A Very Disney Christmas

I didn't go to Disney for Christmas this year (I never have, though it is a goal of mine!) but I did get a lot of Disney magic in the form of presents!  First of all, my brother and brother-in-law picked out the cutest Disney jewelry for me:

Mickey and Minnie earrings (too cute!!):

Mickey rhinestone and glass necklace filled with tiny gems, on a long gold chain:

They also got me other cute things, but this is strictly Disney today :)  My friend Jenny got me this adoooorable Mickey tea-for-one teapot!  She ordered it from JAPAN!  They don't have cute stuff like this over here, and I absolutely adore Tokyo Disney.  Sigh.  I'll be back some day!

She also got me these awesome Elsa socks!  Haha so cute:

Santa left a Winnie the Pooh Tsum-Tsum in my stocking, along with Frozen Band-Aids!

My parents got me this beautiful Alex+Ani bracelet that I saw on my last Disney trip and hadn't picked up for myself.  I checked online after returning from my trip and it wasn't available!  It was a park exclusive.  Well, since then it has become available on the website and my parents snagged it for me :)

They also got me this Chip mug since I became obsessed with Mrs. Potts after making those cookies of her a couple posts ago!

I got Silly Symphony and Toy Story Vinylmations:

And I gasped when I opened this one!  I had told my parents there was this really cute frame I liked in Hollywood Studios on my last visit, and I thought, "you don't need this."  Just like the Alex+Ani bracelet, I looked it up online but to no avail.  My dad found it on some Mouse Ears website and ordered it for me!  I have the perfect picture from that park to frame.  I'm so excited, and I was so touched!

And lastly, I got my dad tickets for us to go see The Little Mermaid at the White Plains Performing Arts Center!  It was last night, and it was wonderful!  I saw the Broadway production 5 years ago and this one was just as amazing!  Of course it was a smaller scale, but they did some great staging and production work.  The orchestra was wonderful, and the props and costumes were so colorful and fun! And of course all the performers had Broadway-quality voices!!  It is running till January 4 so if you live in or near Westchester, NY then I definitely recommend attending one of their last performances!!

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 :)

Boo to You!!

oh. my. goodness.  My dad & I just got back from Disney World last night.  We had the BEST time.  I have SO MUCH TO TELL YOU!

I went through such a FUNK this morning!!  As we all know, Disney is the Happiest Place on Earth, so it was a little sad coming home.  But home is where the heart is, so of course it wasn't THAT bad :)  I will be writing a post on how to help yourself through the Post-Disney Blues, or as I will further refer to them, the PDB's.  But first (and one of the steps to curing the PDB's), pictures from my trip!

We stayed at All-Star Music, in the Broadway section.  We found these adorable washcloth ghosts hanging in our window:

I just love Disney.  Don't you?  We went to MNSSHP our second day, so I will start with those photos:

These were all over the place, but that didn't make them any less special!  How CUTE!

Here's my dad & me in our costumes: Dr. Doofenshmirtz and The Little Mermaid :D  And Mickey, of course!

The Haunted Mansion was beautifully spooky!!  We made sure to stop by before it got too crowded, which was before the official Halloween party started (MNSSHP starts at 7 but you can go in at 4).  It was awesome, as usual.  We got stuck looking dead-on at Madame Leota's floating head and had that announcement about the ride beginning again in a few moments.  That happened a few times at the party, but it was okay!!  I got a good picture of Jack Sparrow while we heard "Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me" for about 25 minutes on repeat at the end of Pirates of the Caribbean:

This means free candy!!  You don't even have to say "trick or treat!"  Except sometimes it's raisins...

The lighting was so pretty!  Here's Frontierland:

We saw an almost-private screening of Country Bear Jamboree (there were maybe 5 other people there).  We heard about the re"fur"bishment this attraction had in early October and were fretting it might not be open when we were there.  However, it was open, and the bears looked so clean and shiny!  They even finally referenced how Big Al was interrupting the finale with his own song.  Here's the curtain closing on him, haha.

There were a lot of awesome costumes!!  I saw a few guys dressed as Prince Phillip and the Disney fox version of Robin Hood (my favorite Disney movie from my childhood :)), a family of Disney gift cards (so clever!), a few Barbie and Kens from Toy Story 3...  Here's a family dressed as a Toy Story group:

And Kiss:

Here's some pics of the rides:

It's a Small World:

The castle was beautiful, as always:

We saw the Happy Hallo-Wishes fireworks show:

A big tree was in our way (because it was crowded in the prime viewing areas) but we could still see the ghosts and pumpkins projected on the castle!  The colors were nice and our "ghost host" was great :)

Then there was Mickey's Boo-to-You! Parade which began with the Headless Horseman trotting down the route!

 

 The gang were in their Halloween get-ups!

I didn't get a good picture of Eeyore, but he was dressed as a cute clown :) Christopher Robin actually looked just like the character from the books, and he's a face character!  Oh, they're all so cute...

I've never seen Kanga, Roo, and Rabbit!  How awesome!

There was a great Haunted Mansion part to the parade:

We didn't know who this guy and the dog were!  I googled it today and found out it's the "Caretaker and Dog" from the scene in the Haunted Mansion.  I don't remember this scene.  I thought it was from The Great Mouse Detective!  Haha.  Oh well.  It was still so cute to see a real dog in the parade!

 

Then there were the hitchhiking ghosts:

 

And the Country Bear Jamboree:

And, of course, Clara Cluck.  What??  She came down the parade route in her own barn float, clucking away to "Boo to You" hahaha.  What was that about?  Needless to say, we loved it.  I think this was my favorite part of the parade.

Here's another nod to Robin Hood--the Sheriff of Nottingham:

Here's Maleficent:

Goofy came to end the parade with his big candy concoction:

We saw the sign on our way out:

Then there were the treats!!

Aaah!  They had these adorable mouse ears.  When you lift the flap on top, Chip and Dale are under it :)

We saw these cute lanterns and popcorn souvenir buckets all over the park--they were aDORable!  

They had Madame Leota lollipops:

And Haunted Mansion ghost ones:

Their candy apples are just the cutest!  Too bad candy apples are so messy!!

Then there were the cupcakes, of course.  YUM!

I love the chocolate mouse ears on the ghost cupcakes!!  I want the mold!!  I finally bought a pumpkin-topped cupcake on our last night in Disney:

Cute AND delicious!!  Then there were the real pumpkins:

And the not-real pumpkins:

 

 

Mickey and Minnie in their farmer's clothes at The Land in Epcot, with some familiar pumpkin faces...

Duffy was in his pumpkin costume, also at Epcot, wearing my tiny Duffy on his head:

And of course there were pumpkin scarecrows at Main Street, USA:

Here's some decorations at the entrance to Magic Kingdom:

And the exit!  Oh, it was such a magical time.  See ya real soon!  (So much more to come!!)