Halloweening - Costumes - Corpse Bride

Three days without posts during Halloween??? OMG, you must have thought something had happened to me! LOL Nah, I was just super busy with work (in a really unfunny way) and in the evening I had to carve pumpkins because someone insisted to have 10 pumpkins for the party... Woops! But pics will follow of that later.

First of all, I have been featured!!! My first ever feature :) I am so proud! And feel so much better also of course hihi :) Check me out here where I am feature with my Sally Dress. Thanx Sunny for letting me know! *doing happy dance*


Now that thats done, do you remember the Leaf Dress? It was my master piece which was then turned into the Mombi Dress. However, all those dresses must have started somewhere right? Well, they did... the started with the Corpse Bride Dress. In 2005, during my dressy gothic days, I had a blue hair piece that I looooved to wear. Really, if I would have any choice in hair colour, it would be blue. I dont wear it anymore because it was really in bits at the end and I had to throw it away. But my love for poofy dresses (the bf hates those) and Tim Burton combined with the existing blue hair piece made we want to dress up as Corpse Bride for my first ever Halloween in London. I even made the bf dress up as Victor which was great because there was minimal dressing up on his part and a major dress for me :)

How to start? First get reference pics.

The Corpse Bride toy showing the dress really well: http://www.armchairempire.com/images/action-figures/corpse-bride/corpse-bride.jpg. Of course the movie poster: http://movieposters.2038.net/p/corpse_bride.jpg. And then I just happened to find the actual real-life movie poster which of course I had to have and display for the duration of the costume making and Halloween (and many months after)

After that it was off to the charity shops, but do you know how expensive wedding dresses are? Even used they can go up to hundreds of pounds... the cheapest one I found was £30 and that was a little too much for a dress I intended to destroy anyway. But THEN I went to (what is now my favourite) charity shop and found this super hideous and dirty wedding dress. About 3 sizes too big and stains everywhere, no one wanted to buy it and the lady was even reluctant to show it to me. I got it for £4 :) It was ugly, poofy, way too big and perfect for what I had in mind. I'm still kicking myself for not taking a 'before' picture actually but alas that cant be helped now.

Then I got to work. In the end I couldnt bear cutting it up too much but the end result it not too bad... Ready? Here we go!

I painted the whole dress with basic water paint in blue with black TB swirls. Yes this is the part where it doesnt look exactly like the movie dress but I liked it poofy.

I couldnt get myself to cut the 2 meter (!!!) long train so I painted it to match. In the pub I stood next to the bar all evening and we stuff the train under there LOL

I turned the big poofy sleeves (so 80s!) into these lovely gauntlets

I used a simple necklace that I had bought for £1 or so to accent the waist after I had taken it in a couple of sizes. Here you can also see that I cut off the neckline to give the idea of a bodice. I highlighted the edges of both the bodice and the gauntlets with darker blue paint.

The back I kept simple and just painted blue with details on the bow that was also too cute not to use. (Keep in mind, this was my first ever and only wedding dress so I enjoyed this to the max LOL)

I used simple muslin for the veil that I also painted with TB swirls and that was attached with pins and the headbands. I added some spiders for effect.

Here you can see how the headbands worked. I needed those as the hair piece only attached the a pony tail and the rest of the non-blue had to be covered. The vines were real vines from the garden that I spray painted black.

I had this bouquet with fake flowers from pound store with an added bow from some leftover veil, also painted with blue and with extra spiders

So, do I look like it yet?

The full dress. This is my favourite picture :) but this was only the dress rehearsal

The actual party where I'm actually blue. I didnt really liked the blue as I felt more like Smurfette than Corpse Bride...

We tried forever to get a decent movie poster picture but it just wouldnt work... Out of all of them I like this one best. Not bad compared to the original huh? ;)

So for only £4, some minor accessories, and about 4 days of work I had this fantastic dress that I wore for three years in a row on every occassion I could.

Halloween 2005...

Halloween 2006 (after a little too much punch)... Oh yes, here you can see the worm I made. You know how she always has this talking worm in the movie? Well, here it is :) I also adjusted some bridal shoes but under that dress you can hide a country so no sign of the shoes anywhere...

Halloween 2007, the blue worked best here...

Until the bf insisted I changed (see above picture haha)... which is when it became the Leaf Dress.

In this lovely time of Halloween I just had to share this dress. I hope you like it! And if not well that's too bad since it doesnt exist anymore LOL. For a while I tried to sell the non-dress parts on ebay but it didnt work... Hihi, I guess no one is as crazy as me!