hatty halloween!

this year for halloween, i dressed up as princess beatrice of york, one of the guests at the royal wedding, whose infamous hat sold for €93,000 on ebay.

image courtesy of buzzfeed.com

i’ve always made a point of making my own costumes - not just for halloween but any fancy dress event - and this year was no different, especially now that i’m using my sewing machine on a regular basis!

so how exactly did i make this outfit? read on to find out!

i started off with some basic raw materials - a felt floppy hat, and two a-line 3/4 sleeved dresses, one to wear, and another one to use as extra fabric for embellishments.

first on the agenda was the hat - the most important part of the outfit!

step 1: get yourself a hat hat (wool felted fedora hat, €12.99, new look)


step 2: cut away the rim, leaving just the dome of the hat. trim base of dome to fit.

step 3: cut out a hoop from strong, reinforced cardboard

step 4: stretch fabric over hoop and pin at the back

step 5: stich (by hand or machine) around the inside of the hoop

step 6: cut around the outside of the stitching, to create a hole in the middle of the fabric hoop

step 7: use excess felt to create ribbons and stitch on top of the hoop. finally, attach hoop to base of hat using several strong stitchlines.

three hours later, and it was time to pimp up my dress. i lowered the neckline and added a vertical strip down the centre. i used the facing from the original neckline as the top panel, then used the extra fabric from the second dress to make lots of thin strips. i then wove and twisted the strips amongst the space i’d made in the neckline, and voilà!

this is the inside of the dress before i sewed everything in place

the whole thing took about 5 hours, but at least an hour of it was spent trying to figure out how on earth i was going to do this! at 4am i climbed into bed, exhausted but proud, and today at work, my efforts paid off when i won a prize in the costume competition!

the final product, pictured here with my friend julie, who dressed up as beatrice’s sister, princess eugenie. so much fun!