Peacock Fairy Costume Dress

I finished this peacock fairy costume yesterday.  With the sunset getting later and later this time of year, there was plenty of time to head out to the arboretum for a photo shoot yesterday evening.  

I'm really pleased with how this costume turned out!  

I wear fairy costumes for a living so I designed this costume to be really versatile.  Instead of a dress, it's made up of 7 different individual pieces so I can mix and match with some of my other fairy costumes to create a lot of different looks.

The skirt is 4 layers.  There's an iridescent two-tone taffeta as the main part of the skirt.  The ribbons at the front are functional gathers, so I can let the skirt out into a floor length gown or gather it up for a saucy fairy look.

There's a lighter blue ruffle bustle that attaches to the skirt.  The bustle is really long, and can be let out into a ruffle train which follows me like a peacock tail, or adds a lot of shape when it's bustled up.

Layered over that is a tutu made of purple, blue, light blue and black tulle.  The tulle is edged to give it a lot of definition, and I used my new embroidery machine to embroider peacock feathers here and there in the tutu's layers.  This might be my favorite part of the whole costume.  I'm having SO much fun with that machine.

The 4th layer is another bustle / hip scarf that ties on with gold ribbon.  It's a lovely stretchy animal-print fabric with gold flecks.  This fabric was actually the inspiration for the whole costume.  It's simply gorgeous.  I also added a row of super bright LED tape to the underside of this piece, so in low light the LEDs shine down into the tutu and give the whole skirt a subtle glow.

There are 3 pieces to the top.  There's a sheer off-white blouse, an under-bust corset and a peacock bra.  The bra is covered in shiny gold fabric with real peacock feathers layered onto it (spray glue FTW).  

The corset is made from a sparkle velvet (left over from my Merida costume) has triple lacing in the front and is cut low in the back to accommodate my green Fancy Fairy wings.

Read More

Dusty Green Flower Faerie Hoodie with Spiral Embroidery

Custom order through Etsy for Elven Elysium, who makes amazing faerie things too. I like this one SO much that I'm adding it to the repertoire.. check it out here!

Read More

Flower Faerie Hoodie Improvements & Updates

Just finished up this gorgeous Flower Faerie hoodie to ship off to the East Coast this morning.  This one was custom ordered with longer sleeves and no laces on the sides.  It's always fun to make modifications.  This is the second request I've gotten for no side laces and it makes it a rather different hoodie, I think.  Certainly it fits differently.  I like the clean lines of it quite a lot.

I'm also getting a little faster.  This one is my best seller and I've made quite a few of them at this point.  I think I maybe have shaved at least an hour or maybe two hours off the total creation time (so, down to 5-6 hours from 7-8 hours).  Details take time! 

(Also, the side laces take a lot of time.  Maybe that's why I finished this one so quickly)

I keep making teensy improvements too.  My serger does a lot of different types of seams and I keep changing my mind as to which seam type I like best for which seam.  I think my choices are getting better and better. 

For any sewing geeks who might be reading this, I use a Babylock Imagine serger.  It's got a feed differential, which means it can sew two pieces of fabric together at different "speeds" - i.e. it makes gathers or ruffles automatically.  The other cool thing it does is make "lettuce edges" if I sew just one layer of fabric on a stretch differential.  Like this.. see how the sleeve edge is wiggly?

Anyway, that's one thing I've started doing with the later versions of this hoodie, and I think it adds a lot.  Another thing is the way I assemble the wrist cuff.. the way I was doing it before, I ended up with a little uneven jag at the end of the wrist cuff, often as not, and I reworked it so the edges come out even and hidden this time.  It's those little things that make me so happy.

Read More