Help with making a pooled dress?

[Envy-Chan]

Hey, I really want to cosplay as Sloth for upcoming convetnions, but I don't want to make her look bad by making a bad costume, so can anyone give advice on how to make the bottom part of her dress? It kind of pools out. Okay, it pools out a lot. Here's a reference pic.

I need to make the bottom of this dress...

[TR Rose]

My suggestion is to look for a pattern that's shaped about the same as the dress you want to make. Look at wedding and prom patterns especially.

For something that goes out at the bottom, you're going to look for a dress that's fitted along the body, then gets much wider at the bottom. So your pattern pieces will look triangular rather than squared all the way down. Is this making sense?

FYI, Jo-Ann Fabrics is running a pattern sale for the next few weeks (McCalls is cheap this weekend, I think Simplicity is going to be cheap in a week or two), so it's a good time to go pattern hunting.

Best of luck.

[taeliac_studio]

Ooh! There are a ton of patterns for skirts like this! What you're looking for (on the line art on the back) is one that has "gores", or little triangle panels that go between the regular dress pieces. The cool thing is, if you have to modify it to make the skirt even fuller, it's really easy to say double the size of the gores

Here is one from McCalls (#5274)



Otherwise, there is something like a tulip dress that would work like that. You could use this pattern (scroll down to #5914) & simply lengthen the one they show. The skirt is really, really easy to make, too - my mother has made like 5 of them for herself~

Otherwise, if you think of a regular "A line" skirt, it's shaped like an "A". Now, where it hits at about your knees, you can make it an even more dramatic shape, kind of like this:

Code: Select all

     A
    | |
   /   \
 /       \

Sorry for my horrible, horrible ASCII artwork... I can sketch out the rough pattern if you needed it

Here is a good pattern in a similar shape (Butterick #3134) (view A, and you'd just have to lengthen it) That is the one I'll probably use, and just smoosh it to the top

I have to say thank you for the great picture of Sloth, too - I wanted to make the dress for Christmas this year, and couldn't find any good shots XP