I don’t have any pockets in my costume so I can’t promise I’ll be able to take many pictures but I’m sure that Chel will come up with a few and post them to her blog after the big night.
Here’s the finished get-up:
I’ve got ivy crawling up my boots, which cover my gorgeously warm fleece tights;
I have these wee gloves on my arms, which will do nothing to keep me warm, but will look cool next to the vine tattoos I’ll be adding;
And my corset, to which I added elastic panels so I could breathe;
And my hella gorgeous opera cloak, which my mother altered so the sleeves could be removed.
The final product (minus makeup and tattoos – and sorry the pictures are terrible: I used a timer and the light is bad). I’m very pleased! Also I kind of feel like if my outfit were more purple I could do a pretty convincing Ursula …
Part of my Hallowe’en costume (update on Friday!) is making Poison Ivy look like she’s got actual ivy growing along her skin. For that I chose to pick up some Silhouette temporary tattoo paper. The great thing about this is that you don’t even need a Silhouette to do this project – you can always cut the tattoos out by hand. Any colour printer will do.
Design your tattoos on your computer and make sure to mirror them in the image you print out onto the special paper.
Print them at high quality on the shiny side of the paper.
Use a squeegee to ever so carefully smooth the sticky plastic sleeve over top of the printed and dried design. It’s really quite easy.
Cut it out carefully with scissors. Or use your Silhouette if you’ve got one.
Then go ahead and stick stuff to your skin! These would make great gifts for people if you customized it to their tastes. I bet they’d make great favors at weddings too!
It’s getting to be that time of year, folks. And the annoying thing about posting seasonal stuff on a blog where you don’t necessarily plan too far ahead is that things like Hallowe’en costumes can’t be posted until *after* Hallowe’en, which is a little lame. But at least they can be inspiration for next year.
This year, the Pie and I are heading out on vacation and we won’t be home for Hallowe’en. The Pie has a tournament in Toronto that weekend so I’m teaming up with Chel and her friends and we’re doing a group costume: Batman, Robin, and assorted villains. I am unreasonably excited to go as Poison Ivy and join the group. This costume has taken a considerable amount of planning, so it may even top Wolverine as one of my best costumes to date.
I’ll show you what I have come up with so far and hopefully it’ll inspire you as well.
One of the issues with female comic book characters, especially those written by DC, is that they tend to come scantily clad. And I don’t want to show that much skin. There will be children in our group. And sometimes it snows on Hallowe’en in Canada. And nobody likes being naked in the snow. So part of the challenge was to take the traditional PI getup and make it a bit more … modest. Because holy Hanna that is just not my style.
I started off with the basic corset, in green, and I found one on Amazon that also had a wee skirt that came with it (the skirt is MUCH shorter than advertised but oh well).
After strapping myself into it in a rather undignified manner I realized that the flimsy, slippery ribbons that made up the laces were all that was holding the whole thing together. And I have quite a bit that needs holding in. I could see one of them snapping under the pressure and having a disaster on my hands.
So I replaced the laces, front and back, with a sturdier material: parachute cord. Not only was I now more confident that the corset bindings wouldn’t spontaneously explode, but it was actually easier to lace up because there was more friction with the cord.
Now I could lace it up good and tight and it wasn’t going anywhere. Problem was, this thing is made for people with smaller … assets than I have, and there was some danger of a spill (and there will be children present), so I had to wear a bra underneath to keep everything where it should be. And the bra peeked over the top of the corset. Not good.
I had to therefore disguise the bra as best I could (because there was no hiding it and I was sure as shooting not going without). Fortunately for me the local Fabricland is about five minutes from our house, so I popped in and found exactly what I needed.
I basted some trim and sequins onto the bra wherever it was exposed. I also put some more trim at the bottom so that it would blend in with the similar trim at the top of the corset. The sequins might be overkill but I love them.
Right. I’m not hanging out anywhere now. This is good. But I’m so tightly strapped into this thing that I’m having trouble breathing. It’s not like I can simply loosen the laces – the whole thing will fall off. And it has no give whatsoever. I needed a bit of a release valve built into this to save my lungs. I bought some 6″ wide elastic from Fabricland as well, and I will cut out two of the back panels and replace it with four pieces of sewn-together elastic. This way the corset can still be as tight as it needs to be but my ribcage can also expand and contract as needed. But I had to go out of town twice for work (I’m in Indiana as I write this and as you read this) so it’ll have to wait until I get back.
Then, there was the issue of hair. PI’s hair is red and long. Mine is short and brown. Normally I dress as a dude for Hallowe’en simply because having short hair makes it easy to do. This year I had to go to extremes. I picked up this wig for super cheap (thanks Amazon), and after an interminable wait it arrived.
It’s been about ten years since I’ve had hair this long, or this red.
And then there’s this. This is an opera cloak hand-sewn by my great grandmother about 100 or so years ago. I used to play dress-up with it all the time and amazingly it’s still in beautiful shape. It hasn’t fit me across the shoulders and chest since I was about nine years old, however (my great-grandmother being one of those tiny elfin type ladies). After some consultation with my mother we decided to remove the sleeves to give me some more room to move around. She’s working on it as we speak.
I have some other grand plans including temporary tattoos, fake vines, and lots and lots of glitter. I’ll keep you posted about how they turn out!
Ali Does It Herself 