Almost a year ago my oldest daughter Valerie watched Chronicles of
Narnia: Prince Caspian and begged me to make one of Queen Susan's
dresses for her. This project was exactly the sort I like, so I readily
agreed and talked my other children into being Prince Caspian
characters for Halloween. Halloween is now past and I'm finally ready
to tell of the experience.
I will start with Valerie's costume, since I have pictures and it's been done since July.
This
is a screen shot from the movie. It gives you a good idea of what
these costumes are supposed to look like when they are done. Valerie's
costume is supposed to look like Susan's, second from the left.
I started by choosing a pattern that had similar lines the dress. I had on hand McCalls
M5207, so this is what I used.
That
was the easy part. The next step was the most difficult: choosing the
fabric. This drove me nuts. I spent months trying to find fabric like
the dress in the movie. Nothing came close, except for a pillowcase I
came across at Down East Home after the dress was finished. I finally
settled on an upholstery fabric I found at Wal-Mart for $2.00/yard.
I
started with the overdress. Since Valerie is 9 and hasn't developed
womanly curves yet, I was concerned about how to keep the dress up while
she wears it. If I were to have made this for an adult, I would have
used boning, for support and structure and relied on the woman's hips to
hold the dress up. Since the fabric was already heavy, I opted to
leave out the bones and didn't even bother to line it. I decided that I
could add boning later, if needed.
Another decision I needed to make was how and wear to close it. I did some research,
primarily at
http://costumes.narniaweb.com/
I was able to glean some useful suggestions from the costume forums
there. I decided to use hook & eye tape for a closure down the
top part of the center front bodice, leaving the bottom open, like in
the movie (just take my word for it, since I don't have a screen shot.
To the right is one of the only instances that the back of the gown is
visible in the movie. At first it looked like there was lacing in the
back, but when seen closer, see below, it appears that there is some
sort of button closure. I opted for lacing, to simplify things.
Having
made these decisions, it was time to cut out the dress. While the
fabric had a print, it was the same, whether viewed up or down, so I
layed the pattern in both directions, to reduce waste.
For
the top of the bodice, I just turned under the extra part of the
pattern. As you can see, the fabric I chose is a little closer to the
green part of the spectrum.
I
cut the remaining pieces. In the meantime, Valerie decided to make the
same dress for her Barbie. So I took a break to help her with the
pattern and cutting. Her friend helped out. For the doll sized
pattern, I took the instructions from the McCalls pattern and used the
diagrams of the pieces, by enlarging them with the copy machine. Then I
helped the girls pin the mini pattern pieces to scraps of fabric and
let them cut them out.
If you loo
k carefully, you can see a drawing Valerie made of her vision of the Susan dress, hanging on the closet door.
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| Now they are both cut out |
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| I sewed half of the bodice and did the first fitting. |
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| I
determined that the bodice was too high both in the front and back, so I
cut off the excess on the left half of the dress and used it as a
pattern to cut off the excess from the right half of the dress. |
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| Eli wanted to help, but, no. |
To be continued...
