Bellatrix Lestrange - Supanova 2014 (Australia)

My daughter and I are making a Bellatrix Lestrange and Snape costume for Supanova Sydney 2014.

We didn't quite have them finished but decided to debut them at Supanova Melbourne (April 11 - 13, 2014).

I am going to post some pictures here and include some explanation of how we went about making the Bellatrix costume and how we are going to improve on it before the Sydney Supanova in June 2014.

The Corset.

Here are some progress pictures of the corset.



We used belt leather off-cuts that we found in a bin at Birdsall's leather in Botany, Sydney. It was about A$10-15. The leather is quite thick and stands up on its own once pieced together. Some of the leather was brown rather than black so we bought some leather paint from an equine supplies shop for A$7.95 and painted it. Once we had given it a polish with some boot polish it looked OK. We "stitched" it together using 1.5mm (I think) circular cross section leather thonging which we bought from Spotlight for about A$1.75 per metre. We laced the back opening with 2mm round cross section leather thonging and on the front we used large square section length of raw-hide thonging that once again we got from the bargain bin at Birdsall's for A$1. The corset needs a lot more distressing before we take it out in June for Supanova Sydney.

The Dress.

The Bellatrix dress we decided to make out of suiting linen. We had several reasons for this. Firstly linen tends to really absorb light so that you don't get any reflections like you do with polyester based fabrics. Secondly, the large, heavy warp and weft we thought would look better when it was left ragged at the bottom of the dress as it is in the movie. Thirdly, we thought it would probably take the paint for the spirals and the embroidery thread better. And, finally, it is a natural fibre which has got to be good for the world. Something we didn't like about the linen was the price - A$25 per metre! I think we ended up having to by five metres because of the awkward sizing of some of the pieces, particularly the skirt and the hood. At least there will be some fabric left over if we want to make changes in the future (we suspect we will be changing the sleeves and perhaps having to reinforce the shoulders of the dress where the eyelets punch through close to the edge).




We came up with our own pattern, which we will draw up as a PDF for anyone who might be interested. We decided that we wouldn't include any bust pleats as there didn't seem to be any in the film costume, so we just dropped the front waist seam down a few centimetres in the middle (you can see the peaked waist line on the pattern) and gathered the material at the middle of the bust. The result of this was that the front waist seam was actually longer than the back and that the result would be more fabric at the front of the skirt than the back. However, considering there was going to be a corset hiding this area we actually thought that this would be an advantage and would give us folds of fabric at the front of the dress which we thought more closely matched the screen costume.

After we had made the dress we decided that the neck line and the shoulders were too tight and so we opened it up a bit and restitched the gather at the bust. The hood was a simple 50cm x 50cm right angled triangle of linen which was then stitched into the neck line. The seam at the neck line was left raw and unfelled as was the seam around the edge of the hood.

The shoulders were turned over by about 5-7mm and top stitched. We didn't want these to fray too much as they had to hold eyelets.

We attached the skirt to the waist but left it much longer than necessary and left the selvage along the bottom (the reason for that will become clear shortly).


Once we had finished sewing the dress we painted silver spirals all over it using a Uni Paint Pen (2.2mm - 2.8mm). I practiced a little bit on some paper so that I could get used to drawing different types of spirals, then, using a polypropylene chopping board (so that the paint wouldn't go through to the fabric underneath) I sat on the sofa watching "Order of the Phoenix" and "spiralled" away.



Once I had painted the whole dress it went into the washing machine and when it came out the spirals were faded almost perfectly. Then we used some silver thread to free-motion embroider some spirals onto the dress. We need to do some more of these before Supanova Sydney, but given that we had never done any FME before we think we have made a good start.



The other thing we did was to cut away the selvage at the bottom of the dress and to start distressing the raw end of the fabric with a craft knife and a seam ripper, so that it would appear like the screen costume.

Some things we should have done differently!

We should have done the eyelets on the shoulders after the wash. Some of them came of the fabric and they had to be redone and, as a consequence, moved slightly from their original positions. We used the smallest black eyelets you can get from Spotlight and put nine of them around the top of the shoulder (which seemed to be about the right number looking at pictures of the screen costume).

The Sleeves.

The same basic process that were used for the dress were used for the sleeves. Same fabric, same size and number of eyelets at the shoulder. We took measurements of my daughter's arm and just made a pattern from scratch - not too difficult really. Left and right completely interchangeable. Something that we did do differently to some of the other repro costumes we have seen is that we actually stitched the upper part of the sleeve together. Other costumes seem to have eyelets all the way up to the arm pit, but careful observation of pictures of the screen costume seem to suggest that the upper part of the sleeve is closed - so that is what we did. It makes it much easier to get the sleeves on. We used 14 eyelets per side of the sleeve vent making 28 eyelets per sleeve and 56 in total for both sleeves. The small eyelets we used came 30 to a box for about A$4 per box. To do the whole dress we therefore needed four boxes, which left some left over for the inevitable mistakes and losses.



Some things that we should have done differently!

We should have done the free motion embroidery before we finished sewing the edges and closing the seam on the upper arm. Also, the sleaves don't seem to sit properly. In the normal day to day use of your arm the wrist is more often than not twisted in relation to the upper arm and so the peak on the "cuff" tends to not sit on the middle of the top of the hand. We are going to adjust our pattern and remake our sleeves before the Sydney Supanova in June.

The Boots.

We used the picture below for our reference for the boots bought them on Ebay.



We found them under "Womens black high heel martin boots". They were about A$28 plus A$21 postage. They looked almost identical except that they had eyelets rather than boot hooks (speed laces). We've thought about drilling out the eyelets and replacing them with boot hooks, but think it may be more work than it is worth.

Here are some pics of the finished outfit at Supanova Melbourne 2014.

Great work! I loved the last pics, she really nailed bellatrix's attitude!

I know this is an old thread and a long shot. But do you happen to still have the pattern you made? I've been trying to piece together some from other patterns and it hasn't been going to well. I happened to stumble upon this while I was searching and hoping someone had made one somewhere.