Making Maleficent

Happy New Year Everyone!  It's been quiet on the craft front in the Auntie Sandra household.  There was a mad rush before Christmas with outfits for the girls, a table runner for their Mam and bunting with photos on, among other things.  Since then I've been really lazy though and just doing jigsaws that Santa brought, and I don't think I can really count them.

So, after Charlotte's Halloween experience of being a character no-one would recognise (see here) she decided she wanted to be Maleficent for Christmas.  Very festive.  Originally she asked for a dress with the wings and horns, but we compromised with the Christening dress.

So we still needed horns and a train, but no wings.  Thankfully.  I found some black, crinkly fabric to try to get the texture and the 'V' pattern down the centre front and back.  I've never attempted to make anything on the bias before, so why not go for something high profile like the centre front of a dress?  I adapted Simplicity 5520.  When I say adapted, I mean I took out some panels, narrowed the whole dress massively, altered the sleeves and how they were set in the dress, added a big collar,changed the neckline and stuck a big train in the back.  Otherwise it's exactly the same!  After I'd made the changes to the pattern I worked out how much fabric to buy.  Because it was going to be cut on the diagonal of the fabric I ended up doing lots of diagrams and Pythagoras' Theorem came into play.  I also had to hunt out a protractor.  Does everyone do things like this, or is it just me that's that sad?

I remembered to take photos while making, so I'm afraid I will be sharing them.

Front piece pinned on fabric on the bias.

Fronts and backs cut out.

Fronts and backs attached.  You can just about see that I remembered to add interfacing at the neckline.

A close up of the 'V' effect down the centre front.

The sleeves on the original pattern weren't big enough for my purposes.  In the original Maleficent costume the sleeves are attached down the sides of the dress.  If I'd left them as they were the poor child wouldn't have been able the lift her arms up.  Although that might not have been such a bad thing!

The original pattern is on the right.  You can see I basically just stretched the shape out.  Once Charlotte had tried on the dress we discovered the sleeves were too long.

By several inches!  So the sleeves had to come back out to be altered.

I also changed the shape while I was on.

This photo was from before the alteration, but you can see how the sleeves are attached all the way down the side seam.

I did an awful lot of rolled hems on this dress.  On the plus side, I now quite enjoy doing them, although I do still tend to have a couple of false starts each time.

Next up was the the train.  I ended up putting a big triangle into the centre back each side of the zip.  I believe the technical term is godet.  Each triangle was split into three sections and each section has a contrast fabric across the bottom part.  It looks dead easy.  It took me about two days to figure out what I was doing!

  

The contrast is supposed to be leather.  Charlotte's obviously isn't.

Then came the collar.  Ah, the collar.

Each side has two separate 'petals'.  These petals join at centre front and back.  I thought I needed some sort of triangular shape.  After much experimentation I came up with this shape.

The curve down the right hand side is where it fits to the neckline.  I needed two of those for each top and bottom, in fabric and in stiff interfacing.  Thirty two in all.  Seems a bit excessive, doesn't it?

I did think to start with that I might need to put wire in them to keep their shape.  I didn't in the end.  It would have held the shape better, but I wanted it to be comfortable for Charlotte to wear.  That is after all what it is for.

One side of the finished collar.

After that the dress itself only needed a zip putting in.  So here we have the finished dress.

Front.

Back.  And close up of train.

I'm hoping that if I don't mention to anyone, that they won't notice that some of the grains in the triangles are going the wrong way.  But you're not going to tell anyone, are you?

On to the headdress.  I got to do papier mache.  I think I was about ten when I last did that.  I made some twisted horn shapes out of tin foil.  And blew up a balloon to the size of Charlotte's head.

I then spent several days covered in flour and water glue and newspaper.  After everything was covered and dry I tried the headdress on Charlotte and cut it to shape.  I attached the horns with tape and covered in yet more newspaper.

The horns are slightly wonky and I think they're too big, but I'm proud.

It was then time to get out the glue gun and cover it in fabric.

All ready in time to open on Christmas morning.  I'm just waiting for photos of Charlotte wearing the outfit to show you.

And what did the other niece want for Christmas?  Followers of this blog will know Katie has a bit(!) of a mermaid/Ariel obsession.  This year I caved.  She now has a tail and bra to wear in the bath!  More on that to follow.

Taking shape

As I said in my previous post, I decided to use Simplicity 5520 as a base for the Elsa dress.

Unfortunately it would need quite a lot of tweaking to get the look I was after. Cue copious amounts of greaseproof paper and nicely sharpened pencils. From a nice simple dress with four main pattern pieces we went to one with 11 pieces in the space of a couple of hours. It went quite smoothly, but I did start to get a bit lost off when I tried to add seam allowance back in!

Please excuse the quality of the photos, it's something I'm going to work on in future.  I had to put the pattern pieces on a piece of ivory fabric.  It's not a good day when you realise that your carpet is very similar in colour to greaseproof paper!  Ah well, it meant I didn't have to vaccuum.

The sewing together went smoothly and relatively quickly.  My side front/centre front seams don't quite match, but I won't tell anyone if you don't. For the cloak bit I just cut a piece of net about 2m long to roughly the right length, gathered it and sewed it in the seam between the net and the lycra of the bodice. Katie did try it on when all relavent pieces were together.  It is a little large around the bodice (seriously, these children are weird shapes), but she could at least get in and out of it.  On to the sleeves.  The sleeves included in the pattern weren't the right style at all.  When I made a dress with the pattern last time I did draft some.  By myself.  And amazingly they fit.  I can't remember much about the process other than it took several different books with different instructions before I cracked it.  It was a very proud moment when they fitted into the dress.  I kept pointing them out to people.  Honestly.  The most boring part of a princess dress.  I digress.  I did make the pattern piece slightly longer (in the vain hope that Katie has grown a bit in the last year) and made the wrist end pointy, to look more like Elsa's dress.

Then I tried to attach them.  And I tried again.  And again.  I just couldn't get my head around the logistics of it (this is what happens when you don't follow patterns).  I even tried tacking the sleeve in and I avoid tacking at all costs.  My problem was that to hide the seam in the lining under the arm (basically in her armpit) the rest of the sleeve was being pulled wrong and I'd have ended up sewing it closed.  Not helpful.  In the end, and after several days of head scratching and randomly saying to people "But why won't they go in, WHY?"  I hit upon a solution.  I'm fairly certain it's unorthodox and it felt like cheating but I, whisper, put some teeny, tiny cuts in the bodice.  Just in the seam allowance really.  But it worked!  The dress now has sleeves. I've since hemmed the skirt and sewn in a bodice lining. I really only lined it because I think one layer of net might be too flimsy for the top of the bodice and I thought too many seam allowances in net would be scratchy on small people's skin.

And here we have it. Drumroll please........the almost completed Elsa dress. With a over a week to go until the big day. It's a bit concerning being so nearly done. I've only got to hack off (sorry, carefully measure and trim) the bottom of the cloak and clag on some sparkly bits. I know the original is quite understated in the sparkles department, but Katie's almost 7 and there's nothing understated about her!




The front view.  I'm quite liking how the net looks sparkly as well as the bodice.  It's not, it's just plain white, but it looks good in photos.  I think I've got enough of the trim used around the neckline to go around the bottom of the cloak.  I'm trying to add a bit of weight to the cloak for all important twirling.  The dress should flare out nicely as there's plenty of fabric in the skirt and the lycra's quite heavy.

The bodice front...












and the bodice back.  You can see where the cloak's attached.  After her birthday we'll hopefully have some pictures of a child in the dress, but I'll post some more later in the week of the completed dress.