Extravagance is Everything : We Could be the Same

One of the weird things about costuming is how while you’re working on a project it can be completely consuming but after it’s finished it can just disappear completely. This is why it is important to photograph projects. I was looking through my photos a while back and got a shock to see these dresses because I had completely forgotten I made them.

Actually, that’s not completely true. I remember doing the painting. I know I spent a summer carefully painting these designs on a table with a lamp under it with a recording of Eurovision 2010 playing over and over again in the background. But that’s it. All the construction memories had gone and even the painting memory wasn’t attached to a particular project, just Eurovision.

(Suggested listening here. Or here if your musical tastes tend to calmer)

A long time ago I made a Barbie as the Island Princess costume for one of my cousins. A year or so later I had a request for two Barbie outfits so they could have one each. This time the costumes were from Barbie and the Three Musketeers.

The short, sparkly skirts were easy – one seam, elastic and hem.

According to my notes, for the bodices I used Vogue 7845. (My notes don’t say a lot else, unfortunately.) As with the Island Princess dress I decided to have fabric over the shoulder for inset sleeves rather than having the dress held up by semi-detached sleeves. Because the necklines were annoying enough as it was I didn’t want to have to deal with having them open and close. Instead I made the bodice closure using a trick I’d learnt from a princess bodice I found in an opshop: put the zip in upside down.

By far the biggest challenge of this project was the painting. Each dress in the Barbie Musketeer series had its own skirt design repeat and bodice design repeat. As ever, I wanted to be accurate so I had to recreate these. I also decided to correct the off-centeredness of the patterns found on the dolls used in the promo photos I was using as a reference.

To make the patterns I spent a lot of time fiddling with autoshapes and curled clipart in PowerPoint (PowerPoint is an excellent graphics manipulation program).

This was the result, for the bodice and the skirt front:

We printed it out full size and I’m not sure what happened next. I know I painted by tracing something, probably a drawing based on of the printout but with the lines curved correctly and the swirls the right length (the computer design was mostly for scale and placement). I suspect I used a seperate set of transparencies for each colour and traced over these. As with all freehand designs I got my mum to draw out the tracing guide because I am not neat enough.

For the purple stomacher I printed out a photo of the doll bodice at A4 size which was blurry but the pattern was visible. Mum drew it for me on plain paper and we photocopied it onto a transparency I could paint over.

Mum also drew out the skirt design for me. The doll dress has kind-of glowy pink bits in the dress panel and I managed to find a gorgeous satin that had the look of being softly dyed with different shades.

Here are the finished results:

This was the project where I discovered fabric paint which turned out to be a very useful discovery. In particular, the gold bottle which I bought for this dress has served me very well.

The skirts are all lined with gold satin and close with hooks and bars.