly fit me and it was cheap and when it arrived i discovered that i had
accidentally bought the perfect murder dress. and then i made a TikTok about it and it kind
of went viral. The thing that makes this dress so discreetly perfect is that it has flaps at
the front black fabric which is overlapped by the outer purple the flap on the right hand
side of the body doesn't go all the way to the side seam so you'd need to carry a knife on the
front of your leg which is not ideal but the flap on the left joined at the side seam so we could
cut into that no problem. And of course if you are ballroom dancing with someone and they are leading
they will be holding your right hand in their left your left hand is therefore free to be on
their shoulder, on your skirts to keep them out of the way, or grabbing a pointy thing
to stab them with, so... works either way really. to figure out where to make the cut i had to first
figure out where the knife would sit so i came up with three potential designs of improvised
attachment of which i thought the three attachment point option (waist plus two leg bands) would
obviously be the most secure but i wanted to give them all a fair shake. If your knife has no sheath
but it's a larp knife or it's something you made of craft foam to cosplay as Vin that will be fine
but it's probably more difficult to disentangle it from whatever attachment method you have come
up with. In such cases if it is a larp knife and therefore made of latex or something similar just
sticking it down your bodice might be a better option at least if it's small and while you can
actually buy leg sheaths i felt like improvising would be more interesting and also i have bought
a fair number of sharp objects recently and i don't want the police being at my house like
Mrs Bearup you have bought a significant quantity of knives and sheaths recently
is everything okay? As you can see this child's plastic sword is roughly the length of the raven
claw knife which i accidentally ordered because it said 24 centimeters and it was actually 21 inches
but the important point is that both of those are probably too long to sit comfortably on my femur
if you're going to attach something to your leg it's ideal if it fits comfortably on your leg.
I mean you could probably hide an actual short sword in a rococo dress but i don't own either
of those things so i'm not going to try that. what i have is this which is actually a letter
opener back when i had an office job i used to open most of the post and i was saying to
my colleague one day how much handier it would be if i had a lesser opener and she said Jill
i've got just the thing for you. I found it in the attic of my house when i moved in!
and she came in the next day with this i mean it's probably not cursed and it does have a
metal sheath which is useful for tying things onto. If this is a really impromptu 'prep for
potential disaster' situation for your heroine then perhaps one really long ribbon might be all
that she has access to, and this would also work with one long piece of string. one long
ribbon can go around your waist be tied around the scabbard or sheath or whatever you like to call it
and then subsequently be tied around your leg. the one leg attachment point thing
means it is more likely to tilt off at a weird angle and possibly show underneath your dress,
but if it was a very long single ribbon then you could do two attachment points.
This was my first attempt and as you can see it's sitting far too high on the thigh for this dress
which doesn't have a whole lot of fullness over the top of the hips. if i was wearing something
like my red dress then it probably would have been fine but that dress is older than most of the
people on TikTok and i'm not cutting it up. Second attachment option is just attaching it to the leg
in which case ribbon can work but something like leather cord will give you more stick.
Tying it around your leg once rather than twice again does mean that it's more likely to slide
diagonally. for the most secure option you want a waist tie plus two leg straps which
as it turns out for this particular dress means that you want it to be as low on the
thigh as possible like basically you want the bottom of the scabbard to be
as close to your knee as is comfortable for you. This looks really ugly and not at all in
the vein of the dark royaltycore aesthetic that we're going for so i'm going to make it up again
but this time with ribbons that fell off my Mistcloak walking upstairs in that thing is
just a nightmare. they're all the same color which makes them look more cohesive and also you can tie
them into bows which amuses me. one point to note is that when you sit down the waist to leg ribbon
will go slack and the knife will shift a bit but when you stand up again it will straighten up and
the knife will go back into the correct position nobody ever mentions this in novels but maybe
they all have custom knife sheaths then again the only heroine i've ever seen who talks about how
uncomfortable inner thigh sheaths are is Verity Price from Discount Armageddon so
there you go. Also i feel like an inner thigh sheath is just a very inelegant
solution because when you're trying to draw it it looks like you're trying to fix a wedgie.
If you're wearing a very tight skirt it just might be necessary if not why would you give
yourself the hassle of looking like you're trying to draw a knife from your crotch?
Just saying. So with the positioning figured out i then consulted a Bernadette Banner video on how
to add pockets I measured my hand I marked along the place with chalk and then I snipped along the
seam at which point I found out that there were actually two seams so I snipped along that seam
and then I found out that I'd actually opened up the entire side of the dress because all
of the bits were sewn together so I haphazardly stitched that back together with a running stitch
and here we are. I made the hand slit bigger than i thought i needed but i probably should
have made it significantly bigger than i thought i needed. now on this particular dress there's a
petticoat under the outer dress fabric which would also need a slit cut in it because the petticoat
layer is 100% polyester and no one was ever likely to see it i decided to cut my slit in it and then
burn the edges of it instead of sewing them because i could just not be bothered really. i
was a bit concerned about the two slits not lining up properly when i tried to put my hand in so what
i did was i drafted some pocket pieces and then i stitched the pocket pieces in but i didn't stitch
them together the whole way around. So i stitched down a little bit on each side of the pocket
and then i safety pinned the petticoat to the pocket piece and then i had a kind of hand tunnel.
And there you have it! A completely hidden dress slit from which you can pull a dagger to
assassinate or at least threaten the distressingly attractive noble from a rival kingdom who has been
staring at you all night. Or you could do what i'm going to do when i finish making this video
and just sew the rest of the pocket together so that i have somewhere for my smartphone and my
keys and i don't have to carry a handbag. i highly recommend the latter option over the former first
because pockets are really useful and second because leaving your house armed with knives
or daggers is illegal in quite a lot of places including the uk where i live. if you needed to
know the mechanics of ballroom weapon concealment for fictional purposes then we got you covered.
There are other options for the concealment of knives like the bodice dagger but first a word
from our sponsor which means that i don't have to worry about getting demonetized because i said the
word daggers too much in this video. I'm going to make the assumption that you'd like learning
things because well you are watching a video about how to hide daggers in a ballgown a subject in
which i hope you have a *purely academic interest* This video is sponsored by brilliant who also want
to help you learn in a hands-on way but also like a legal way, just saying. I don't know about you
but I learn best by actively trying things and problem solving rather than by watching other
people do stuff (this has certainly been true of my recent adventures in sewing) and learning by
doing is what brilliant is all about. For example their Casino Probability course teaches you about
well probability via the medium of various different kinds of games. How lucky or skilled
or indeed cheaty does your super spy anti-hero have to be in order to beat the house in craps
or poker or blackjack? Well now you can work it out mathematically. To figure out exactly how
hard it is to beat the house and to learn more about brilliant go to brilliant.org/jillbearup
you can sign up for free. And the first 200 people to click the link in the description will also
get 20% off the annual premium subscription too! Now back to hiding weapons in clothing.
There's not really enough room in this dress to conceal something unless you're wearing a
structured under layer and honestly it's tight enough that i would be a bit concerned about
putting on the structured underlayer last i was unable to zip it up. That said i do have a red
dress under which it is quite easy to conceal a fashion corset and then you can just stick
the bodice dagger down the front of the fashion corset. This is not sharpened though, I feel like
I should point that out. If it were you'd have to be careful about cutting yourself while you were
drawing the dagger unless you're going to draw it sheath and all. This sheath has a loop on it
which allows you to attach it to something. I mean you could attach it to your belt but really where
would be the fun in that? bit obvious. or if you feel like your corset has it held in there tightly
enough you can just pull the whole thing out and then remove the sheath. Either way important
to note that bodice dagger concealment will work better in a bodice which is just slightly bigger.
While this dress is lovely it is very fitted through the bodice so if i had to choose a dress
which I could draw a bodice dagger from I would go for the red one but i'm not cutting slits in
the red one so there we are. Sometimes you have to work out whether to prioritize slinky and fitted
or ability to stuff a lot of weapons in there. If you enjoyed this video and you'd like to learn
how to hide a sword in your dress like you're Wonder Woman, or learn about the practicalities
of sword fighting in a wedding dress, then there is a whole playlist which i think
you might enjoy. And if you like this stuff of course you can always subscribe. See you soon!