My Disney Birthday Party, Part 1: The Dress

For my birthday party this year I decided to have a Disney theme.   What a fun idea!   At first I was going to limit it strictly to old school Disney classics, but then the more I thought about it, the more I decided I wanted to go as Merida from Brave.   Because she's awesome and taught me that you can have masses of ginger curls and still be a princess.   Hurrah!  So I went online and started looking for Merida costumes.   There didn't seem to be any adult ones anywhere.   Nevermind, I thought, I've got two months.   I'll make one.   I've made a dress already, so I have a bit of an idea what I'm doing.   It'll be fine!   So off I went to Mandors to look for a pattern.   They're the best place I've found for patterns.   This is their website.   I decided to go for this one:

I did pattern C (bottom right) only without all the fancy decorative bits and millions of buttons on the sleeves.   Next stop was fabric.   I went to Edinburgh Fabrics for this (http://www.edinburghfabrics.co.uk/).   This being a costume I decided I wanted to make it as cheaply as possible, so I settled for some very cheap satin lining material.   Once again, going for a cheap fabric proved to be a BAD DECISION!   The fabric turned out to be fairly horrible to work with.   It unraveled itself pretty easily, so that I often ended up having to sew seams a couple of times to get them to stay.   Not only that, but it turned out to not be ironable, as I found out to my cost while trying to iron on interfacing.   Not only did I have to make a whole sleeve again, but I also had to buy a new ironing board cover.   So yes, no more cheap fabric!   Anyway, this was my fabric:

So I took my measurements and got started with the cutting of patterns, pinning the patterns to fabric and cutting fabric.   Boring!   The fabric was also annoying to cut.   I had to keep it absolutely flat to the floor to stop it pulling itself out of place.   I had to use lots more pins than usual while working with it.   Some pattern pieces pinned to the fabric:

  



So I started with the pinning and sewing, following the instructions.   They were pretty easy to follow, and when the dress was done it fit me pretty well!   Hurrah!   I added a bit of ribbon round the neckline, to be a simplified version of the white bits around the top of Merida's dress.   Pretty convincing, I thought!   I make a great Merida!  This is the finished product (I swear it doesn't make me look that chubby in real life; camera flashes seem to have an unfortunate effect on the fabric):

The final stage for the costume was for me to dye my hair extra red and make it extra massive and curly.   Fun!

 


All in all, I'm going to declare this dress a partial success.   I mean it served a purpose, which was to be a costume for a party, but after just one evening it developed four holes along the seams, due to crap fabric.   It's also stained and to be honest I have no idea how to wash it without destroying it.   On the plus side, it was pretty simple to make, feels AMAZING to wear, got lots of compliments, and even won a costume prize.   I do really like the design as well.   Perhaps I'll try this again sometime, but with a nicer fabric.