I say 3 weeks, but in reality, you’ll need 6 months lead time, just coming up with the idea.  When your daughters say, “We want to be Rainbow Fairies for Halloween”, they had better utter these words before Memorial Day, or you’ll have to tell them they are out of luck.  I simply can’t come up with ideas overnight.  Many, many sleeps are required…

Next, assemble your items.  In this case, I found the wings in a small toy shop near the Pike Place Market in Seattle.  I’d like to tell you these dresses were made for $20-ish, each, but that would not be including the $15 wings, airfare, hotel, food, rental car…so, in essence, these costumes cost me a couple grand.  And you thought re-purposing clothes was only for the frugal!  The pretty periwinkle dress I used as the base was the bridesmaid dress I wore in Amie’s wedding.  You know her as “the shoe expert”. I would love to show you a picture of me in this dress, dancing with a beer in my hand, drops of liquid flying into the air, but apparently all of my pre-Greg pictures are living in a storage space under the house.  Lucky for me, I scanned 1 about 9 years ago, which was the last time I had enough free time to trouble shoot our scanner.  I’m in the lower right, being Jacyln Smith of our Charlie’s Angels crew.  My college roomies just ROCK. Wow, I just realized the back 3 on the left are all pregnant in this picture…the 6 of us have made some babies.  15 if you like math, which I do not.  This post shall confirm that fact for you.

The glittered tulle I bought at JoAnn fabrics, using many, many, many coupons.  That stuff never goes on sale.  I also had some back-up periwinkle fabric if I didn’t have enough bridesmaid fabric (which was a dream to work with, quite honestly), 2 periwinkle zippers, thread, glittery pink tights, and they wore silver shoes they already had. How MUCH tulle did I buy?  Some was too much, some was too little, but I think I only had to run back for pink, so for me, that’s a total victory.  I’m guessing I used a half of a yard of 5 colors, and maybe a yard and a half of pink.  Let me be clear: I find that math has very little use in sewing.  It’s better to guess and spend the energy being pissed off that you’re wrong than try to correctly estimate.  Wait…I don’t know how to estimate, so that’s just a rationalization, but what the hell, this is supposed to be fun, so just roll with it.

When working without a pattern, it’s helpful to dig through your child’s closest and find the “next closest thing” to what you want to make.  It is useful on sizing and as an example when you want to draw your own pattern pieces.  I used this Land’s End long shirt/dress from summer. If you are sewing using “the Lori Method”, never measure the example piece.  EYEBALL IT.  It’s better that way.  Or not.  Just remember, there are no right answers in Lori Math…only guesses.

Now, and this next step is quite important: WALK AWAY!  Shut your sewing room door, and walk away.  You are at approximately minus 3 weeks until Halloween, and that’s just WAY TOO EARLY to be starting a project that could be done in that time frame REASONABLY.  No self-respecting Mother would get this type of project done early.  It’s poor form and won’t win you any friends at the PTA Meeting.

With 4 days until Halloween, and all of Fall Break lying before you, pour a BIG glass of wine, open some Pringles, pull out your  “Pretty In Pink” DVD, and grab your scissors.  It’s break neck speed from here ladies.  Be prepared to sweat, curse, and yell at your family should they dare ask you for ridiculously needless things like “food” or “clean underwear”.  If a foot falls off during a raucous game of UNO, it’s staying off.  You are in your ZONE.

Now, take a big sip of wine, because you’re going to have to cut that dress to pieces.  It’s going to hurt.  Whenever I cut fabric, I hold my breath.  There’s just no going back once you start slicing.  I used the original top of the dress to create Sara’s top, which gave me some preexisting nice darts for form.  For Kelly’s I used a fabric pen.  ALWAYS use a fabric pen.  It washes right off.  Which is quite important, because as you can see, my original sketches on Kelly’s half ended up being way too low.  I pinned well above my marks, and those hot pink lines you see came right off in seconds with a washcloth and water.  I wish you could have seen Kelly’s face!  When I held up the top for sizing before I sewed it, she gingerly asked, “Mommy?  Are ‘dose marks going to stay ‘dere?”  Sara would have grabbed a permanent marker and turned it into a landscape.  They are SO different, despite wanting their entire wardrobes to match.

I did draw a few pattern pieces.  I made a sleeve (and mine are ALWAYS too big…20 years, I can’t get sleeves right), decided it was wrong, made a 2nd sleeve, and it was wrong, so I layered them into a 2-layered sleeve, in order to disguise the fact that they were both way too big.  Dazzle them with color!  I did try to zig-zag the edges of the sleeves because tulle with unravel if you simply breath on it.  I could have never zig-zagged 24 skirt petals, so I used a finishing fray glue on them.  It worked fairly well, I must say, and was far easier than zig-zagging the edges of tulle that is studded with crystals.  THAT IS…well…A BITCH.

To inset a sleeve, it’s the standard, right sides together, pin the hell out it, make sure you aren’t sewing the ends of the sleeve onto the dress itself, find out you did, undo it, and start over.  You know, pretty basic stuff.  In the meantime, your 4 year old might bring you a lovely picture, full of stickers and a lovely display of her newly discovered writing ability.  It will be much needed fuel.  That, along with the guilt that your 4 year old taught herself to write, because you were too busy cursing at dresses you could have bought at Target for half the price and in 1/100th of the time.  Moving on…

Voila!  2.5 hours later, you have sleeves.  You wanted 4, but you have 8 layered, so while you started at Trouble-Shooting City, you landed in Fabulous Town.  See how that works?  There’s a special magic in making mistakes.  I find it important when making the girls matching clothes to work in parallel: I made both tops, one right after the other.  Otherwise I’d forget the mistake I just made, and not remember to correct it on the next dress.  I work back and forth, like I’m lacing a shoe.  I make 1 top, then the 2nd top.  I put the sleeves into the 2nd top, then back to the 1st top.  Therefore each outfit has equal chances of being both the rookie attempt, and the expert attempt.  My mistakes are spread out evenly over both costumes, as opposed to 1 being fairly nice, and 1 being totally wonky.  I may have learned this lesson the hard way.  As well, if I got 1 costume entirely finished, I would have to overcome a mountain of dread trying to start another from scratch.  In sewing, once you’ve finished a project, you just want to take a break from the machine.  And let’s face it, you might need to dry out.

For the skirts, I cut strips the length of the skirt I wanted plus about 3 or 4 extra inches, and put in the hem.  Then I cut 24 petals and divided them into 2 rainbow sequences per skirt.  I pinned them via the patented “eyeball it” method:

This picture represents a trial run.  I ended up repinning the entire thing twice before I got it to stretch out evenly.  It’s possible that while chatting with Amie on the phone, I pinned Kelly’s skirt entirely upside down. My Bernina is a whiz at ruffling.  The key to good ruffling is simply to pin, pin, and more pinning.  Then you pull the pins and tuck in the pleats as you go.  I have zero.zero formal sewing training.  I was hired at the age of 15 by the Ball State University Costume Shop as an Apprentice for their summer stock theater.  I was given a machine, a cutting table, and an ironing board, and told to create an entire wardrobe for the Vera’s character in “Mame”, using the sketches from the Assistant Costume Designer.  I wasn’t interviewed, no one knew me, and I never got the chance to tell anyone my entire sewing resume consisted of 1 sweatshirt in my 8th grade Home Ec class.  Wanting to appear experienced, I promptly turned on my iron, found it had a shredded cord after it burned through my wrist, and spent my first day of work in the ER.  You Gotta Start Somewhere, I guess…

I left some room at the top to turn it over and make a velcro waistband, which is not the least bit tricky.  Fold a tiny bit in (1/4th of an inch), iron.  Then fold over a couple of inches more, and sew it down as close to the edge as possible, leaving a few inches open so you can play with the velcro.  Cut your velcro a couple of inches wider than your child’s waist (but make your skirt 2x too wide from the get-go so it can gather), feed it through the skirt using the famous “my string came out of my gym sweats, and does anyone have a safety pin so I can feed it back through” method, overlap those extra 2 inches of velcro, sew them together, and it snaps right into the skirt.  Then sew down the seam you’ve left undone.

The most important part of the skirt is that you pull your petals out through the top before you make the casing for the velcro.  The last thing you’d want is to sew those bad boys down.  Undoing stitching on tulle is as much fun as your annual lady appointment, if you catch my drift.  I did sew the skirt into a tube before I made the casing, which takes all of 2 minutes and 1 seam.  I really want to learn how to make a twirly skirt, which means, I’m going to have to use a pattern.  My attempts at winging it have never worked, and my hand-drawn patterns perpetually end in tube skirts.  25 years ago I made a full-length white velvet gown and now I can’t even make a twirly skirt without a pattern.  Wait…I was only drinking Mr. Pibb when I made that velvet gown…hmm, that might have something to do with it. I recall I ate my weight in Twizzlers trying to get that thing done.

The good news is that you will have helpers.  They will gladly pull down the button jar, yank the tulle scraps from the trash, and organize this entire mess for you.  You may not understand their organization system, but trust me, that’s because sheer genius is hard to grasp.  Am I still finding pom pom balls and buttons on all 3 floors of my house?  Of course I am!  It’s like a game of Notions Hide-and-Seek.  And I’m LOSING.  This picture was taken around 3 pm.  Kelly is still in her pjs, while Sara was on Day 3 of wearing that tank top, and she was wearing tights for pants.  When Mommy is sewing, anything goes.  I encourage their mess-making in my sewing room because what’s good for Momma Goose is good for her Baby Gander.

In the end I had to whack off the tops and hem them to make them much shorter.  I put a zipper in the back, which I won’t describe here, because I hadn’t put in a zipper in 20 years, and there was some serious “winging it” going on at that point.  I will say the instructionals that come with zippers are for more complex than they need to be.  I threw it away and just figured it out by looking at a zipper on my own dress.  It was easy-peasy. Again, don’t worry too much about taking measurements.  This is a Halloween costume, not a 4H project.  No one is looking for finished seams and perfect hems.  I tried them on the girls several (hundred) times as I went about making these.  Pin and sew.  Pin and sew.  I go slow, eat lots of junk food, and go through a “bit” of wine.  Again, remember in the Lori Method, there is NO measuring.  Not of fabric, and certainly not of libations.  Funny thing…these costumes didn’t want to be made to “Pretty in Pink”, which makes no sense to me whatsoever.  She makes her own prom dress out of 2 different dresses!  Hello?  These wanted to be made to “Stepmom” with Julia Roberts, which means I cried all over them.  HEY!  Movie about a dying Mother!  THAT’S WHERE THE GIRLS ARE GETTING IT.  HA!  I’m not going to die after all!  Good news!

The dresses are actually a skirt and top that aren’t sewn together.  I made the sashes out of long strips of tulle, hemmed on the long edges, gathered onto the skirt, and then held down by a few stitches into the skirt, here and there.  Sashes hide EVERYTHING, just keep that in mind.  When you didn’t take the time to fully think out your design, wrote nothing on paper because you have no drawing or measuring abilities…just throw a sash on it.

As much belly-aching as I’ve done about these costumes, I so glad I tried.  “Make Halloween costumes for my daughters” is now crossed off my bucket list.  Sara will be 7 next Halloween, and I’m guessing her days of being a fairy are just about over.  Right now she wants to be Kim Possible and marry Phineus and/or Ferb.  I’m glad I grabbed the chance to make something over-the-top girlie while I still had it.  I can’t keep them little, but I can keep the pictures.  Oh my precious baby girls…oh how I love you.

Rainbow Fairy Sara

Rainbow Fairy Kelly