Narnia costumes 2009 - Susan

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 look carefully, you can see a drawing Valerie made of her vision of the Susan dress, hanging on the closet door.

Now they are both cut out

I sewed half of the bodice and did the first fitting.

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.

Eli wanted to help, but, no.

To be continued...