Fall Fairy Costume for Halloween!

28 Oct 2011 2 Comments

by pickyforwords in Crafty Me Tags: clothes, costume, crafts, fairy, fascinator, feary, floral fascinator, halloween, homemade fairy costume, how to make a fairy costume, how to make a fascinator, how to make a headpiece, how to make fairy wings, wings

I was going to post detailed how-to guides on how to make each piece of my Halloween costume; I even have all the step-by-step pictures, but I figured there wasn’t enough time before Halloween now and I didn’t really feel like going though the trouble of uploading all those picture on here and typing each step in great detail (which I have written down on pieces of paper).  So instead I spent a whole 3 hours in photoshop preparing step-by-step instructions… at least now I don’t have to post a million pictures on here, ’cause putting pictures in posts isn’t that easy.

Most of my costume was made from things I already had; some things were bought a long time ago for other projects but never got used and some were being used but could be spared.  I only had to buy the tulle for the skirt and the leaves for the shirt, which I thought I had but must have thrown away or lost at some point.  Other materials such as the milk jug and coat hangers were provided by my boyfriend.  So that means this costume was made of 87% reused and recycled materials. GO GREEN!

I’m gonna start from my head and work my way down.

This was my favorite project out of everything.  At first I didn’t think I was going to be able to make it because I didn’t have everything I needed, but I eventually found everything I needed and substituted some things and it all worked out.  I am very proud of this; it turned out exactly as I imagined it. 

These are just some earrings I threw together ’cause I thought they would be fun to have for the costume.  I have leaves everywhere!

This is what I originally bought the leaves for, but then I had some left over so I used them for other things.  This was one of the easier pieces of my costume.  I just kind of put them where I thought they looked nice and then quickly sewed them on.  I then put a piece of thread on both side at the bottom and tightened it to make the bottom of the shirt scrunch.  That was after I took this picture so you can’t see it here.

I thought the wings were going to be the easiest, but that was before I made the dumb mistake of tying half hitches all the way around the wire instead of just wrapping the yarn around.  It turned out looking nice but it took a really long time, 5 hours in total just to do the yarn.  I suggest to anyone who wants to do this to just wrap the yarn around the wire.  It is much faster.  It took a while to come up with a way to make the wings more stable so they wouldn’t pivot or fall backward, but I found someone who did this and it worked.  I just didn’t know how to make it look pretty ’cause it was too late to incorporate it in the wing shape so I had to add it on. 

This was another thing I thought was going to be simple, but turned out to take a very long time.  How to make it was simple enough, but what the instructions didn’t tell me was that they were making it for a child!  So I thought I was only going to need 60 total pieces of tulle.  No.  When I ran out of tulle I only had half a skirt, so I had to go back to the store and buy more tulle (luckily it was half off this time) and cut it all again.  That means I cut 139(I bought more the second time just in case) individual pieces of tulle.  So if you want to make this skirt and you are my size (33”) then you are going to need about 120 pieces of tulle.  That’s 60 pieces of each color.  This whole thing was turning into a nightmare.  First they didn’t have the colors I wanted on the spool so I had to get it in the big sheets, which made for a lot of cutting.  Then I ran out so I had to get more and that meant more cutting.  The second time around it seemed like it went faster.  Though, the tulle was still a pain in the butt to deal with because it catches on everything and sometimes doesn’t cut properly.  Lesson learned from this project: I am never working with tulle again.

I will have pictures of my full costume on Halloween.  Until then, have fun putting together your costumes!

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