Well, Halloween is coming again. Time to try too hard.

So, it's nearly the end of September, and Halloween is coming. As of now I don't even have a Halloween party to go to, although the same could be said of last year as I was working on my Sailor Pluto costume. But I just love making costumes, especially elaborate ones, so I had to come up with a good one for this year. And then there were some fabric sales going on, and things just happened.  This is this year's project:

Princess Peach!

Being a girl gamer, Princess Peach is one of the first female video game characters I was really aware of.  And I was thrilled when she started entering the Smash Bros games as an ass kicker. This specific dress is the one that she wears in Smash Bros Brawl. I have loved this dress since I first saw it. Her dress was always so plain before. I know it was her classic look and whatever, but a little flounce and lace never hurt anybody. Sure, I could do the plain classic design in my sleep, but wouldn't it be more interesting to make myself a real fancy ball gown? We're going with interesting for now, knowing that that will probably change to hair pulling screamingly frustrating.

So, I ordered some fabric, and while I was waiting for it, I got started on some accessories.

Now, I know of an Etsy seller that makes just beautiful accessories for Princess Peach. And I wanted them, badly, but it would have been more than $100 to get the crown, the jewel, and the earrings. So I needed a cheaper option. I found the officially Nintendo licensed crown and jewel:

On ebay for like $15. I could swing that. And they actually look pretty nice. The jewel is meant to be attached with sticky stuff on the back, but I just glued felt over that and attached a brooch pin, I had extras from doing Shannon's Chibi Moon brooch.  All I needed after that was earrings. I'm already a jewelry maker, so I had all the basic foundations for making earrings. So I went to the dollar store and bought some ping pong balls.

I stabbed small needle holes in the top and worked the flat end of a flat topped wire into the holes. I dabbed a small bit of glue around the hole to make sure the post didn't come out of the ping pong ball, and when that was dry, bent the wire into a tiny loop and trimmed off the extra, then attached them to the earring hooks. I also used styrofoam balls, toothpicks and toilet paper tubes to make temporary earring hangers for paint drying purposes.

I bought two different metallic blue paints because I couldn't find exactly the shade I was looking for.

It was just the cheapest brand available at Hobby Lobby, and it was on sale! I wanted the color less green than the teal, but more green than the blue, so I did a roughly 50/50 mix. I initially started painting it on with a brush, but the brush marks were insane, and I could see many layers of paint and frustration in my future. So I mixed my paint with some Floetrol (which I have because I've been learning about acrylic pour painting, I should make another post about the paintings I've made, they're cool!) and then basically dunked the ping pong balls in the paint. After that I just hung them up to dry.

Extra styrofoam balls and toilet paper tubes had to be added because I was worried about them tipping over or sliding off the toothpicks.

My paint dunking method did mean that I did have to keep an eye on them and swipe the bottoms of them every so often with an extra toothpick to try and keep the paint from drying in a little drop/bump on the bottom, but once the tops were dry I was able to flip them over and stand them up in more toilet paper tubes upside down, which allowed the drop on the bottom to flatten out and dry.  They turned out nice and smooth and even.

After that was dry, I dunked them again in my can of Minwax polycrylic to protect the paint and make them shiny, which led to another round of hanging and swiping off droplets with a toothpick, but once again it came out nice and smooth, and they look very nice.

Aaaaaaand, turns out I haven't taken a picture of the final product. I guess I better get on that. Anyways, they look really nice and I'm very happy.

I also needed Peach's shoes. It looked like they were just some simple ballet flats in dark pink, and wouldn't you know it? Walmart just happens to sell a pair that was exactly what I wanted. I also decided to get a little fancy and add some pink gems to the toe. I know it's not accurate, but I just wanted to dress the shoes up a little and they came out so pretty! I'm gonna wear these just for the fun of it with my every day wardrobe.

Besides, under that fluffy pink skirt, what are the chances that people will even see that? Best part is, those shoes cost me $5. Gorgeous. I may have bought a second olive green pair just because I love ballet flats and they were cheap. I should get another black pair before my current ones wear out...

I also needed a wig, obviously. So I ordered one off of ebay. They were having a sale at the time if you bought two, so I also bought a reddish orange one to improve my old Jessica Albert costume, (I've been playing Dragon Quest 8 with my boyfriend recently, and it's really made me remember how much I love Jessica, and I'd like to take that costume out sometime) and potentially  use for a future Jessica Rabbit costume, if I don't have to permanently cut it to make pigtails for Jessica Albert. (why are all fictional Jessicas red heads? Why did I dye my hair red? Are all Jessicas just meant to be red heads?)

This is SOOOOOOOOOOOO not what it looked like when it arrived. It was thin and scraggly, you could see the wig cap right through the hair on the bangs, it was awful. The red one looked pretty good, weirdly enough, since they came from the same seller.  I was frustrated and a little sick with the thought of having to return it, I hate returning things. On an impulse, Stu and I hit a thrift store shortly after that, and I bought a plain straight blonde Halloween wig for like $4. I very carefully cut the thrift store wig into its individual wefts and then hand sewed those throughout the ebay wig. Including some shorter bits at the bangs to thicken that up. The end result was actually a pretty good looking wig. I was much much happier. And it only took an extra $4 and an evening of my time.  I then had to straighten the wig, because the straight thrift store wig strands did not match the curly ebay wig.

I used the hot water method, where you basically boil some water and dump it over the wig, and the heat from the water straightens the strands. When it was dry I brushed it out, rolled it up in foam rollers and then dunked it in boiling water again. Let that cool and dry, took out the rollers, and had a freshly curled wig.

I liked the ringlets, but that's not really how Peach's hair looks, so I brushed those out so they would just be general wavy/curliness. I trimmed the bangs to a reasonable length, although I have not styled them into Peach's little forehead point thing. I won't have all her little flippy-outy bits, because I simply don't think I have the skill to sculpt a wig like that. I'm bad at hair styling just in general, and I have almost no experience with wigs. So we will just suggest the existence of flippy-outy bits with waves and curls.

Also. In order to pull off a skirt like that, I was gonna need a hell of a petticoat. Or, even better, a hoop skirt. I had a full length petticoat from my steampunk stuff, but I really wanted something bigger than that, and if I didn't want it to weigh a million pounds, I was gonna need hoops.

Based on some Pinterest tutorials, I went to the hardware store and bought three 10 foot lengths of 1/2" plastic piping from the plumbing section.  I was only gonna do three hoops, because I didn't want to get crazy, and I thought the 1/2" tubing might still be pretty heavy. I'd have liked a smaller size pipe, but wasn't able to find any. And didn't feel strongly enough about it to try harder.

So I arranged the pipes in three hoops of descending size, starting with the biggest to determine whether I was gonna be able to walk through doors or not. (Barely. The hoop is too big, but it flexes when I push it through doorways, haha.) I think the biggest was like 36" or 37" across? I'd have to double check on the smaller ones, because I just eyeballed what looked right to me.  After that, I attached them to five long ribbons that were designed to go from my waist to just above the floor. I just sewed around them through the ribbon that I had pinned on the waist of my dress form.

The nice thing about this, is the hoop size can be adjusted if I want, all I have to do is cut out a section and retape it, and then slide the ribbons around to evenly space them again. I may have to do that, if I decide it's just too annoying to squeeze my dress through every doorway. I just... I just really love the fluffiness of it.

After the hoops were attached I threw my steampunk petticoat over top, and then sewed the tops of the ribbons to the waist of the petticoat.  Why yes, it was incredibly awkward to sew things onto the skirt with all those hoops in the way. I also added a drawstring waist to the petticoat, since apparently it used to just sit on my hips unassisted, but my hips are quite a bit smaller than they used to be.

Sorry, the only picture I have of me not wearing it is a snapchat. In case the scope of that skirt is hard to see when it's by itself, here it is with me wearing one of my full circle skirt maxi dresses over top:

It's pretty damn fluffy. And I freaking love it.  It is a little heavy on my hips, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to attach these little skirt hooks:

You know, these guys.  I'm going to sew several of the bigger part on the inside of the waist of the hoop skirt, and the small parts are going to be sewn onto the corset I'm going to be wearing with this outfit. Those are small and easily removed from the corset if I want. And this will allow me to hook the hoop skirt to the corset, and then tie with the drawstring, which should more evenly support the weight and make it much more comfortable.

Whew, this post is getting long. I have all kinds of plans for the dress itself, but due to the length here, I'm only going to go into what I've done.

Now, obviously I don't have a pattern for this dress. So I decided to try my hand at duct tape patterning. So I put on my corset, wrapped myself in plastic wrap, and then with Shannon's help, wrapped myself in duct tape.

Super hot. In every sense, man it was sweaty in there.

I cut that off of me, and cut it into the pattern pieces I needed. I transferred those to paper, and then cut those out of some scrap fabric to make a mock up. There was lots of adjusting for the gathers and the sleeve size, but I ended up here:

Look how excited I am about how wildly attractive that looks!  Uhhhhhg. It's just for fit, it's just for fit, it's just for fit.

Anyways. I got the sleeve right. It's so puffy, I love it. The triangle panel in the middle of my chest needs to be bigger and the fabric to either side of that needs to be smaller and gathered more. I also learned that the gathered middle panel down the front needs to be sewn to a foundation of ungathered fabric so the gathers can's stretch in weird ways and ruin the shape. But I think the end result is that this looks enough like the top of Peach's dress that I can proceed. I do have my pink fabric now. Hilariously enough the light pink is a little more peach colored than I'd prefer, but it will still work.

So I took the mock up apart to use as a pattern, and then just kinda left the pieces lying around...

And that's where we're at. Next step, actually getting into the pink fabric!