Welcome back! Last up is showing how I made Hornet's dress. In this guide I will cover the following steps:
1. Make a muslin template
2. Materials used / Construction
3. Armholes
Make a Muslin Template
So this is dress was deceptively "simple". Looking at the dress one would think it's a circle skirt just extended. Well thanks to my many mock ups, it turns out that is not the case. So at first I was looking at doing a "paneled skirt" pattern but decided I wanted fewer seamlines. As always, I make a muslin mock up of the fabric portion. This helps me know what challenges I had making the garment and everything is better the second time you make it.
I knew I would need horsehair braid to help with the hem sticking further out but as you can see from the photo above it was not as full as I wanted. I go in more detail about how I made the dress below.
Materials Used / Construction
The materials for this was dress was honestly more than I expected. So to get the fullness of the dress I wanted, I needed to make a double circle skirt but lengthened to hit where I wanted on my leg. Here's the list:
5 yards of muslin
5 yards of medium interfacing for mock
5 yards of medium interfacing for actual dress
5 yards of polyester twill fabric in the color "wine"
2 inch horsehair braid (bought pack that had 50 yards)
5 yards of black polyester lining
~ 1/4 yards heavy interfacing
3 yards of black spandex
stretch needles
7 inch wooden embroidery hoop
E6000 glue
So to get the dress to look more full it was clear the amount of fabric and the horsehair braid was insufficient. So interfacing to the rescue! I used medium weight interfacing to achieve a more full look.
Much better! Additionally I did some box pleats at the top. So another unique issue was that Hornet doesn't really have shoulders...
So to do this, I attached a wooden embroidery hoop at the top of the dress before the collar attachment. Now it feels a little uncomfortable but honestly it makes the silhouette look so much better. Now that mock looked pretty good it was time to make the actual dress. It was the same process and I sewed in the horsehair braid along the bottom. Now I didn't want a seam line 2 inches from the bottom so I hand stitched the top of the horsehair braid to the dress which took forever, but I'm glad it doesn't show unless you are very close.
The black lining was sewn into the dress by stitching along the top near the neck then carefully folding the lining along the pleats before stitching along the bottom. I chose to line the dress since I wanted my body to fully disappear if I twirled or did any sort of action movement.
The collar was made by making a paper mock of what first looked like a dog cone collar, but then I just drew my desired slanted hem. Since that shape wouldn't lay flat, I cut the paper pattern in half and used that to cut my fabric. I cut both halves three times; once for the red fabric, once for matte black cotton that I had, and once for the heavy interfacing. The interfacing was used to allow the collar to stand up on it's own. I sewed all pieces together then sewed to the main body of the dress. At this point the fabric was too thick to use the embroidery hoop, so I improvised and glued the inner most embroidery hoop ring to the inside of the dress collar on the inside. I used E6000 glue and it's held up great so far.
Last thing I did was make some spandex gloves and pants to go with my costume. I bought an activewear pants pattern and used that to make the pants. The gloves were made with the "turkey hand" method.
BONUS: Armholes
So this wasn't required to actually just wear the costume, but I wanted to be able to move around and be pretty independent at a convention (i.e. not need a handler very much or at all). To facilitate that, I made some arm holes!
The best place to put them was going to be on the inside of one of the folds so I put on the dress and marked that part with chalk. I then cut 4 strips of fabric about 4-5 cm longer than my armhole length, placed a strip on either side of the line (still uncut!) and sewed two parallel lines on either side of the line and stopped at the end of my marked line. Then I cut along my line but stopped just short of the end of my line then cut it in a triangle. The I folded the strips to the inside of the cape and top stitched along the edge to secure the strips to the inside.
** I overblew the shot so you can see where my armhole is **
Done!
I know this was done pretty fast but honestly it becomes pretty straightforward after you make a mock. I cannot recommend them enough! I hoped you liked this tutorial and if something didn't make sense or you want more info, you can send me an email and I'll get back to you as soon as possible!
See you next time when we start a new project!
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