Oh boy was this costume a labor of love. This might sound strange but if there was any costume that I could say was my child, it’s this one. […] First, I went to New York’s garment district to buy fabrics. I decided on an evening wear fabric, a medium bridal weight satin, because I wanted the dress to look elegant.


Next was draping and pattern drafting. I had a friend of mine […] help me with the drape of the dress because I had never done a handkerchief hem before. From those patterns I drafted the over dress (red), and the black underskirt. The pattern making for the black underskirt was really complicated because I had never done anything like it. The points of the black skirt fall between the points of the outer peach dress, so I couldn’t free hand a pattern. The patterns needed to match, but at the same time all the points needed to fall in different places on each. I made a pattern of the outer dress, cut and re-arranged where the points fell because I wanted to keep the length and curves cohesive. When I finally figured out how to do it it work perfectly, thank god, because it took me forever to figure out!


The top of the peach dress is lined and boned, to hold it up. At the front of the dress is a monogram “M” like in the original illustration. Before the dress was completely sewn up, I had to monogram the “M”. It was hand embroidered and took forever! I had never done such intensive embroidery so it took awhile to get the hang of it.


The outer red dress is fully lined and all the ruffles are baby hemmed. I drank so much coffee while trying to finish those ruffles! In total they measure over 12 yards!


The wig was dyed and styled by me. Originally it was blond and I dyed it to a darkish grey. It’s meant to look like manga hair, so after dying it the base color I mixed up a few different tones of the same color to add streaks. It’s subtle but has a nice effect. I also wefted extensions to add to the bottom to make it longer.


The wings were made by me from scratch, built on a wire frame. I bought a few different lengths of feathers, cut each tip to a point and glued them on one by one. Thankfully the wings aren’t that big so it didn’t take that long.


On the top of the black underskirt, under the peach dress, is a built in pettie coat. I have a little bustle going on in the back it’s so puffy. I gathered tulle it and sewed it into black lining fabric to match the underskirt, the top is finished with bias tape so it could be sewn clean to the black skirt . The built in pettie coat keeps everything from looking to heavy and it’s convenient not to have a pettie coat on under everything else.