Rose City ComiCon!

So. I don't think I've mentioned this, by some time ago, I was invited to go to Rose City Comicon in Portland with Matt and Cari. I obviously jumped right on top of that. That was kind of part of why I went to Wizard World Con, as a kind of baby training wheels con experience. Which I think worked out for me.

Anyways, I buy my passes and talk to Matt and Cari about plans and I find out that they have a group costume in mind. And of course I want to be part of that, why wouldn't I?  It turns out that John Barrowman:

God, he's pretty.

Is going to be there. And they want to do a costume to entertain him. So rather than choosing one of his obvious roles from like Doctor Who or Arrow, naturally they go with his bit part from The Producers:

  Sexiest. Gay. Nazi. Ever.

Damn.

So, basically we were all picking characters from this movie. There was lots of mind changing and switching around, but eventually everyone settled. Initially, I was going to be doing a Girl in Pearls:

And Danny was going to do a different Girl in Pearls a rather hilarious misfit girl with a big mop of red hair, that I cannot for the life of me find a picture of. 

It would have been hilarious and wonderful. But such a freaking chore to make. I was not looking forward to the time and expense, so I'm not gonna lie, I was a little relieved when that plan got changed to try to include more main characters.  So I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do. And then I remembered in our recent drunken watching of the movie, Cari had been pushing me hard to do the blue dress that Uma Thurman's character Ulla wears during the "That Face" number.

It is a beautiful dress. Really, what Cari wanted was for Stu and I to do that as a couples costume, but we all know how he feels about dressing up. Even if it's just a suit. And he has ended up deciding not to come anyways, which doesn't surprise me. A con is not at all something he would enjoy. However, I knew that Cari was doing a different Ulla outfit and I refused to do Ulla too. I felt like I would be hijacking her character. But then when I needed a new outfit I decided maybe it wouldn't be the end of the world. I checked with Cari and she said she was fine with it. I also debated doing Ulla's white dress from the beginning:

And I decided I would choose based on which one I was able to find supplies for easiest and cheapest. Although I was definitely leaning towards the blue dress, that thing is gorgeous.

So Cari and I made plans to go fabric shopping together. Neither one of us have ever had someone to geek out over costume making with before so it was pretty exciting. I still had a $25 gift card for Joann's that Stu's parents had given me for Christmas, I figured this would be a perfect use for this. Plus Joann's had a 25% off total purchase coupon as well. Very convenient. And then even more convenient, I had a company meeting at work where they had a raffle and I got lucky and won a $50 Visa card. My budget for my costume is now really good.

So Cari and I get to Joann's. We start at the pattern table because Cari still needs to find a good pattern for her outfit. I'm pretty sure I have a good pattern for the blue dress, and the white one is a pretty simple design, so I'm not too worried about finding a pattern, but there's no reason not to look, and maybe I can help Cari.

So, we've been sitting at the table for like 5 minutes, max. I flip straight to the formal wear section. And almost immediately, I find this.

I mean. Look at that.

It's the same. Damn. Dress. I mean, sure, it's missing the drape at the front and I'd need to take out the waist seam, but LOOK AT IT. I've never found such a perfect pattern for a costume. And of course, it just happens to be the brand of patterns that are on sale for $2 at the time. Cari even grabbed one for herself because she's always loved that blue dress too. So that pretty much sells me, I'm doing the blue dress. We spend some more time looking for patterns for Cari, and we find some stuff that's close enough, with some alterations. She's doing the version of Ulla from the Springtime for Hitler play where she's dressed up like a Nazi.

Now it's time to look for fabric.

So we wandered over to the special occasions fabric, figuring we'll start there. We walk down the aisle, Cari reaches up and grabs a bolt of blue mesh fabric, and throws it in the cart. "That's your top layer." She says. And she was right, it was exactly the color and drapey-ness I needed and it wasn't even super expensive. It was perfect. And we've been searching for fabric for less than a minute. We have a little more time trouble finding the bottom layer, and fabric for Cari, but eventually I stumble across a big bolt of some kind of athletic weave blue fabric that will work wonderfully. The texture is a little odd, but the mesh will cover that, no problem. And it's on clearance!

We found some things for Cari, and as we're standing around waiting to get our fabric cut, suddenly I spot this absolutely beautiful electric blue jersey. It's drapey and beautiful and exactly the right color, and also not expensive. It's hard to describe how perfect it was, I instantly fell in love like the clearance bolt never existed. It was everything I wanted. It's only flaw was that there ended up not being enough of it to get as much as I needed for the full length dress, so I decided to go with the knee length version, which was fine. The long one is amazing, but the short one is something I can legitimately just add to my regular wardrobe, it's just a pretty dress.

So we go to checkout with our fabric and various sewing notions and whatnot. They ring me up, scan my coupons, and it comes to $77 and change. And I don't know if you were paying attention, but with my gift cards, that means this cost me $2. Man, Cari was so mad at me. I've never had a costume or any project just fall into place like that. It was just the best feeling in the world. I couldn't believe it.

So, after that, I needed the rest of the accessories. For the wig, I had intentions of using polyester fabric dye to dye a white wig I had yellow, but that kinda turned out awful.

Yuck.

But then I happened to stumble across the perfect wig with the perfect hairstyle:

It even arrived in two days with free shipping. Just need to soften the curls a bit, which I did by gently running my fingers through it. I also plan to hang it upside down and lightly warm it with my hair dryer just to get a little more lift at the scalp, and it should work perfectly. Plus, in the meantime I get to freak put everyone I live with by attaching my with head to a stool and pinning the wig to it and leaving it standing around all creepy like. :D

For shoes, at Cari's suggestion I bought a pair of dance heels with the thought that dance heels are intended to not be painful since dancers kinda need their feet to function. And of course I find the perfect pair on sale while they're running a free shipping promotion. I wore them to work a few times just to break them in a little, and they really are the most comfortable heels ever. I'm gonna get two more pairs in black just for general wear.

I was able to find a pair of nude thigh high stockings super easy, those are common. And then I realize I'm gonna need a garter belt. It's visible in the slit on the right side of the dress. I wasn't really able to find a good one that I liked, so I decided to make one. And right about that time I get an email from Joann's with a $10 gift card because when I made my previous purchase they were running a "reward dollars" promotion if you spend so much money. So I run to Joann's and with that and more coupons and spend more nothing on the supplies for a simple elastic garter belt.

I also realized I wasn't sure if Ulla is wearing earrings in that scene. We ended up having a second movie viewing party where I was able to determine that there is something sparkly and blue on her ears, but it's impossible to really say what. Which I guess makes it easy. Digging into my own craft supplies I found a few options for sparkly blue jewels:

I ended up going with the oval ones because I liked that color better. I used some small stick on gems around the edge that I painted blue to add a little extra sparkle, and glued on earring posts. Bam. Done. 

It was nice because I made up my mind not to stress about the earrings, since you can barely tell she's wearing any.

So next was just actually putting the dress together. I started by making a mock-up out of a thrift store sheet because I needed to figure out how I was going to remove the waist seam. I ended up actually cutting the back bodice piece in half so that there was one bodice piece for each skirt piece. I taped them together and just eased across that part while cutting to smooth it out. It worked pretty well. I just sort of roughly cut it off at the knee, I wasn't too worried about length at this point.

I was shocked by how much extra fabric I had when I laid it out on the final fabric. The pattern called for about 9 yards, and I was only able to get 6, but look at this:

It's totally long enough to do the long dress! The skirt pieces are a little wide, but I'm almost positive that if I could unfolded the fabric and lay it out flat I could puzzle piece it together and have enough fabric. But that would have been a huuuuuuge pain in the ass, so I didn't. There's a tiny part of me that kind of regrets not doing that, the long dress is so elegant. But the rest of me that doesn't want to spend several painful hours crawling around on the floor and wants a nice regular wear dress knows it was the right decision. Especially since it has two layers. God, can you imagine if I was doing a lining too? Uuuuuuuuuuhhhhg.

So, I don't have a lot of progress pictures of actually sewing the dress, it was pretty straightforward, just connecting all the pieces. The only part that was weird was that I was adding an extra "seam" down the middle of each piece, because you can clearly see that Ulla's dress has more seams than my pattern. It made me feel a little like a crazy person, the first hour of my sewing was just sewing meaningless lines down the middle over and over again and connecting nothing. I had a pretty great moment though when I realized the jersey fabric I was using was stretchy enough that I didn't need a zipper. God, that was a good feeling. I hate zippers so much. Especially invisible ones.

So I got the dress assembled. I measured the length on myself and managed to get it cut at the right length. I ended up doubling up on the shoulder drape part, the amount of fabric the pattern uses initially was too small for how it looks in the picture of Ulla, so I just doubled up and made one piece slightly shorter so they'd stack.

The difficult part came when I needed to do the drapey twisty bit on the bust. I had a vague idea of a rectangle of gathered fabric twisted across the bust of the dress. Which is basically what I did, with much arranging and shifting. It's really hard to describe what I did, but I'll try.

So, my rectangle was like maybe a foot and a half wide and like two feet long, just to make sure I had plenty. I gathered it up until it was about four or five inches wide. I intended to attach it vertically, but it just wouldn't lay right. I eventually realized if I attached it horizontally along the top edge on the side of the bodice, and then twisted it in the middle and attached it to the other side it made the gathers lay much more nicely.

I ran into a problem when trying to figure this part out. I really needed it to be on a body to get the shape right, but because of the lack of zipper and my weight loss, I could not get this dress on my dress form. I'm really gonna have to remodel that thing. I tried hanging the dress or laying it out, but nothing helped me figure out the shape I needed. Finally, I found the correct solution. Meet Tempy, the temporary dress form:

Why yes, that is a bra hooked around a bed pillow and stuffed with scraps of fabric. It totally worked, too:

I think my next big project should be a new dress form. Or maybe a small project of at least carving this one down a bit so I can actually get things on the dress form.

Side note, this whole topic of my dress form being too big is just AMAZING for my self esteem.

It only took me a few evenings to finish the dress, it really we it together pretty smoothly. Which makes sense, this has been the most karmically perfect project. My issues have been very minor.

This is the only picture I have of me in the dress so far, and it's not a great one, but I will get more later. I'm really happy with it.

So, probably the biggest issue I had was about the garter belt. Joann's didn't have garter clips in the style I could see in the screen shot, but they did have some little metal clips with plastic teeth. They didn't look right but I figured I could paint them black and they'd work well enough. They're barely visible anyways. And I just happen to have black enamel paint that will hold up under use better, especially if I bake in on for hardness.

You might see where this is going.

So I paint the clips. I put them on a tray, preheat the oven, and stick them in at 350 degrees for half an hour. Once they'd been in there for about 15 minutes I remember THEY HAD PLASTIC TEETH AND I JUST PUT THEM IN THE OVEN. I immediately go pull them out, but it's much too late. The teeth are completely melted into each other and there's no saving them.

So I trashed them and went online where I was able to find black clips in the style of the screenshot on eBay and they only took a few days to arrive. No more messing around.

I went really simple with the garter belt. I cut a piece of black elastic to go around my waist and four pieces to go down the front and back of each leg. Stitched everything in place and we were good to go. The thing is barely visible in the costume, I wasn't gonna waste a lot of time it thought on it.

I also needed an apron, since I was doing the short dress and she wears an apron in that part of the scene. I used fabric I had on hand, hilariously enough it was the mock-up skirt I made for Princess Peach, still in skirt form, so I just cut it up. Big rectangle for the main piece, two small ones for pockets and ties. Easy peasy, like half an hour max. And I made sure the pockets were big enough to carry my phone so I shouldn't need to carry a purse, which is excellent.

At this point, all I have left is the barrettes she wears in her hair. I attempted to make some out of some alligator clips I had, but it looked weird, so I need to go get some actual barrettes, which won't be a big deal. So that means I'm basically done almost two weeks early! I like that. Nothing like the death stress of Princess Peach.

I have a few things to do still, I'm helping Cari out with some of the other stuff, I'm doing Danny's shorts, and I'd really like to get my parasol for Princess Peach done as well. I'm taking Peach to this con and entering her in the costume contest. I don't expect to get anything but I really feel like I need to try with how hard I work on these costumes. If I have time I'm gonna try to get my Toad purse done as well, but that's way down the priority list since I'll only be wearing Peach for the costume contest. Going to a real, big con is quite an investment thought, time and money wise. Well, I suppose it wouldn't have been so expensive if I hadn't purchased both a photo op and an autograph with David Tennant...

Oh, did I forget to mention that? I'm totally getting my picture taken with David Tennant. I might die. Like really. I decided to get the autograph too because Shannon is literally going to kill me when she finds out, so I thought maybe I'd be super nice and bring her back and autograph. Spoiled kid.

Well, I think that's all I've got for the moment. I'll be back later.