By the way, I was the Little Mermaid for Halloween...

I wanted to tell you guys all about my costume!!  I hope you don't think it's too late now that it's November.  I mean, technically it was "Halloween" today in my neighborhood.  Thanks to "Superstorm Sandy," the kids' trick-or-treating day was ruined, and moved to today.  So really it's not that late.

So I was The Little Mermaid.  Because of my red hair, really.  Ariel is every girl with red hair's favorite princess.  Anyhow, what a process.  How to do the top, how to do the bottom, etc... First, I made Flounder.  I was determined to have a Flounder purse as part of my costume, so if my costume alone wasn't that convincing, people would look to my purse and go, "ooooh!"  I drew a picture of Flounder from a Google image search.  Then I cut out a Flounder body shape and cut it out of felt.  I sewed the pieces together:

It was a little difficult to add the bag bottom and give him some width, but I folded some pieces of paper this way and that and figured it out.

 

I added the fins and stitched the smile (all the stitching was by hand), then added the tail.  Turned him inside-out and poof:

I was so pleased with this!!  I stitched on some lace with little pearl beads on it as the strap, like sea foam, right before the trip to Disney.  You'll see pictures of that later!

I considered many things for the top.  I bought a shell at AC Moore, thinking I'd make a mold of it from papier mache.  2 real shells would be too heavy!  Then I found 2 shell-shaped tin dishes at a thrift shop for $2.  Well they were too small to be decent, so again I had to think of something else.

Finally, I figured I would get some dark purple fabric to attach to a nude strapless bra, and put some puffy paint around the back as the thin strap.  I got a T-shirt at AC Moore (just $3) to cut up and use as fabric.  It worked!!  I folded 2 pieces into squares, gathered them at one end, and sewed them to the bra.  Here it is before I sewed it.  Again, I had to hand-stitch all that.

I hooked it closed and put it around a couch pillow and an old scrapbook to draw the puffy paint on the sides.  It worked really well!  I'd measured the width it was pulled to versus myself and all the little wiggles in it stretched out flat when I put it on.  This took 2 nights because each side had to dry before I could do the other.

The skirt took a heck of a lot of work.  First I bought some fabric and just sewed it on me.  It was way too tight to walk around comfortably, especially if I was going to Disney World.  The zipper was a disaster, because I hadn't followed any pattern.  I had to trash my first skirt attempt.  :(

Fortunately, my brother-in-law Hiro went to fashion design school in Paris and worked in Tokyo as a designer for years.  He made a pattern to my measurements and helped me translate it to real-life size on tracing paper.  From that, I cut the fabric, sewed it together, put on the zipper, and added the fins!

That's a picture from the first skirt, but I used the same design for the fins on the second skirt.  Except I stitched all the sides over because that fabric had a lot of little strings hanging and pulling off.  I stitched one light green square onto another, but sticking off the sides so it would form a tail shape!  For the skirt, I used my sewing machine!  It was a pencil-skirt shape with a slit up the middle so I wouldn't rip it walking around. 

Finally, here's the finished product.  You can see the full costume in this pic:

Then I found a dinglehopper on the kitchen table :)

The top of my skirt was the very last thing I did.  It was actually done like 3 minutes after the party started.  I cut a length of the fin material, folded it over, and gathered it in the middle front.  I sewed it onto the top of the skirt (at first it came apart and I was panicking, but my friends are all "fashionably late" so it was fine).  I was still doing my hair when my first guests arrived!  There's actually one of those bump-it things in my hair, and some bobby pins and little claw clips.  I'm wearing green seashell earrings and a pink poofy flower :)

Here's a more "appropriate" version of my costume that I wore to Disney!  You may have seen this in my MNSSHP post (and it's the only picture of the "sea foam" strap I put on Flounder, sorry!):

I bought a sequined purple tube top off ebay, and when it arrived I had to take it in (again, Hiro came up with the "how").  I also gathered the front middle to give it more shape!  Let me tell you, sewing with sequins is HARD WORK.  I also bought gold-glitter shoes from Wet Seal (much cheaper than the Toms version, and more comfortable) to look like sand, or just to make my feet less noticeable.  Haha.

I had my dad take a picture of my hair because I didn't know if it looked alright all night (because this was after we came back).  I was pretty happy with it :)

Hooray!  It was a great Halloween.  I'm sure we all want to be Disney Princesses sometimes :) By the way, you should have seen all the purple this top left on my skin!!  I felt like Ursula instead!  Hahaha.  Hope you had a great Halloween!  Please send me links of your costumes if you'd like :)