"Run away! Run away!"

I made a dress for the Renaissance Faire on Saturday. I started it Monday. (I’m insane, I know.) The outside is green brocade home decor fabric, and the sleeve lining is an antique gold gathered taffeta -- also home dec. Unfortunately, all I have right now is a pic from my camera phone, but this whole post will make more sense once I take decent pics tomorrow.

Here I am with King Arthur, Patsy and a random stranger.

Funny story about the green fabric...the girl who cut it for me rang me up incorrectly. It was on sale for $4.50/ yd [regularly $19.99/yd], and I got 6 ¼ yards. Somehow (and I realized this way later), she only charged me for ¼ yard. So I got allll that fabric...for $1.12. It’s kind of sad that I bought so much other fabric and stuff that I didn’t notice a $27 gap!

I fell in love with the beaded trim, but of course JoAnn’s didn’t have enough to do the neckline *and* the sleeves. I had to make do with another trim for the sleeves.

After my unintentional savings, I splurged a little on the gold fabric and got 3 yards @ $6.50 apiece [regularly $12.99/yd]. The red trim was 1 ½ yds @ $5.59 apiece, and the beaded trim ended up being 2 yds @ $5.39 apiece [regularly $8.99/yd]. All in all, this will cost me around $40. Not bad, considering how much the Halloween costumes are costing me.

I put all the main pieces together and tried it on. WELL. Apparently Butterick’s loose, flowy dress pattern is a body-hugging (and not in an entirely bad way) column dress. Whaaa? I know I’m no stick, but I am definitely not so large as to warrant the tightness of this dress. [It makes my ass look fantastic, though...maybe I’ll make one of these in the future.] So, I went back to the pattern, bought another 2 yards of fabric, and added the godets for view A of the pattern. Once I put them in, I got the effect I was going for in the first place. It was a big pain in my ass, though. I was really nervous that I wouldn’t be able to finish it in time.

I took some pictures of myself in the dress before I started putting the godets in, and I’m going to send it to Butterick to complain. There is *no way* that the dress shown on the envelope came from the pattern. Warning: the following is not a pretty picture.


Also, I helped my mom with a 'secret' pirate costume for my dad. I made a very manly ruffly shirt. Aaar, matey! I'll try to get some pics of that, too.

On the Halloween front:
The whole point of making elaborate costumes was to wear them into Hersheypark during one of their Halloween weekends. A wrench in the gears: Hersheypark apparently doesn’t allow adults to dress up. Something about frightening the kids. Personally, I think that’s crap. Plenty of other parks have ‘kid-friendly’ hours during the day and scarier stuff going on at night. And our costumes won’t even be remotely scary! So*now we need to find something else to do. I mean, we’ll still go into the park (dressed like normal people), but I have put way too much time and effort and money into these costumes to not wear them *somewhere*. Any ideas? Damnit, someone throw a Halloween party so my creations won’t go to waste!