Oh, San Diego Comic-Con. It's an amazing experience that any self proclaimed nerd should attend at least once in their life. You get the chance to see panels of your favorite shows, possibly meet your favorite actors and do fun, free experiences. It also gives you the chance to show off your true love of your fandom by creating a cosplay. Now cosplay in itself is a very huge topic that could be an article all on its own but it something that I like to take part in. Over the past years I have done quite a few such as Ariel, Amy Pond, Rey and Belle. This year I had big plans for making three new cosplays for the attendance of this year's comic-con. I however, was a bit lazy and only had time to make one but I made sure it was a good one at that. Now I am quite the Disney fan, as you can tell from previous cosplays, but aside from the films, I am an even huger fan of the parks. This year I planned on doing a parks-based cosplay. Now of course it would have been fun to just go with the red headed wench from Pirates of the Caribbean but instead I wanted to go with a character that had a dark side, a character who really liked to walk on a thin line. I'm talking of course about the tightrope walker from the Haunted Mansion.
Often spotted in the doorless and windowless chamber of the Haunted Mansion, this character had more than just a couple costume pieces that you could purchase online to make the final outcome. The most challenging was the skirt.
As you can see it has a very unique design of a white circle skirt with green and red flowers on it. First, I know for a fact that you can buy this whole outfit online and yes it is absolutely gorgeous but I decided to take it the hard/fun way. Now, seeing how YouTube is YouTube, there were about 100 or so videos on how exactly to make your own circle skirt. I did watch them, but after losing focus a couple minutes into it, I decided, meh what do they know it's not like they are actually trained professionals I got the gist of this. So with that, I went straight to work on the nearest white bed sheet I owned and made a circle in the middle of it, because that's how a majority of the tutorial videos started. I had hopes that what I made was a tiny circle at best and if it was too small I could go bigger.
Then of course I actually tried the thing on and...
I'm pretty sure I could have fit a baby elephant through this hole. I made a major fail as I realized I should have actually listened to the videos and really done my own measurements with real measuring tape and not a random guesstimated length with some ribbon. However, I realized I had already gone too far and would have to work my way out of this from here.
Luckily, I had a good audio book to keep me entertained as I went to work. Anyway, I took a guess that maybe if I cut a line down the middle it would give me a chance to try and readjust the skirt, which did work. Now that I was able to tighten it and actually make it my size, I carefully placed pins where the overlaying pieces met, then slid it off so I could sew the waist altogether.
Seeing how it still hadn't reached a skirt like look to it, I decided to even it out and make it look a little bit shorter. I'm terrible at cutting straight so I just placed a curved duct tape line along the skirt for me to follow which actually worked.
I tried it on and strangely felt princessey with my long circle skirt, even if it was only just a bed sheet. Considering that I had been working on it outside on my back porch I decided to clean it and make it even whiter, before the next part, by throwing it in the wash. Also the lack of sunlight did put a bit of a hindering on the process.
This was the part I was looking forward to the most: flower power time. Looking at the photo, I'm sure there was a much cleaner and prettier way of making the flower design on the skirt. I however, was running out of time and went with the more efficient method of spray painting and Sharpie-ing.
Once everything dried, it was time to bring out my favorite handy dandy duct tape to do some more hemming.
It was as if the skirt knew I was almost done working on it as it seemed to be the hardest cutting I ever had to do on something but, we finally made it! I threw on a petticoat to give it an extra poof like it has in the photo and I was amazed with the outcome.
I felt so proud of myself for not only working on something without any real help from a video tutorial but also because it was my first sewing masterpiece. Cosplay always gives you a sense of accomplishment when you're done working on your pieces that's hard to describe.
The main point of this story is guys, if you want to cosplay something but aren't so confident on how to pull it together, just have fun with it and do your best. Nobody started out as an instant master -- it's going to take a lot of work.
