Disney Cosplay: Ursula from The Little Mermaid - Part 2

Continuing some costuming! Turning myself into Ursula from The Little Mermaid for a geek convention in town later in the year.

Step 3 - Over dress

I believe this dress was $1, and it has already had a cosplay life as part of my steampunk costume.

Plenty of fabric to work with in the skirt.

Hmm, it needed more bulk. Oh yes, my wedding dress skirt is still in the cupboard!

That's a lot of underskirt! But it will sit nicely.

Step 4 - the tentacles

I cut the tentacles out of the over skirt. Sealing the edge was going to be the hardest part, particularly with the curves.

 But look at it working over the purple underskirt - very exciting!

What I ended up doing was cutting the underskirt through as well and tucking the edges of both layers in. This had the added benefit of giving the tentacles some bulk, rather than them being flat.

It took an awful lot of pinning...

I was happy with the shapes that I managed though.

 It really does look like the right shape!

Now to sew it all.....

Did some eco/natural dyeing again

It was half a day's work, but it was fun as always. I'm getting better with my setup and pack down now, when I eco dye at home.
It was a very colourful pot, with cotton, linen and silk.

 A nice little array on the line, drying in the sun initially.

 I'm not a fan of pastel, but the dye process always changes this.

 Some unexpected touches in lace that I thought wouldn't dye!

Here are some of the results. Lots of colour wash this time, very interesting.

 I have a water lily stencil that I want to put over this one.

 This is very pretty, the way the lace trim took up the dye.

 Love those springs!

 This was one of the best of this lot. Great horse shoe prints.

 Lovely speckles on this silk, from the tea leaves.

 And this little top- the copper of the lace has all come from the dyeing!

I did only get my leaves that morning, so maybe they didn't soak long enough and that's why we didn't get strong prints. Apart from this one:

Almost ready for a craft stall now.
#lovelypennypatterns

Disney Cosplay: Ursula from The Little Mermaid - Part 1

I think I'm attracted to villain costumes because they are more practical to make and wear than a lot of the heroine costumes (this is particularly true in games and anime, where they often don't wear much).
My next one: a cosplay of Ursula from The Little Mermaid.

I started with the hardest part: the underskirt.

Now that people around know that I sew, I often get surprise donations! A colleague gave me a whole box of long lengths of fabric that her sister was getting rid of. And what should be in there but purple cotton that I can use for this project!

There's enough to work with, too!

I wanted to make a skirt that can sit between the planned layers (over the white, under the black), and fabric print it with octopus suckers.

Step 1 - make the underskirt.

This was a relatively quick sew. I cut a panel of the darker purple and added it to the top of the pale purple, because there wasn't quite enough length in that panel.

I put a very narrow hem on the bottom, as I wanted it to be neat and not very obvious. Any length that needed to be removed could be taken from the top.

I put a tube on the top so that I could thread elastic through. 

This will be a completely separate skirt from the rest of the costume.

It came together very nicely.

Step 2 - print the octopus suckers on.

What could I use to print and how big should they be? 
The bottom of a glass bottle worked quite well.

Then I just needed white fabric paint and an idea of what spacing I needed for the sucker marks. I added a white dot in the middle of all of them as well, to make them look more like suckers.

Here it is, fully printed and drying on the line. I did a heavier concentration of circles on the bottom to see how it looks. Pretty happy!

Watch this space for the rest of it!