Elsa [Ballgown], Making Of – Part 5: Stola and Bag

And finally here is another part of my Elsa Ballgown series.
If you haven’t read the other parts, be sure to check them out right here.

The dress itself was ready by now, but since I didn’t want to get into the ballroom with my big convention-bag, I wanted to make a fitting one for my dress. So I started to design my bag and get the measurements I wanted according to the fabric and accessories I had bought for this or at hand.

Also, on a sidenote: I will never use panne velvet for anything again.

So I started with the lining and the side parts to get the size and lenght correctly. My cat was a huge helper here while elaborating the strings.

Meow. Looking good.

Elsa [Ballgown], Making Of – Part 4: Shoes and MakeUp

Welcome back to my Elsa Ballgown progress! This time I’m going to write about her shoes and the make up! 🙂
There won’t be that much to talk about, but I’m doing my best to tell you every detail.

But before doing so, I want to remind you, that this is part 4 of my Elsa Ballgown costume makeing of. If you want to read part 1-3, feel free to check them out right here: part 1 (wig & accessories), part 2 (corset), part 3 (skirts). 😀

First of all I had an idea in my mind which I drew onto paper:

Sorry for the German. (These are just some notes for myself to remember.)
I had seen some fitting shoes on ebay which I wanted to buy. But guess what. The moment I wanted to buy them they weren’t in stock anymore. Yay. So I decided on these ones:

Not the ones I had in mind, but this flower-like fabric at the toes is somehow fitting for Elsa.
So I started with elaborating the ribbon I had in mind for the shoes.

Elsa, Making of – Part 3: The Undershirt

Wow, it took me way to long to start a new blogpost, but here it finally is!

If you haven’t read part 1 (wig) and part 2 (shoes) yet, feel free to do so!

This time I’m talking about the undershirt of my Elsa Icegown Cosplay I started 2 years ago.
But let me warn you: After this part I don’t have anything else done. I need to finish the corset, start the cape/train and edit the skirt. And I’m thinking about ordering new fabric for her skirt, because I don’t like the shape anymore.

That being said, here is a picture of her undershirt (the sleeves and the part around her chest) :

I have to say… trying to figure out the actual pattern here was really hard.
(The pattern for her train will be even harder, I believe.)

So where did I start? I took a look at different movie-screens, watched the movie several times and searched for cosplays with accurate sleeve patterns to get my own done.

This is what I came up with:

The pattern is a simple sleevepattern, I alternated to fit the form of her rounded shoulderparts. I did the pattern for the whole thing by myself and cut it out before painting the sleeve-pattern on, to check if it would fit.
And it worked. So I used that to get another piece of fabric where I can paint the forms onto without it messing everything up.

Elsa [Ballgown], Making Of – Part 3: Skirts

Heeeelllo there! It’s been a while… again. So sorry, but Real Life just hits me everytime I think I do have more time to work on costumes or on blogposts.

With that being said, here’s the next part of my Elsa Ballgown Cosplay! For more information, click here! 🙂
Also, if you haven’t read part 1 (wig & accessoires) and part 2 (corset) of this costume, but you want to, feel free to click onto the links!

I started with thinking about how to arrange the skirts and how many I actually want. Since the FanArt isn’t clear at that point I used my phantasy and could choose myself how I wanted it to look like. I decided that I wanted to have 6 skirts in total, each one with a 3m hemline. … Yup, don’t ask me, I don’t know why I did that. All in all the skirts took most of the time of this cosplay.

I started with the skirt at the bottom. A short one to get a bit of volume:

At this point it looks like some kind of huge panty. Okay.
I ruffed it by hand and pinned in onto myself to take a look:

I then found some roses out of fabric which were sewn onto the organza which I used for one of the following layers of skirts.

Elsa [Ballgown], Making Of – Part 2: Corset

Aaand another blogpost is heeere! This time I’m going to talk about my ballgown-corset which… was a lot of work. Would I do that again? .. Probably yes, but only because it just looks super nice. If it wouldn’t… I would most likely skip making five layers for a (simple?) corset!

Anyways, if you haven’t read part 1 (wig & accessoires) yet, feel free to do so by clicking here!

First of all I made a sketch about the differences of the snowqueen/icegown corset and the one I want to use for the ballgown. As you can see there are some minor, but important, differences. Why making one pattern for both corsets? That’s too easy, isn’t it? Well I decided I wanted some extra work, so I kept going on…

… and here it is: the finished pattern. At this point I had to decide how many layers I wanted, which fabric I should use and what the top layer should look like… and I eventually had an idea I liked. I wanted to have a lining layer, two more layers in which I could sandwhich the boning in between… and the top layer should be chiffon. But I didn’t want to see the chiffon-pieces sewn together through the fabric, so I decided to sew chiffon with another layer of fabric together. Yay.

I also wanted to get some fabric-paint and glitter onto the chiffon-layer so I tried a few things out. I used some kind of glitterpaint (the paint itself is transparent, so after drying there’s only the glitter left – niiice!) and spraypaint for the fabric because I wanted to keep the blue-darkblue-lilac/purple-color-pattern the fanart had. If done right the colorgradient looks really nice! I liked that so I moved on.

Elsa, Making of – Part 2: The Shoes

So after a lot of time… here’s the next tutorial!
This time I’m going to tell you a bit about how I made my shoes of my “normal” Elsa costume (the icegown)…
I don’t have a lot of pictures of the process, so please bear with me!
And since I finished them about one year ago I can’t remember everything… oops.

If you haven’t read part 1 about the wig yet, feel free to do so by clicking here.

So I started with buying some shoes on ebay for like… 2€ or so? The shipping payment was actually higher than the costs of the actual shoes, lol. I thought about which kind of shoe would be best for my ideas… and I decided to go with those because I could easily cut off those strips. At least that’s what I thought. I also made sure that their heel-shape would fit the shape they have in the movie… Which didn’t turn out too well, but I guess I had no choice but to work with them. In the end I think they look okay, so I don’t care about that too much anymore.

After they arrived I had some new ideas… and I tried out some materials. I used some soft plastic (or whatever it is called in english – it’s soft so it doesn’t hurt too much, but hard enough to stay in shape on it’s own) and worked with different colors. In the end I decided to use “Window Color” and paint that onto the plastic with a brush.

So I glued that plastic on. You can see that it doesn’t really look nice this way, but don’t worry, I had something in mind for that. I had a lot of Worbla still at home and wanted to use it to cover the front and the back/heels to add some more depths. I put some color onto that (aquarell, I think) and started glueing different shades of blue glitter onto the worbla.

Elsa [Ballgown], Making Of – Part 1: Wig and Accessories

Hey guys!
It’s been a while, but I’m back with a new Making Of – Part. This time it’s my Elsa Ballgown which I will wear at a cosplayprom at the Dokomi Convention, Düsseldorf, Germany, in 3 weeks.

If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the picture of the FanArt I’m using as a guide:

I will add stuff to it, but all in all I really like the design. Directly after seeing this FanArt I was like: I want to cosplay this!

So this first part will be about the wig and the accessories I’ll be using for this. The wig is the same I will use / I used for my Elsa Icegown. I talk about the washed and restyled wig here, my first attempt and the step by step making of – instructions can be read here.

After washing my wig it looked like it wasn’t washed at all! I think I put way too much hairspray onto it before. It got really smooth after brushing it, so it wasn’t that bad at all.

I braided the hair (started with a french braid at the top and worked my way down – then I normally braided it down to the end) and worked my way from the middle to the left and then from middle to the right front strands. I really like the look right now although I hadn’t had the chance to wear everything together yet. My contacts also arrived so I hope to do a makeup test soon.

Next I decided on a design for my headpiece. I had this blue plastic-rose at home and wanted to do fancy stuff with it, so I gathered some materials I already had at home and embellished them. It’s an awesome ballgown after all!