Hello lovelies,

last year I attended Dokomi and its theme was retro. Of course Lady Oscar jumped into my mind immediately.
I am not the Oscar type and therefore chose to do a Marie-Antoinette cosplay. Ryoko Ikeda made some wonderful illustrations but to be honest, historically wise they are more fantasy and Victorian than 18th century. Therefore I decided to combine the cosplay and the rococo form and make it a bit more historically accurate.





As for the fabric I didn't want to go with expensive silk or satin because it was a cosplay after all and for the robe I went with a pink polyester satin-like fabric. It was actually lovely to work with because it didn't fray that much and the pleats looked very full.

I did not have a lot of time on my hands for that costume (a month, every day after work) and it misses a lot of frills I wanted to add. I am not sure when and if I will wear this costume again but given the opportunity I will definitely try and add more decorations and frills and pearls and all of the good stuff.

Once again I used the JP Ryan pattern with slight alterations: I made the shoulder straps separately and finished them in the historical way. A few of the long seams were made with the machine, all of the visible seams are of course hand made.

I started with the stomacher. For my Elsa cosplay I used stiff fabric to get the desired stiffness, this stomacher was made with sturdy lining and reed boning.





The skirt is pink polyester and definitely not the nicest fabric but it served the purpose. I see the making of both of my cosplays, Elsa and Marie-Antoinette as training for a bigger project: a robe a la francaise made out of real silk and hand made bobbin lace.


I used different kind of techniques for this, and I especially grew found of the rolled whip gather, as seen on the picture above. It was the 18th century way of gathering everything. For this you just whip gather (I always use an extra strong thread because the normal sewing threads snap at the pressure) about 5-10cm of your fabric and then pull, and then gather and pull again. That's all.


I decided to go with his plainer skirt design. It at least looks similar to the third Marie-Antoinette picture from the top.

 I hand stitched everything to the skirt because the sewing machine would have been too obvious.

Next was the actual robe, the lining was made out of 100% light cotton.


The pink fabric was pinned on top but not flatlined, because that would have been more Victorian.

This is how the whole back looks like.

 One of my most favourite parts of doing the robe is pleating the back. I think this is the most elegant feature about it.











First fitting:


I finally wore the pictures at the convention. There was an adjourning park and M. made a few pictures of me.





I edited all of the above pictures, it seems like I have a kind of red phase.

Only the picture below was edited by another person, namely Eva Hime/Hane Iro. She also added the flowers and made it ethereal.

All the best,

Auris Lothol

Hello lovelies,

for last year's Connichi I made a mash up, I combined a robe a la francaise with an Elsa from Frozen design. I wanted to cosplay her for a long time and had already bought some fabric but never even came to make a pattern or anything. The dress design is my own and it's pretty simple. But except for all the glitter Elsa's gown is also not super fancy.
As for the sewing pattern I used the robe a la francaise pattern by JP Ryan.

I started this project on the 3rd of August and finished it in time for Connichi 2018 which was held on the 7th and 8th of September. Everything except for the dress side seams were hand-sewn. As you can imagine, I had a hell of a month constructing this.

Doing the pannier was the first item on my list. See my other post here.
Lucky for me I already had stays and therefore didn't have to do them.

After the pannier came the underskirt, made out of a silver and blue polyester fabric. I didn't have enough fabric and had to order some more from the fabric shop in China and it only arrived two days before we left for the convention. That was super close, but also meant that I finished the skirt on the long train ride.


The construction of these skirts is super easy because they are made out of two big rectangles, in my case it was 107cm long and 150cm wide. I pleated the waist then sewed them together on both sides, leaving about 20cm from the top unsewn.

A ribbon was sewn to the waist, then hem it and that was the whole construction of this gown.


In the end I decided to also add some frills and bows. Pro tip: always do this before you sew your skirt together, not afterwards. It's much easier this way.

The frill was done with a whip gather. It was the first time I used this method and I had to start over three times because the material was so thick that the thread was pulled apart several times. But after the first regrets I really came to like this form of gathering.




The stomacher was also made out of the shiny fabric and lined with buckram, leather and thick linen but it still didn't get the stiffness I wanted.
I found this huge snowflake on aliexpress and decided to buy it. After it arrived I found out that it was a replica (?) of a frozen snowflake and even had a tag.

And this is the finished stomacher



The dress was a pain in the ass, I will not even sugarcoat it. I sometimes really didn't have any clue what the instructions wanted from me and I had my friends help me explain the mystery. Or sometimes they made the confusion even worse. Oh, and working with chiffon...I hate it. But it is still my favourite fabric to wear.

At first I wanted to cut off the straps to the dress to make it more historical accurate but then I thought, I am making that dress out of plastic chiffon, that is the least of my problems. 

This is what my back lining looked like. That is actually a pretty good method to adjust your dress to your size.


The next time I am doing a robe a la francaise I will not do the front closure on the lining because it didn't work out for me. I had to pin the stomacher on the sides of my gown and it looked horrible.
At least the back looked super cute,  the picture is from afterwards and you can clearly see the tiny snowflakes I added at the end.


I made three different sleeves, the biggest ones in the chiffon fabric, smaller ones in white and then I also added lace sleeves.
That's my under sleeve made out of white chiffon and blue and white lace.

My boyfriend helped me out with the dress and glued rhinestones to the sleeve. Thanks again!

I didn't have enough rhinestones to also glue them to the lace I added to the dress. Maybe I'll do this before another photo shooting, but none is planned yet.


The last bits were finished on the train ride to the convention, especially adding all those little snowflakes which are almost impossible to see on all the pictures. Fantastic.


Here are some pictures of the costume worn. Thank you so much to the Photographer Souly/Il Carnefice