Sleeping Beauty - A Costume for the Panto.

As Christmas (aka pantomime season) and my daughters birthday are close together, her godmother takes her to a pantomime in Cork, our nearest city. As part of this treat, my daughter likes to wear the costume of the main character. So in the past I've sewn an Alice dress, a Cinderella dress (not blogged), and this year it was Sleeping Beauty's turn.

 

Pink is the colour most associated with Aurora/Sleeping Beauty's dress, but in the film and books, she wears a different dress before she 'falls asleep'. Though my daughter hasn't quite left the 'pink phase'! she didn't take much convincing when I showed her pictures of the other dress worn by Aurora.

An online search for images of the dress, led me to pick View 2 of this vintage Advance pattern 5816 that I already had, because of its v-shaped bodice and skirt.

The main additions the skirt pattern needed was length, and extra fabric added to the centre front and centre back to create pleats. I also curved the top of the bodice at the front and back armholes and cut a centre front seam so that I could create a lace-up bodice.

The sleeves and upper bodice were adapted from Butterick 5890. I recently used this pattern for the Elsa Coronation dress which I sewed for Halloween. I had to draft the white collar myself using a flexible ruler, then measuring the neckline curve once I had sewn the shoulders of the front and back bodices. I've never drafted a collar before, so was surprised and pleased that it lay flat and looked so good.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The dress turned out exactly as we both imagined, especially the centre front which has eyelets and is laced up with narrow grosgrain ribbon.

The fabrics are all from Vibes and Scribes, a well-stocked fabric, wool and haberdashery shop in Cork that now delivers online. The top bodice is cream cotton jersey, the main bodice is a soft-textured black polyester, and the skirt is a medium-weight sateen which was the last piece on the bolt.

 

Though it seemed like I was cobbling together parts of patterns, and making up pieces and instructions as I went along, the dress worked and most importantly she was delighted with it.

 

 

 

 

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Details on Queen Elsa's Coronation Dress

In the film Frozen there is a lot of detailed Scandanavian, and in particular Norwegian, artwork known as rosemaling. This is most evident on Elsa's Coronation dress.

(The previous post looked at finding fabric for this dress)

I considered a few options for decorating this dress, especially appliqué, or sewing on ribbon strips. However ironing appliqué on velvet would damage the pile, and sewing ribbon on a stretch fabric would be difficult and affect the drape of the dress. Initially, drawing the designs on the dress didn't seem the best idea. I looked at clips from the film again, and decided it was at least worth a try. I drew out the design on paper and drew it freehand on the velvet with fabric markers.

It really isn't perfect, but I think it worked much better than the other options and suited the fabric.

The dress is based on Butterick pattern 5980 View D (View B length) which I altered to add sleeves with v-shaped hems and narrowed the dress hem width. I chose this pattern because the seam lines reflected those of the dress in the film. All the inside seams are French seams, with the yoke sewn on the outside and covered with ribbon. 

The top part of the cape is based on the cape pattern from Oliver&S Little Things to Sew, dramatically shortened. The longer pleated part is based on my daughter's height. Her back width was tripled to allow enough fabric for the pleats.

I used organza ribbon for the orange accents on the dress, but used janemeans purple stitched ribbon for the inside  hem of the cape and used janemeans plum wired ribbon for the upper part. The decorations at the neckline on the black velvet were cut out from teal  wired janemeans ribbon.

There's not much more to add except that it's a total success and worth all the work .... you can almost guess the line of the song from the poses in these pictures. The dress induces bouts of random singing 'Let it go' with very demonstrative 'I'm free' while throwing off the cape! 

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Fabric Search for Elsa's Coronation Dress

If it's Elsa, it must be Frozen! We were late to the Frozen party in this house, and finally bought the film during the summer holidays. It was watched on the few wet afternoons we had this summer, my 7yo daughter & 9yo son loved it, but the rest of us could be found openly watching & enjoying it too!

 

The most popular costume from the film is Elsa's shimmery blue Ice Queen/Snow Queen dress, but my daughter has her heart set on the coronation dress. There are excellent and detailed pictures on this blog -Arendellekingdom

Some research on the film and that dress has thrown up some interesting links. One of the most fascinating is from an illustrator on the film, Brittney Lee, who blogged about her design process. She also provided information on the interesting ’rosemaling' designs in the dress fabrics and throughout the film.

There is also an excellent interview with the costume designer, Jean Gillmore, from Frozen on the Tyranny of Style blog.

It was very interesting to discover that many of the illustrations of the costumes are based on the properties of fabrics from which the dresses in Scandanavian countries would have be sewn. For example the weight of a fabric would affect its drape and movement. This is reflected in the animation in the film.

 

 

With all this inside knowledge, I searched for fabric online which would be suitable for a child's costume, and accurately reflect the costumes in the film.

The Coronation dress in the film seemed like a wool fabric, but that would be the most impractical fabric for a child's costume. Then I considered velvet, which would drape and move in a similar manner to wool.Many velvet dress fabrics available online are polyester and stretch velvets or velours, which would probably be most suitable. but I was looking for a fabric with more weight, so was drawn to using cotton velvet, which is expensive to buy in Ireland.

 

 

It took me ages to find the kind of fabric I wanted, either it was too stretchy, too expensive, wrong colour.....

After a very thorough search, I eventually found the specific colours for the coronation dress in a cotton mix velvet fabric from Fjøelner in Denmark. It turned out to be the perfect weight and was delivered extremely quickly.

 

This is where I'm at....

 

I already had black velvet and a suitable pattern Butterick 5980 (ViewD with longer skirt and long sleeves), so the dress and the Cape have been sewn up. Now I just need to figure out how to add the floral/scrolling designs to the velvet on the dress!

 

 

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Fun Sewing for A Toy Wedding

Not having much time for big sewing projects over the school holidays, there are still ways and means of getting some sewing in....

 

When my 3 year old niece wanted two of her toys to have a wedding & I got a request for simple wedding outfits, I needed no further excuse to get back to my machine.

 

 

This McCalls pattern 6005 was bought quite a while ago and it was a complete surprise when I realised that I had already cut out and organised all the tiny pattern pieces. The patterns don't quite shout 'wedding', however the pyjamas top was easily transformed into a wrap-around wedding dress by adding length and layers to the skirt part. The patterns for the leopard print coat and trousers were used for the grooms suit.

 

 

 

The veil, bow tie and shirt collar piece were my own creations! The fabric and trims were scraps and small leftover pieces, chosen on the premise that anything lacy and sparkly would appeal to my niece.

 

 

The 'wedding' had all the trappings of a true Irish wedding, though on a smaller scale in my brother-in-law's house with a meal, dancing, a disco and finishing with the national anthem! Of course, everyone was also talking about the clothes...

 

 

 

As an extra surprise for my niece, I sewed tiny (teaspoon-sized!) aprons as 'housewarming' gifts for the 'newly weds', inspired by the aprons I sewed in this post.

 

 

The grooms apron is Parsons Gray laminated cotton with janemeans beige narrow stitched ribbon as ties and a headband.

 

 

The brides apron is an Amy Butler laminated cotton, bought from this Irish shop (Pippablue). It has a Liberty print fabric pocket, janemeans narrow slate stitched ribbon ties, as well as a matching headscarf. The elastic was added to the ribbon at the neckline with a simple zig-zag stitch, to ensure the apron would fit over the head.

 

These little aprons were kindly modelled by Mickey and Minnie, before being delivered to a very appreciative niece.

 

 

 

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