Alice from Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland

verdaera

Active Member
Hi, everyone :)

I'm kind of new here, and since my current projects aren't quite to the 'build thread' stage yet I thought I'd share one of the costumes I'm most proud of.

The original Disney Alice in Wonderland has been and still is one of my favorite Disney movies so naturally I was thrilled when the new one was to come out. Before the movie came out, the costumes were put on display in a hidden room at Comic Con, which a few lovely bloggers took wonderful, 'costume-research-aimed' pictures, so I had enough material to get started before the movie came out. I started in photoshop playing with the picture angles and scale to make a pattern for the bottom hem of the dress. Since the bottom of the skirt was basically a rectangle for a tiered skirt and I determined that the selvedge edges were joined for the ruffle, I ordered some silk organza and dyed it the shade I wanted, and started hand embroidering the hem. It was mostly back-stitching and I had to invent the scallop pattern, which now that there are better pictures I know was probably a more heirloom stitch done with a wing needle. I did the hand embroidery at night while patterning and building the rest of the costume. All in all, it took me 7 months to embroider the hem of the dress.

I built all of the other pieces, and modified the socks and boots. The boots involved stripping off the top coat on the toe and then dyeing it black, the socks were simply imperfect stripes, a la the style of Colleen Atwood in Tim Burton movies. You can see a bit of the bloomers in parts of the movie, so I made that out of a swiss-dotted cotton. The petticoat is a striped silk taffeta with a ruffle hemmed with horsehair, though I added a second petticoat later for more poof. The gloves are a point de'sprit fabric which I striped using Prismacolor markers, and the buttons are from the "replica" Hot Topic gloves (the gloves weren't even close but the buttons were spot on. Their necklace was pretty good too). The rest of the dress is made with a grayish-blue base layer of silk satin with an outer layer of blue organza. One of my friends managed to source the same buttons used on the movie version in LA, so those are accurate.

One of the things I'm proudest of is the lace. I couldn't find a trim even close, so after seeing Battenburg lace in the theater costume shop I was in at the time, I managed to track some of that down and invented the little flower I used, which I mounted on a netting layer.

All in all, the project took 9 months and probably cost about $400. Sooo much more in labor of course. When I first came out with this, people wouldn't stop asking if I would sell it to them, so I estimated the cost for the labor to be about $10,000 conservatively, and obviously they stopped asking ;)

Anyone interested, I had done a blog on this build which can be found right here: http://alice-kingsley.livejournal.com/
 
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That is one hell of a dress! WOW! I can't even imagine doing all that hand embroidery. All your hard work and effort clearly shows. This is by far the best Alice dress I've ever seen, and for good reason. :thumbsup Seriously, WOW!
 
That is one hell of a dress! WOW! I can't even imagine doing all that hand embroidery. All your hard work and effort clearly shows. This is by far the best Alice dress I've ever seen, and for good reason. :thumbsup Seriously, WOW!

I agree completely with all of this!
 
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