very late halloween post.
So I wanted to make a buch of posts on each topic, leading up to halloween, but I got overwhelmed by other things so I’m just getting to this now, so for the sake of my sanity I’m just going to post everything now.
Jessica
The dress:
I built the whole dress on a foundation made of multiple undergarments sewn together.
1. bought cheap girdle thingy and sewed it closed
2. staystitched parts of undergarments i was using- below underwires of body shaper, along hips of tummy-control-shorts-thing, and cut off pieces i didnt need.
3. glued 2 sets of enhancer pads into bra(essentially custom-building one of those “add 2 cup sizes” bras, except mine was seamless on the outside and had exactly the kind of shape i wanted for the neckline of my dress. i did one gel one on the side and a foam one meant for swimsuits in the center. the foam one gives a lot of structure so it helps things stay in place.) lined inside of bra with fabric from cheap pantyhose from wal-mart, just to keep everything in place.
4. replaced warped boning in bodyshaper with pieces of cable ties(just file them down at the edges an theyre good to go! i only wish i had used the layers of shapers to create more boning channels, as i didnt have enough which made the ones i had buckle )
5. layered shaper over girdle, tummy control over shaper, and bra on top.
6.put pantyhose on mannequin, (THAT was an ordeal) put shaper over pantyhose, and tacked in place
.
7. through a series of pinnings, re-pinnings, and exceedingly small stitches, i sewed the fabric to the dress starting with the side slit, working my way around the front all the way to the center back. then i cut the fabric, and started from the front slit again and worked the other way to the back. i used red thread for the sides and the heavy duty stitches, but for the little extra stitches, i used metallic red machine embroidery thread. the trouble with metallic threads is that their fibers are some kind of weak metallic tinsel-y thing and a clear synthetic core, and the metallic part tends to break down with too much handling, which leads to tangles and tantrums, but i tried this conditioner called “thread heaven”with great results. its a little blue box with this waxy clear stuff, and you can just run thread through it for hand sewing, or put a little glob in the path of the thread for machine sewing.
8. finishing on the hems and slit, iron-on seam tape, reinforced with red metallic zigzag stitches(with more thread heaven)
9. realized it was too much of an ordeal to just step into the thing, added a zipper in the back and a pair of bra closures inside to help keep it together for the zipper. ( i just wish i had reinforced the stitches on the closures, because one of them popped off when i tried to put on my costume the night of the party. luckily the zipper still closed, though not without some effort.)
Makeup:
i ended up using gluestick/powder method. i bought cheap eyebrow stencils at sally beauty, and in the end i really didnt go very overboard with contouring/trompe l’oeil stuff outside of that, mostly because my boyfriend didnt have a mirror, but also because it wasn’t really worth it. anyway, i used “sealed with a kiss” over my lipstick, and that stuff was pretty fantastic.
Hair:
my hair didnt need too much. just the little curl over the eye was enough. had toyed with doing a henna rinse, but in the end i didnt want it to throw off the makeup colors, so i didnt bother.
Roger
Tail:
i spent hours and hours and hours working on a bunny tail made of cotton balls, liquid latex, rubber cement, and model magic, but once i finished it i realized it would make sitting nearly impossible without discomfort and damage to the tail, at which point i realized how dumb i was not to have just felted the thing out of poly-fill in the first place. so then i felted a new one in less than an hour, and put the old one in the hall of stupid mistakes.
feet:
i used clown shoes as the foundation for the feet, sprayed them with primer, and built up toe shapes with model magic. they had lot of cracking, so i sealed them with rubber cement and coated them with a snow-texture medium(“snow-tex” is its official name) to conceal the cracks and make them look furry.
gloves:
i bought cartoon mickey mouse gloves from party city, and they were the perfect shape, but i needed to paint them yellow. i tried to paint them with acrylics to save money, then painted them with spraypaint to save time, then painted them with textile paint to conceal all the other messy paint jobs i wasted time with. i re-drew the little lines on the back of the hand with a really fat sharpie.
bowtie:
to make the bowtie, i used light blue fabric from a dress i bought at Deb for 95 cents several years ago. i made my own polka dots with a stencil i made out of a manila folder, and used white textile paint to create a blank canvas before going in with yellow paint, then tracing the outline of the circles with orange glitter fabric marker. then i cut a strip off, sewed a little tube out of it, then sewed a big tube out of the remainder of the material, and sewed one end shut. then i stuffed the big tube full of poly-fill, sewed up the open end, and gathered it down the center.i wrapped the little tube around the gathers, sewed it in place, and slipped elastic under the little tube, and voila!
suspenders:
i found red suspenders at hot topic, made giant buttons out of model magic, and glued them in place. i had to use the suspenders in reverse, so the buttons would stay on and conceal the fasteners, but it worked out nicely.
ears:
i bought them right before easter for a dollar, i felted that funny little orange tuft roger has, felted yarn to it for texture, and painted it orange before sewing it to the ears.
The finished product:
All in all, I think I learned a lot and had a lot of fun, but next year I’m not going to get so elaborate… hopefully. 
Burned Robot-Girl II
So aside from fitting the dress, it has been completed. It took a little over 13$ plus some stuff I had at home, and I’m very pleased with the result. I think the most important lesson I learned was that Family Dollar is amazing. I bought cruddy black spraypaint for 1.35!! Two steel wool pads for 1$! superglue for a buck!! I’m pretty much always going to check for stuff there first from now on. the only thing they didn’t have was rubber cement, but I got it at cvs and I have to say I think Elmer’s changed their formula, because it didn’t behave like I expected. I tried to get it to go all globby and drippy but it just disappeared into the fabric. For most people who use it that’s probably a good thing, but next time I’m just getting the rubber caulk from family dollar.
I cut out parts of the dress to make it match the original. slightly challenging, but not too much. I didn’t really mind if it looked wobbly, since it did get melted after all.
I tried spraying leftover dress fabric with spraypaint and crackling it, but I don’t think spraypaint is thick enough, because that didn’t work out. It did look pretty convincingly sooty, though, and the soot helps hide the fake polka dots anyway.
To match the pattern, I cut a sponge to match the size of the polka dots(they were exactly the size of a dime),glued it to a toothpick, wrapped the whole thing with old bias tape, and spotted all over the dress, like so:
dots!
I bought an old kid’s play phone from the thrift store, because I figured it might have some interesting wiring and bits in it, but getting it out of the plastic was a task. I tried a crowbar, I tried a dremel, but eventually I had to just smack it with a brick, which was a great way to vent the frustration of the dremel.
before & after phone
I had wanted to use horsehair braid to make the hem stand out, but that would have gotten pricey and might have made the skirt too short. One of these days ill get to use horsehair braid on something, I hope.
I used lots of leftover stuff from old projects, like a red metallic-velvet ribbon for parts of the wiring, colored rubber bands for coated wires, and bits of steel wool for frayed wires. I imagined there was some kind of metal mesh holding the robot’s armature together, so i spraypainted some old netting with black, gold, and silver glitter paint. generally, fake parts read much better onstage anyway, and i dont have to figure out how to cut down a circuit board. i did use little boards from the toy phone, and what I think was a speaker(?) from the mouthpiece. I glued torn bits of fabric around it so it looked like it popped out of her body.
my favorite thing was the silver scrapbooking stickers I bought last year for 50 cents for no good reason. they just looked useful at the time. they work really well for those weird little silver dots where wires join up.
I stuck everything on with hotglue, reinforced with superglue and rubber cement. It took maybe an hour or two. Then I spraypainted those, too, and highlighted them with silver spray glitter. I tore off the hemmed edge and went over it with a black fabric marker and spraypaint. it looked incredibly legit for ten bucks. As always, the best part was bringing it in and showing it to everyone, when they were all really excited. It makes it worth all the weird stuff I end up having to do in order to put stuff together. : )
Jesscia Rabbit Makeup Adventures
if you search youtube, you can find enough jessica rabbit makeup tutorials to choke a horse. the trouble is that so much of the illusion relies on contouring, and that can be really hard to do when your face isnt the same shape as whoever is doing the tutorial. so i gave up and mapped it out on my own face with a picture and that free mspaint for mac software you can download from the internet. i tried to figure out how to match me to this:
this is her 'de-tooned' as it were.
so more than just the giant purple eyelid and the fake brow, her face has distinct planes that need to be recreated in order to avoid looking like a weird slutty clown.
discovered several things, which im going to write down so i dont forget, namely:
- stick makeup blended with a brush creates a really smooth, natural-looking complexion
-airspun truanslucent powder is really good, but im 90% sure i had a massive allergic reaction when i tried it, so i need to try the unscented kind
-flexible sealor is good but i need to dab it on with a sponge,or find a better brush, it’s a consistency like nail polish otherwise
-’palladio,’ a makeup brand at sally beaty supply, makes really fantastic eyeliners. theyre super smooth and they actually stay on, which i wouldn’t expect.
-shimmery light pink pencil under eyebrows makes them look lifted and makes your whole face look brighter
-cheap natural-looking lashes plus fancy flared half-lashes look fantasitc.
-drawing my lips out to the side instead of just above the natural lipline gives much better results.
-drawing on the eyelid shape with a white pencil helps map the eyelids out beforehand.
so i mapped out my face and got this:
sadly, this was miles ahead of my first actual attempt at this makeup
i was all excited so i did a test last week and got this:
the eyelids got way too big. they got away from me, bit the lips looked much better than in previous attempts.
part of me thinks maybe I shouldn’t exaggerate the eyelid so much, and just stick with my natural eye shape, but I also think my contouring could have been much stronger, so i did a new, more focused sketch:
much more precise. hopefully will yield better results(?)
which i intend to try fairly soon.
burned robot-girl
without a doubt the weirdest thing i’ve ever had to make is the costume im making right now. a dress which looks exactly like another dress, but burned, with wiring and circuit boards showing through. the girl is supposed to be a robot who got stuck in an incinerator, so her dress is part of her robot-y self. im having trouble even imagining what this would look like, so i did research by googling animatronics and burned dolls.
my favorite look so far is this crackle effect on this burned doll. i figure i can use this to make her look burnt where i’m not exposing some wires. maybe just black spraypaint and then i pull it apart? i’m trying not to get too complicated.
note the crackle on the head
eyebrow experiments
In college, i took an independent study course in stage makeup. I pretty much failed at concealing my eyebrows, but mostly because of this dang costume i have no choice now, and i have to learn. there are a lot of youtube tutorials, and they’re all incredible in how much more informative they are than my little makeup manual from college. so far i know of 3 basic methods…
1. the “ivory soap” method:
dampen up some ivory soap, rub it on your eyebrow, conceal. et voila.
It actually works pretty well, especially considering how easy it is to clean up and how cheap the soap is. No spatula or spirit gum required, but I’m thinking about using it and covering it with a sealer.
2. the “gluestick” method
use a spatula/your fingers, push against the grain& with the grain, powder, conceal, et voila!
Im not a fan. I think it irritates my skin, and it dries so quickly that it’s hard to get everything tamped down and smooth.
3. the “spirit gum/mortician’s wax” method
first you have to brush your eyebrows up/against the grain, glue them down, wait for stuff to get tacky, roll out a little ball or snake of wax, stick it to your brows with a spatula, powder,conceal, et voila!
This is how i first learned how to do it, back in school, and i absolutely HATED it.
Today, I learned of 2 nifty little tricks so I decided to try again.
2-A. the “Gluestick/tissue” method
use a glue stick, use a single ply of tissue, tear off the egdes, conceal, et voila!
i cannot get the edges to stay down for the life of me, as evidenced by the photo:
pretty gross.
also, the tissue falls apart so easily that i cant really conceal it effectively.
3-A. the “spirit gum/wax/ holding a lighter under a spoon in a suspicious manner” method
instead of just a spatula to smooth out the wax, use a lighter and heat up a spoon, which melts the wax, thus expediting the smoothing process.
i really liked this method, although it started to crack once i applied makeup, as evidenced by the photo:
not too shabby, methinks.
So this one, like the ivory soap method, probably needs a sealer, which is why I just bought one from the internet. Hooray!
Becoming Jessica Rabbit
So I’m a little obsessed with halloween costumes. They’re a chance for me to show off how type-a i can really be. This year, my boyfriend and I will be Jessica and Roger Rabbit. Yes, I decided this in late feb. No, I’m not ashamed.
Anywho, its a very complicated costume to make, especially if you’re on a budget. The trouble is that the character isn’t exactly drawn like a real person, and her dress doesn’t exactly follow the laws of physics.
so here's what were working with.
Basically, the only way to support her bustline is via compression of her tiny tiny waist. she has no straps, and her dress has essentially no back, and the entire thing is a seamless sleek package. But what does she care? She’s a cartoon!
I’ve already made some basic changes, namely, I will not do the super duper backless thing, because on real people it just doesn’t look right, it makes them look bulky on the sides of their ribcage, and it limits how much you can pull the waist in, so its really not worth it, because the visual impact comes from the hourglass figure. I think the tube-dress thing looks like a cop-out, as does a poorly-styled wig. It’s a really bad costume for people if they’re going to phone it in. Literary characters, fine, everyone imagines them differently, but cartoons are specific iconic images, especially human cartoons, and they require attention to detail, otherwise they’re just lame. I can’t quite decide how to use bones so that they wont show through the main fabric, because all that structure kind of kills the whole liquid slinkiness that’s going on.
It’s hard to figure out how exactly the skirt is supposed to go, because it seems to flare out, but it cant drag along the ground, its not a gown. Also, I cannot figure out what kind of stockings she’s wearing. I think a dark sheer with a backseam might be best, or maybe just a dark sheer, the backseam might be too intense. And then there’s the makeup. I want to make myself actually look like the cartoon, but I have to work with my face to do it, and its a little tough, because again her face doesn’t follow human proportions, or my face doesn’t fit cartoon proportions, mostly in the huge eyelid department. My search for makeup tutorials has taught me that I have less eyelid to work with than most people who make makeup videos on youtube. Anywho, I’m off to figure out how to block out my eyebrows.
