Happy Halloween (again) to all our readers who celebrate this weekend (and Monday)!

This year my SO and I decided to be attendees to the Goblin Ball, from the movie Labyrinth and here is an excellent video of the ball scene (and yes, that is David Bowie as Jareth, the Goblin King).

In my previous post I talked about and had pictures of our masks. This post is all about the rest of my costume. I will start from the top!

My hair is going to be huge. I have some blonde spray to put some streaks in it and made these wonderful feather clips to add volume, color and texture.

They were pretty easy to make. I bought a bunch of alligator clips and wound the feathers on with thread.

My dress was a bit trickier. My SO and I wandered around a bit and finally landed in a costume shop. There wasn’t much on the shelves that wasn’t Leggy Lane (sexy whatever) and I was getting a little disappointed. Then, one of the ever so helpful salespeople told me that since they are planning on moving to another location next year, they are selling as much of their rental costumes as possible so they don’t have to move them. This sounded promising and there it was, the perfect ballgown type dress. And even better, it needed some work which meant I could negotiate a price.

After talking to the owner of the costume shop (and making sure he saw the tears and problems), I got the dress for $15. I didn’t have to put too much work into it, it needed cleaned pretty badly and a couple of seams had ripped. So, thankful for polyester, I threw the dress in the wash, stitched up the seams and ironed it and it looks pretty good.

As Halloween was going to be a cold night I knew that I would be grateful for a wrap of some sort to put over my shoulders. I decided to splurge a bit and made myself a shawl of velvet and brocade with some pretty lace that I could use for regular use if I was so inclined. It is made of maroon royal velvet and silver brocade and has lace edging and tassels at the end corners.

Under the dress was a little more interesting. I will state here that if I had any idea how hard tulle is to work with, I would have bought a crinoline (although I do like what I made much better than what I saw in the costume shop). For this, I looked at patterns before I made it. It came out pretty well, and I now have an off-white crinoline if anyone needs to borrow one.

My only problem now was that the dress was really just a little too short for me and the crinoline really showed at the bottom. It wasn’t unattractive, just not what I had in mind. I thought, why not make any underskirt that would hide the crinoline and match the dress. I decided to make it out of some pretty green organza that has little sparklies all over it that I found at Joann’s (I have been to Joann’s practically every day for the past week).

This brings us down to my shoes. I wanted something that would have a Victorian era (not that our costumes are even remotely accurate to the era), but wouldn’t cost much. One more trip to Goodwill found me the perfect shoes, in bright blue. This wasn’t a deterrent for me at all, especially as these are the dye-able type of shoes. I bought some fabric paint and painted those suckers gold and voila! The perfect shoes.

Now to make them even better, my M-I-L had these gorgeous rhinestone shoe buckles that are absolutely perfect. I love my family!

After all this, last night I was considering how on earth I was going to carry around any personal effects and decided to make up a quick drawstring purse to match.

I cut a round piece from the same velvet and brocade used to make the shawl, sewed them right sides together, turned it (like a pillow), stitched the edges flat, made a medallion of cardboard for the inside and outside covered with the same fabric to give it shape (which I then stitched together), used some gold eyelets for the drawstring, threaded with some black cord and voila again! A great little purse for my cards and chapstick (and some touch-up makeup).

I cannot wait for tonight! I will post pictures of both myself and my SO all done up. This is going to be so much fun!