The Making of Fleur Delacour Costume

by thalia 1 January 2016 2 comments

Okay, this is not exactly a Halloween Costume… But Erlia was throwing a Harry Potter themed party today, to celebrate her birthday and a New Year party at the same time. And course, much like our Halloween Parties, this was another excuse to make and wear costumes for us! ~~So, I’ll file this under Halloween… Or maybe I should make a Costume category… Hmm.~~ Yes, I made a Costumes category…

Anyway, we were planning to come as the HP characters:

Ari as James Potter, because he already had most of the clothes. They kinda dress similarly.
I’ll be Prof. Trelawny. I was going to dress up as Nymphadora Tonks, because my hair was already blue and I had many clothes like hers. But I’ve been wanting to do Prof. Trelawny, just because her look was sooooo kooky!
Aina would be Fleur Delacour. She was thinking of dressing as Cho Chang, but her costume was either too ordinary, or too hard to make (the cheong sam… my sewing technique wasn’t up to par yet). Besides, Aina’s hair didn’t have a fringe.

For Aina’s Fleur Delacour, we planned to make everything from scratch… The basic plan looked like this, although the colors were all wrong:

The Dress and the Cape

It turned out that Aina didn’t have a light blue dress. So, I had to make one for her. We chose a knitted jersey fabric, so that it’s cool enough for Singapore weather, and she could use it as an everyday dress afterwards. I used one of her dresses as the rough pattern, which helped speed up the process.

The dress cutting was made much looser than the real Fleur’s dress, because I don’t think Aina would wear tight clothing for her everyday dress. We put three small buttons, just as decorations and make it look similar enough to the real Fleur’s dress.

This was probably the first time I had sewn a normal short sleeve. I’ve done puffy sleeves for the Princess Bubblegum costume, but that was easy, because the puffyness covered the mistakes. Sleeves are very tricky!

For the cape, it’s even more tricky for me, because it had a collar. I’ve never sewn collars before. I’ve made a cape before for Aina’s Red Riding Hood costume a while ago, and now the length was perfect for Fleur’s cape. So, I used the red cape as the pattern, sans the hood, and replaced the hood with the collar… Easy to say, hard to do… But since I’ve never made a collar before, I had to search videos and tutorials all over the internet. I made a few mistakes along the way, like attaching the collar top-side down (oops!), but I could fudge it…

Fleur actually has a double-collar cape. But I was already spent in making one collar, so we skipped the second collar… Maybe next time, when I’m more experienced in making collars…

However, I think the result was quite satisfactory. Aina seemed to be happy with it, too.

The Wand

The plan was to make a wand that can shine at the tip, just like in the movie. Ari did a research for the shape of Fleur’s wand, and decided to make it out of paper and glue. He made the center of the wand hollow, to fit the wire, and stuck a small lightbulb at the tip. Inside the grip was a single AAA battery housed inside a plastic sleeve made of a short piece of drinking straws. The challenge was the on/off switch. We could not find any electrical switches that were small enough to be kind of invisible. In the end, Ari basically created a metal ring that was to be worn by Aina, which acted as the conductor between the two wires. If Aina pressed her ring against the two ends of the wires, the lightbulb would turn on. This way, the other kids would not be able to use her magic wand, because they didn’t have the ring 🙂

The exterior of the wand was decorated to resemble a wooden stick, and look like the wand used by Fleur. We used hot glue to create the wood grains and some construction paper for the elaborate carvings. Finally, we painted the wand brown.

The Weird-Shaped Hat

The hardest part was her hat, and we couldn’t find a hat that had the right shape and color like Fleur’s hat. So we had to make it… somehow. We bought a pink felt hat at a store, which had the closest shape to Fleur’s hat and actually fit Aina’s head. There were not that many options, because most of the felt hats were in adult size. Since we got it in a bright pink color, we had to cover it with blue-color felt, and added the weird spout thing on top… which turned out to be the most tricky part of the hat.

We first covered the hat with paper fabric, to make it easier for us to glue the blue felt layer.

After the glue dried, we attached the blue felt (with glue again) on top of it, and tried to fudge the edges by blending the felt together. Then we tried to add the spout-like shape like Fleur’s hat, but it didn’t turn out too well. We had a hard time shaping it so that it looked like a spout thing, but, we couldn’t make it stick to the felt. So we ended up with just a small lump on the top of the hat… Couldn’t really see it in the pictures… Oh well.

The Result

I guess it wasn’t so bad. It was quite comfortable to wear in this weather, and Aina loved it. The wand was fun… Although later that day, the light started to go on and off by itself… magically, perhaps? Or just short-circuited… XD