Stop, Drop, and Catch Fire

Oh dear.

The dryad costume is not going well.  My inability to hand draft a corset meant I had to turn to a commercial pattern.  While I waited for it to arrive, I started working on the big branchy mask, only to find that I’d ordered the wrong gauge of wire, and this stuff was too weak to help my hair stand on end (even though this is the style my hair is normally most cooperative with!).

So now I’ve got all my materials finally lined up, but very little accomplished.  It happens to be highly traditional for my costumes to be assembled as the result of several frantic all nighters.  My senior year in college, I stayed up for 36 hours straight and finished a skirt in a debate meeting while wearing it.  This is a fun story to tell now, but made me very grouchy to be around then.

So, I’m being uncharacteristically sane and pulling the emergency eject button.  I can start work on the Dryad costume in January (after The Hobbit one is done) and make good use of all these supplies next year.  I’ve come up with an alternate idea that will take a lot less time but still seems creative and delightful.  So, I’ll keep posting updates on Monday to stay on track, and you can try to guess what I’ll be based on the progress photos.

So, what do you guess based on the dress I just picked up in a thrift store?  It’s going to have some big revisions (those shoulderpads are going to be burned) but I’ll just tell you now that I’ll be replacing those fruit buttons with something similarly striking but in a different theme.  Any hypotheses?