Cinderella

The dream is to create this beautiful Cinderella Dress. My ambition, create ALL of it!!!! I will be creating the dress, the hoop skirt, the petticoat, and the corset. This isn't a full tutorial but I will talk about how I made this massive build!!! I'm excited to build this but I think it's going to be extremely hard.

The Hoop Skirt

I did a lot of research on how to make the hoop for this costume. I do have a hoop skirt that I got off of Amazon, it works okay for my Snow White dress but it's flimsy. I have 9 AA batteries in the skirt of my Snow dress and the hoop can't hold up the battery packs. I will need a very sturdy hoop as the base of my skirt. Most people use an elliptical cage, however, I read on several posts that you could't dance very well in this. I like to go to the Ball at cons so being able to dance is important for my build. I also plan to put electronics in the dress so it must be really sturdy.

I decided to go for a standard Crinoline hoop skirt made with Pex Piping. Why am I not using hoop boning? Most of the reason is because I'm a poor college student, the other reason is I read many articles of other cosplayers using pex piping in their hoops skirts and they reported it was extremely sturdy.

Soooooooooooo....................................how'd I do it?

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Fig 4.

Well I started will a long rectangle that that is the length of the circumference of my biggest hoop (the bottom one) and the height is from my waist to just below my ankles. How did I figure out the biggest hoop? Well as bit as I'm going to be I'd like to fit through doors so, a standard door frame is 34 inches. To find the hoop circumference is 3.1415*34 = 106.81. I then added 2 inches and rounded up to the nearest inch (this is for the seam line and the hoop connectors). That gives me a grand total length of 109 inches for the length of my rectangle, this is just barely over 3 yards so I bought 3.25 yards of white cotton for my hoop skirt base.

Next, I sewed on hoop channels that are 2 inch ribbon, sewn in straight lines equidistant from each other this can be seen in figure 1. How to find how far apart they should be? You start with how many hoops you want, I choose 7 (I wanted this to be really sturdy so I put in more hoops. More hoops means heavier so be careful!!!), and the length of height of my rectangle (length of the skirt). For me my skirt length was 28 inches (yes, I'm very short) and I wanted 7 hoops so 32 / 7 = 4.5. I marked lines 4.5 inches apart up the skirt and sewed ribbon over them.

Then I threaded the pex piping through the channels ( I used 1/2 pex piping, there is smaller, use it. It'll be less heavy and easier to thread through the channels). I started with the bottom channel (seen in figure 2), I knew that that hoop was going to be 107 inches long, but I took off an inch for the connector (it's a plastic coupler). I added in the other channels by kinda guessing, I did ever other channels to get the shape and then filled from there (figure 3 is the base shape). Finally, I got something that looks like figure 4, I adjusted the shape a little bit from there but not much.

I use this hoops skirt almost exclusively now under all my "ball gown" like costumes (Snow White, Euphie, and Cindy).

Petticoat

Disclaimer, I've never made a petticoat before in my life! This was an adventure to say the least, to start I did a bunch of research again and looked at many references. I knew I wanted the petticoat to have frills of different colors and I wanted it to look great when I spun. Since the skirt was going to be a circle skirt I decided to do the same for the petticoat.

The Base

I started with a circle skirt that looked like the one to the left. I draped it over my hoop to get a good idea of what the base would look like. If you look closely at the picture you can see the hoop skirt peeking out from underneath the petticoat. I obviously don't want that so I decided to put some frills on the bottom to cover it up. To create the frills I had 9 different colors/shades of tulle and 3 colors iridescent organza. I cut 2, 4 inch wide strips of each color and then arranged the colors in an order I liked. Then I finished all the hems with my serger and ruffled them with my serger (figure 1). I sewed the ruffled trim onto the bottom of the circle skirt TWICE to make 2 layers of ruffles on the bottom of the skirt (figure 2).

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Fig 2.

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The Layers

In figure 3 you can see my second layer, for this layer the ruffles were made the same way but the colors are in a different order, they are also 4 inches instead of 3. The blue tier holding the ruffles is 6, 4 inch wide rectangles that are sewn together and gathered at the top. The ruffles were sewn to the bottom of this tier and then the long tier strip was sewn together in the back to make a circle of ruffles. This tier was finally sewn to the base petticoat 5 inches up from the start of the ruffles on the base layer.

The third layer is made exactly like the second but with 5 inch ruffles. It's important to measure a lot when you pinning. Figure 4 shows how I pinned the ruffle on the skirt, it takes a lot of time but its worth it.

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Fig.8

Figures 5-7 are layers 4, 5 and 6, of my petticoat. All layers are made the same way, each layer is 5 inches above the last. On average it took about 4-6 hours to create each layer, this includes cutting all the pieces, sewing them together, hemming them and ruffling them. In figure 8 you can see the bottom of my petticoat, it looks just as magical as I wanted it too so I'm happy. To make your petticoat more full you can sew fishing wire into the hem of the frills, I only did this for maybe 2 layers because the fishing wire was not paying nice with me. I got the effect I wanted so I didn't bother with the other layers but it wouldn't be a bad idea to add it to the other layers.

Finishing Up

I wanted to check the drape and shape of this petticoat so I used my Euphemia skirt over it. The shape wasn't ideal, parts of the petticoat fell in on itself because the frills are only at the bottom so I got some very stiff petticoat fabric and made a 3 inch frill to go at the top of layer 2. I also added one more layer to the petticoat that only went down half way, this layer had a 6 inch frill of the petticoat material.

To finish off my petticoat I made a chiffon circle skirt with a 6 inch ruffle hem that sits over the entire petticoat. Now my petticoat is finished!!!!!!!

The Skirt

This skirt was an adventure! I had about 7 different fabrics for the skirt and figured it'd be 3-6 layers. All my fabrics are iridescent organza or chiffon. I knew I wanted a circle skirt because I wanted it to make a nice circle around me when I spun.

Draping

I started with draping the different colors over each other. I'll list the fabrics at the bottom of this section. The image on the left was a basic idea of what I decided on. I wanted the butterflies from the blue chiffon to show on the top layer and I knew that the serenity colored chiffon needed to be on top because it matched the bodice fabrics. When I bought fabrics I was going to have a satin skirt with layers of organza and chiffon over it bu when I draped all these layers (base layer of satin, butterfly chiffon, iridescent organza, and serenity chiffon) it started to weight down my dressform. I already had a lot of weight from my cage and my petticoat so I decided that I wouldn't use the satin and only use chiffon and organza. It took me about 2 hours to get a look I wanted for the skirt. I also didn't use all the fabrics, I used all three colors of organza, the serenity chiffon and the butterfly chiffon.

The fabrics I had:

- Blue Butterfly Chiffon
- Serenity Blue Chiffon
- Iridescent Blue Organza
- Iridescent Purple Organza
- Iridescent White Organza
- Lilac Chiffon
- Turquoise Chiffon
- Aqua Blue Chiffon
- Blue Radiance Chiffon

The Layers

Fabrics I used:

Blue Butterfly Chiffon
Serenity Blue Chiffon
Iridescent Blue Organza
Iridescent Purple Organza
Iridescent White Organza

To construct my circle skirt I used this pattern. I only used the pattern for the skirt pieces, so the skirt front and side/back pieces. I made 2 chiffon skirts and two organza skirts. One chiffon skirt was made with the blue butterfly fabric and the other was the serenity blue fabric. For the organza skirts I actually cut the pieces out of each fabric and then Frankensteined them together, this can be better seen in the picture on the right. I alternated each color of organza to make 2 circle skirts. made out of 3 colors of organza.

The skirts were layered as follows:

- Bottom Layer: Tricolored organza Circle Skirt
- 2nd Layer: Blue Butterfly Chiffon Circle Skirt
- 3rd Layer: 2nd Tricolored organza Circle Skirt
- Top Layer: Serenity Blue Chiffon Circle Skirt

Putting it All Together

After all layers were made I basted the tops of the skirts together. Fig 1 shows a picture of all the layers basted together and over the petticoat. Next I added a Yoke and zipper as seen in figure 2. The yoke and waistband are from this pattern, unfortunately this pattern was discontinued but it's a pretty standard yoke and waistband so it could be easily drafted. Finally, I put the waistband on my skirt and hemmed it using my serger. Now my skirt is complete!

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

The Bodice

For the bodice I used the Simplicity Cinderella Pattern which is 1026 and can be seen in the right most picture. I cut the pieces out as is and made a mock up, you can see these pieces in the picture to the right. After trying on the mock up I didn't really like the shape and had some issues with the bodice and the skirt. So, I made a few adjustments to the bodice. First I added more flare to the sides so it would go over my skirt nicely, and second I make the midpoint in the back longer and come to a point (to be more movie accurate). Form there I took apart my old mock up and put together my new mock up making sure everything fit nicely!

Next I cut all the pieces out of my lining fabric (the butterflies) and fusible interfacing. I fused the interfacing to each piece and sewed all seams the same way I did on my mock up. The Leftmost picture shows my lining put together. You can see the sides on the lining flare up and fit really nicely over the skirt, success! Next was boning, the channels I used can be seen in the picture on the left. I used a ton of boning for this dress so if I didn't want to I could wear it without a corset. All boning is a combination of flat steal and spiral steal. Once my boning was in I tried on my lining bodice one last time.

Finally, I cut all my pieces out of the fashion fabric and sewed it all together. I placed a zipper in the back and topstiched the upper and lower hems of the bodice. The last thing to do was the bertha. I used the patter for the bertha but extended the long side by several inches (about 4 on each side). I made the bertha per instructions and then hand stitched it down to the bodice so I could have lots of control over the tucks and poofs. After that My bodice was complete!!!!

Here's my first shoot of her all! (Yes, I will fix the fold lines in the skirt). I've got some adjustments to make and don't get me started on the lights...... Stay tuned!

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