Margaery Bunny: Progress

Margaery bunny For Dragon Con 2015 I made Margaery bunny for a Game of Thrones bunny group. I’d never made a bunny suit before, and it didn’t quite turn out right, but I was happy enough with it to wear it anyway. :P We won best group in the bunny hutch contest!

It was one of those projects that went great in theory but didn’t quite go perfectly in the end. Instead of buying a bunny-suit pattern, I made a mock by combining my favorite corset pattern with a panty pattern I drafted. The mock itself turned out really well and fit great. I constructed the whole thing like a corset. I used a strong twill inner layer, spiral steel, twill stay tape, hidden lace up closure, etc. It turned out really great, except for the me wearing it part. The bottom bunches up and is loose at the same time. (The pictures in this post are of angles that look fine… something I did on purpose :P) Oh well, it was wearable at least and a learning experience. :) The accessories were super fun to make! I made everything but the crown, which is the cheap Halloween version (but surprisingly detailed/accurate).
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Ariel Original Ballgown: Progress

ariel-sarah

Ariel is my favorite of the Disney princesses, so I’m not sure why its taken me so long to make her! I fell in love with her new turquoise/teal sparkly dress, so I decided to use that as a jumping off point. At some point I made the decision that I wanted to be poofy and crazy, so style-wise I crossed her new dress with Sarah’s ballgown from the Labyrinth.

For fabric, I allowed myself to buy stuff I would never use normally, like glitter costume satin and shiny organza. I can be kind of a fabric snob, but I wanted this dress to be silly and boisterous. For the color, I chose blue radiance from the casa line for the tulle and organza and a matching glitter satin (some generic brand from Joann’s.) I also found a gorgeous mint green peachskin fabric for the sleeves and binding (not sure if its peachskin, since it was in the cheap costume fabric section, but its so pretty!)
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Original 18th Century Gown: Gallery

This is my very first 18th century gown, and meant to be more of a practice dress. I purposefully used not 100% accurate materials since it was for practice, and I got them for super cheap. Its not perfect and I have a bit more to work on execution-wise, but it was fun to make and is still super pretty!

The first batch of images were taken at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center by Dim Horizon Studio. I had just shot another costume and had the same makeup on, and also did a super quickie “hedgehog” style by shoving frizzy hairpieces under my hat, haha. Not accurate, but I think it looks pretty and avante garde in a way. :)

18th Century Dress
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“Historically Accurate” Merida: Progress

drawingI love Disney princesses, like… woah. I’ve always wanted to be one, and I finally did it for AWA! But of course I had to complicate things and made an original, not accurate, version for my first one. :P

There’s a lot to say about this costume. It started out with me loving Merida, and loving crazy red hair and freckles, but not wanting to do a costume that’s so incredibly overdone right now. Her everyday dress is okay, but its actually kind of boring (blasphemy! I know). One day I was at the ren fest, and I saw this gorgeous red rabbit pelt at the fur stall, and I thought, wow, this is so Merida! I knew then that I had to do some kind of alternate version of her. The other princesses had “historically accurate” fanart, why not Merida, too?

I started out trying to research the time period of the movie. No luck, and apparently other people had the same problem. The architecture and dresses and materials and just everything in the movie is a mish mash of time periods, so I had to make something up. I also had a difficult time pin pointing specific Scottish fashion. Seems that they wore the same clothes as their European neighbors and nothing super specifically Scottish. (My sources are Google and Wikipedia mind you, I’m not part of the SCA or anything like that to get super secret historical accuracy information, maybe one day). So I left it alone for awhile.

lucrezia_borgiaThen I saw the show “Borgia: Faith and Fear”, and I beheld Lucrezia Borgia. She has curly red hair and immediately reminded me of a proper Merida. And her dresses are very similar if you look past the fine fabric and poofy sleeves. Just looking at this picture, I thought, this is it! This is my version of Merida! And that time period is 15th/16th century, the clothing Italian. And since the Scottish at this time wore whatever generic European fashions were around, this could have been something Merida would have worn, assuming Brave takes place somewhere in the 1400-1500s.

danielle_everafterStill not convinced? Look at this picture of Danielle from Ever After. Yeah, that is almost the same exact dress Merida wears, and its from the same time period.
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