These pictures of my Skyrim Savior’s Hide were all taken at Horse Pens 40 in Steele, Alabama. I had several photographers shoot with me. Credits are watermarked in the photos, but I will list each photographer before each section. Enjoy!
Photographer: Dim Horizon Studio
I made a Cinderella costume for a Children’s Hospital of Atlanta volunteer visit, and plan to wear it to future events (both for volunteering and conventions). Cinderella’s dress looks daunting because of all the material involved, but its really pretty easy.
What really helped was having a great pattern. I forgot to take but a few progress shots because this was one of those crazy whirlwind projects of mine! For the most part I followed this Simplicity pattern I got in a $1 sale. The skirt (separate with a hidden zipper and a hook closure) is pretty much the same as the pattern. I used a tiny rolled hem to finish it. For the bodice I just used the main part without the pattern’s sleeves. I did shorten it a couple inches I think. It is also self-lined with plastic boning. The white sleeves are cotton tubes stuffed with Polyfil with gathered satin casing that I machine sewed onto the bodice on one side, and hand sewed underneath. I added hooks to keep the bodice connected to the skirt. The white side poof things are just semi circles with pleats. The blue fabric is a discontinued powder blue Casa satin, and the white is a bridal satin from the remnants pile. Despite how big the dress looks, I think I only used around 5 yards of the main fabric.
Underneath I have a hoop skirt for structure. I used this tutorial, except without all the math. Its not very clean since I made the measurements up, but does the trick! I also made a chiffon petticoat to go over it. I will make a thicker tulle petticoat in the future.
The wig is a Dark Ash Blonde Jeannie from Arda Wigs. I just didn’t attach the long poytail, and used the short existing one to pin up into a bun. I cut the bangs and left them long on the sides to pin over the hairline. The headband is a strip of blue satin lined with pearls and glued to a headband, with buttons glued on the end. The necklace is just a strip of velvet ribbon with snaps sewed on. My shoes are tacky glitter plastic jelly shoes I found on clearance, but the kids loved them. ;)
Gallery of my Snow White costume. Most of these were taken at Life University by Leo Photography. I will do a construction writeup soon!
Image taken by Bryan Humphrey: Mad Scientist with a Camera near Gadsden, Alabama.
I 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.
Then 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.
Still 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.
Continue reading ““Historically Accurate” Merida: Progress”
I made a super duper last minute decision to attend J-Con, a new small convention hosted at KSU. It was the weekend after AWA and I was feeling super post con blues, and also really wanted to get back to sewing! I knew I wanted to do Chibi Chibi’s casual schoolgirl outfit at some point, and this was a perfect opportunity since it was such an easy project.
There’s not much to it since its so simple. I did take a few progress pics, but honestly its not far off from my Sailor V costume, just much simpler. I didn’t bother finding a pattern or making a mock for it since I just wanted to crank it out ASAP. I cut out a square of fabric out of convenient leftover kona cotton and somehow crafted a basic shirt shape out of it. I used the same poofy sleeve pattern I use for everything. The collar is white cotton sateen I already had because I ran out of kona. I accidentally made the shirt too short (lol boobs) so the extra wide bias tape lining the bottom was an attempt to lengthen it an inch.
The skirt is exactly the same as my Sailor V skirt, but with larger pleats and a center pleat in the front. The bottom edge is clean with no hemming because I used the natural fold of the fabric, basically doubling the fabric. Doubled kona cotton pleats well! Plus I added the bow in the back.
The red bow is the same one from Chibi Chibi’s fuku. The heart broach is the one that I meant to use for her fuku version but got knocked under the couch by my cats and couldn’t find for Dragon Con. I reused her wig, but couldn’t take off the odango shields… because glue! :P Sorry for so few progress pics, I was working too fast to remember to take more!
All pics below taken at J-Con by Bentpic5
Bentpic5 took photos of all the bunny maids at AWA 2013. We will have an official shoot in the spring, but here are a couple of great shots of my costume!
Finishing the embroidery on this was such an amazing and relieving feeling. *_* Now I could finally start putting it together and seeing progress! I carefully sewed the embroidered pieces together, making sure to check how the seams were done in the source. Some had satin stitching along the seam to hide it (shoulders, sleeves, etc) and the sides actually had gold satin covering them. I added thicker interfacing for the collar pieces.
I chose baroque gold Casa satin as my gold secondary fabric. I really REALLY hate satin, but in the end I felt this was the right choice. Story time! Back in high school when I discovered how to manipulate HTML and CSS, I used to make terrible websites. I would go to background swatch sites and use those everywhere. I remember that the satin swatches had the same odd ripple to them as Sheogorath’s gold parts. So yeah, that’s how I made the connection. :P Turns out satin was a bad idea because it already started snagging during Dragon Con. Oh well. x_x
Continue reading “Sheogorath from Oblivion: Progress Part 2”
