#croissant is also entering the fray though | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

erikaalamode · 7 years ago

Text

Previously on The Death Dress…

Poor unsuspecting Erika thought dyeing her dress would be easy. Little did she know that dyeing would feel a whole lot like dying…

Destruction! Mayhem! Panic! The dress… it backed up sewers, reversed street signs, and stole everyone’s left shoe!

Finally, our worn and haggard hero conquered the dyeing process, though the dress did not escape unscathed. The dye looks uneven in areas and it’s splotchy where sap got into the fabric, but it was done… The battle was won. All was well.

Sort of… the dress wouldn’t have been ready for SDCC, and it, as all powerful objects forged in the heart of Mount Doom to take control over all humanity, passed into myth (otherwise known as the sewing room closet). But we had not seen the last of this dress!

*Insert dramatic theme song here*

Two years after my friend and I survived San Diego Comic Con, I got a crazy idea to make an Ursula cosplay and enter it in the D23 Expo’s Mousequerade. I am completely, utterly, hopelessly obsessed with Disney—a fact I probably should have warned my roommate about before we moved in together—and I was having a Little Mermaid moment (but when am I not having a Little Mermaid moment?), and I thought, oh what fun it’ll be to make a giant octopus dress!

Turns out, this project was actual fun. Not the ‘this will be fun, oh just kidding, I’m actually only laughing so I’m not crying’ fun of the Padmé dress, but genuine, ‘I can’t sleep because I’m having too much fun’ fun.

That whole experience really ignited a passion for sewing that I’d never really had before. I’d sewn dresses (complete with frustrated crying and some colorful words for the sewing machine) and I’d made little pillows and things in the past, but never something that made me this incredibly happy.

I’m a political science, human rights, and psychology student, so I spend a lot of time working in my own headspace, the grand results of which are usually papers. There was something so amazing—euphoric, even—in creating a crazy, impossible costume with tentacles that wiggle around me when I walk. I made a tangible object so vastly different than what I’m used to producing. And I felt like Ursula, fabulous, powerful, bold, and I loved it.

Essentially, I got addicted to sewing and particularly to making cosplays of amazing characters, and I needed my next fix. My parents came to visit me for my birthday, and they brought me my sewing machine with some projects that I could work on. One of those projects turned out to be all the Padmé supplies that we had stored away and largely forgotten about in the past two years. I made a corset, some dresses, and spent time fiddling with my Ursula wig, but I didn’t really bother with the Padmé dress.

A couple months later, I heard back from D23 that I had been accepted as a finalist for the Mousequerade, and my mom and I decided to make a mother-daughter trip out of the expo and go for the whole event. That meant three days of cosplays. I had Ursula for one day, and an Edna Mode Halloween costume my mom had made for me in my senior year of high school, but that meant I needed one more cosplay.

Side note: I tried to convince my mom to cosplay with me, but she was too hesitant—I’m still working on it.

Anyway, D23 was the perfect opportunity to revive the Padmé dress. Two years was sufficient (barely) to recover from the emotional toll that dyeing the dress had taken, and I was ready to take another shot at her.

Here’s how that went!

First, I needed to see if the dress even fit anymore. Having spent two years gorging myself on baguettes, cheese, champagne, croissants, and chocolate macarons while living in France, I didn’t exactly have high hopes about what was about to happen when I put that dress on.

Miraculously, the dress was actually a bit large in several places. This was great news. I don’t typically think a whole lot about my weight—my dad’s motto in life has always been, “Live to eat, don’t eat to live,” and I learned something valuable about food over form from that.

However, in the case of this dress, I just about squealed (that’s a lie, I’ve never been one for the squeal-y thing; I tried it one Christmas and it really didn’t feel like me and frankly, it just made us all pretty uncomfortable—but I was super happy about the dress).

If I had outgrown the dress, that would mean I’d have to scrap it. There was absolutely no space in any of the seams to open it up, and you can bet there was no way I was going to dye another one. The fact that it was a bit large gave me some leeway to take it in at certain points so it would fit whatever shape I am today.

I probably should have adjusted the outer dress and the under dress separately, but I was feeling both lazy and ambitious, so I sewed the lining into the shell around the top edge. When I got to the halter, I used a long strip of leftover fabric, folded in half, as a strap. I attached it to one side of the dress between the shell and the lining, and left the other side loose so I could attach some snap closures at a later time.

With the hook, but there is still gapping at the side

There was some gapping at my sides where the scoop back transitioned into the halter top. Had I stuck with the original design of the pattern I used, straps would have held this in place, but Padmé’s too cool for straps so I had to figure out how to channel my inner Tim Gunn and make it work.

I added a hook and eye closure about an inch above the base of the scoop at my lower back to close the scoop a little tighter and hold the sides in. This fixed the gapping to the degree that I was no longer worried about accidentally flashing someone if I leaned forward, because as bold as cosplay might make me feel, that’s not the quite the show we’re aiming for.

The gathers at the halte

I wanted to take it in just a bit more to be safe, so I gathered the neckline of the halter top to bring the sides in closer to my body and add a little more tension to the top edge of the dress. I danced around in the dress for a little while, aggressively serenading my roommate with Broadway show tunes, and the dress held up, so it looked like everything was secure.

One thing that did not change was my height; I’ve only been growing in one direction since middle school, and that direction is definitely not up. But this was great because it meant the dress was still the right length, and it left me about an inch to do the hem.

I rolled the hem over twice and ironed it flat to make it easier to sew. Then, I hand-stitched this using a thread that matched the purple dye so I could hide the stitches. The under dress hem was rolled and ironed and then hemmed by machine because it’s hidden and didn’t need to look as pretty.

With that done, I could move on to the outer drape-cape-dress-poncho?-flowy-thingy (the technically correct term, yes). I had done the draping years ago, so I knew what it could look like, but I was a little fuzzy on the details. However, general confusion is my default state of being, so I proceeded as usual with a trial-and-error, make-it-up-as-we-go sort of strategy.

First, I did up the back seam of the cape (let’s just call it a cape—it’s probably more of a poncho, but that word gives me serious 3rd grade flashbacks to purple crochet, and that war is best left alone for now).

Because I don’t have a serger in New York, I was worried about the chiffon fraying if I left the edges raw. In light of that, I decided to do the back in a French seam, which would hide the raw edges and also give me a reinforced section to stitch my gathers into the back of the cape.

Next, I found the center front of the cape, and hand stitched the ribbon to the halter neckline of the dress and down each side until I reached the darts at the bust. The stitches didn’t really have to be hidden because the large necklace that Padmé wears would cover the neck anyway, but I wanted it to be pretty so I went with hand stitching.

I draped everything back on me and pinned the dress and cape in place so I could mark the ribbons to put snaps for my upper arms and wrists. I found the center between where the snaps would go and marked this as well. While I had it all draped on, I put a rubber band to make the purple tail in the front as well. I took a break to play around it in, because cosplay should be fun and I like pretty things and twirly things and colorful things—I really like this dress.

When I finally got back to work, I drew a straight chalk line on the chiffon between the center point on the upper arm to the center point on the wrist. Then, I stitched across this line using a long stitch length on my machine.

I gathered this down to the length of my arm, leaving a bit of room for flexibility, then tied off the threads to hold it in place. At this point, the cape looked a lot like super colorful wings, so I amused myself with that for a while before moving on.

When the novelty of my fancy wings finally wore off, I used my machine to do a running stitch up the back of the cape, from the top of the purple to the base of the scoop back where the yellow ribbons ended. I used a long stitch length so I could gather this and tie off the threads on the under side of the chiffon.

In retrospect, I should have reinforced this with hand stitching, because while I was floating around in it at D23, my mom accidentally stepped on the hem (see, this is why I should have trimmed it shorter, but we all know how that went) and the gathers burst open. We had a little emergency sewing kit so once we got inside we could fix it easily enough, but when I got back, I redid it by machine and then stitched through the seam allowance twice to reinforce it. That said, I was on a roll (and a severe time crunch) and I really wanted to get it done.

The original

The quick fix

The reinforced redo

Now I could add the snaps! I sewed two to each upper arm and two to each wrist to hold the wide ribbon edge closed. I also sewed two to the back, at the base of the scoop to the yellow ribbon, and on either side of the hook and eye on the dress to attach the cape once I was in the dress.

You’d never believe it—I hardly could, but the dress was done! I swooped around my apartment in it for a while and yelled some Star Wars quotes at some unsuspecting friends who came by, they were confused and probably a little scared, and it was all great fun.

All I had left to do was make the accessories, which at this point felt a bit like the last half of Return of the King: unnecessary because the story is technically already done, but you still have to watch it because it isn’t actually done until you do. But that is for next time, because I’m still busy dancing in my Padmé dress.

Padmé’s Lake Dress, Part 3 Previously on The Death Dress… Poor unsuspecting Erika thought dyeing her dress would be easy. Little did she know that dyeing would feel a whole lot like…

0 notes