The Looking Glass Wars, Redd Heart Dress Diary

The Red Monster Dress was my big costume for Dragon Con 2011, and was updated (MORE JEWELS!) for Costume Con 30...  I saw a Guo Pei fashion show with the black cabbage rose dress, right as I happened to be reading Frank Beddor's Looking Glass Wars.  The red queen in that retelling of the Alice in Wonderland story wears a dress covered in man eating killer roses, which I thought the Guo Pei dress was exactly that!  What's not in the dress diary - I pretty much used the Simplicity Phantom of the Opera pink dress pattern and built on top of it... Under the dress I wore an Elizabethan hoop with a 50's crinoline on top.

Catching Fire Capitol Portraits ~ Katniss

Here is the construction diary for my Katniss Wedding Dress.  We entered a group in the YA Lit Costume Contest for the Yule Ball at Dragon Con 2013 with Capitol Portrait Costumes of Effie Trinket and Cesar Flickerman.  We won!  Best in Show (for most ruffles on humans ever!)

So with maybe some taking in, some rhinestone repair (I left a trail of sparkelly breadcrumbs) and "skinny-securing" of feathers on the bodice, this will be even better next year!

Vivaldi's Masquerade of Versailles ~ Summer

For the Dragon Con 2013 Friday Night Workmanship Contest we did the Seasons of Versailles...

 

Photo by Roger Benson

(Roger Benson)

I did Summer, all blue skies, sunflowers, and butterflies.....

The concept was Ashlee's (Winter), with the idea being "gigantic, blingy, fabulous" so there really wasn't any "is this too much?".  These gowns were not meant to be historically accurate, so polyester dollar store flowers and printed satin-paper butterflies weren't a big faux-pas.

Our group decided that just a few pages of documentation each would be appropriate.  Sadly the judges didn't have time to actually look at any of the documents...  Here's what I had prepared.  These weren't particularly technical dresses, but for my contribution to workmanship, it was making 150 or so origami petals, and for cool materials - I used 35 fridge magnet butterflies....