I’m making Moana costumes this year for Halloween, so I thought I’d do a series of Moana costume tutorials on how I am modifying the official Disney costume.
To start with, I decided to re-make the top. I really like how the skirt looks, but I don’t like how the top requires straps to stay up and the top edge looks wrong. I figured it can’t be that hard to make a new top that is actually a tube top and has a shirred back for fit.
Today’s tutorial is on how I created the fabric for the top.
In May, I made an 18th century round gown to wear to Colonial Williamsburg. I’ll post photos later from the trip (assuming I ever catch up on photo processing), but I wanted to post a couple of quick photos of the dress.
A lot of people in the historical costuming community have made dresses using duvet covers and curtains from IKEA. I needed a breathable fabric for the heat of Williamsburg and I didn’t want to spend a ton of money on fabric, so an IKEA duvet cover was a perfect choice.
Uh… so here’s our Pokemon Go holiday card from last year! It’s six months late and almost too late to even bother posting, but I’m processing photos so I figured I’d share a few.
Photo was taken by Jeff Kuo, graphic design by Cheryll.
For Halloween this year, my girls wanted to be Pokemon. I let them pick which ones, and they picked Pikachu (ok that doesn’t seem too bad), and Jigglypuff (ohmigod big pink ball… how do I do that???) After some consultation with Marcus, we decided that the costume would be a big ball shape worn over a jumpsuit. The ball part of Jigglypuff would be a ball shaped hoop skirt (like a Chinese lantern) with plastic boning, so it’d be collapsible and lightweight.
I was really happy with how it came out because it was all pretty theoretical until about… 2 days before Halloween when I finally got it working. I did a lot of Googling to try to find if anyone else had done something similar, but I wasn’t able to find anything. I ended up having to try a couple different things before I got the understructure working properly.
So here’s a quick tutorial for anyone else who wants to build a giant ball structure out of fabric and boning.
This year’s holiday theme card was of course: Star Wars!
I am so so grateful to Jeff Kuo, who is my go-to photographer for everything. He’s so great to work with, so versatile, produces amazing photos, and I love his cat. =D He was also incredibly forgiving of me for waiting until the last minute to pester him for photos.
I had grand plans to do the holiday card photoshoot in November and be all on top of it, but I ended up having an emergency quilt to finish in November (which I’ll blog about later), so I didn’t get my imperial officer costume done on schedule, and the photoshoot ended up getting pushed into December.
One of these years, I will actually get my act together so that I will not have to pay the rush fee for the card printing.