Mother Gothel Cosplay for Mother's Day

I don't know why I love Disney villains so much...they just seem so much more interesting than the princesses, although I do still have a soft spot in my heart for Belle (because she reads!). I love it when people try to come up with backstories that explain their motivation (e.g. Ursula was actually King Triton's older sister who was denied the throne simply because she was a female, hence her desire to become Queen of Atlantica). We don't get much from Disney's Tangled's Mother Gothel, other than her vain desire to stay young and beautiful, but one of my favorite fairy tale novel adaptations is Donna Jo Napoli's Zel. In this version, the evil witch is just an infertile woman who longs for a daughter, so much so that she goes to unspeakable lengths to keep her adopted daughter with her. That doesn't excuse her actions by any means, but it does make her a much more nuanced character.

Why are villain costumes always so much better, too? I'm way more into jewel tones than pastels. 

Anyway, I had some nine+ yards of this stretch panne velvet in burgundy (picked up for free from someone else's stash at school!), plus leftover gold trim from my shieldmaiden costume, so like with Ursula, I decided on a whim that the stash practically demanded another random costume. I also wanted to see if I could redeem this most abhorred of fabrics (polyester! stretch! not really velvet! so very costumey! and not in a good way!).

I had just enough trim leftover to encircle the neckline. I ended up having a 1.5" scrap left at the end. *whew* That was close!

I found this website very helpful in planning my costume; even though I wasn't interested in screen accuracy, I did still want it to be recognizable as Mother Gothel. It was pretty easy to sew up the body of the dress from my knit block (I just extended the side seams down and out to make a full skirt), but figuring out the sleeves took some doing. The problem with making costumes based on animated designs is that animators don't always consider things like, oh, seams have to go somewhere, and fabric needs to be cut on some kind of grain to get a certain drape. Mother Gothel's sleeves are very fitted at the top, then they suddenly bell out around the elbow to make that trumpet shape. There's just the one underarm seam and that's it! It took me about eight tries to get the sleeve shape more or less right (a lot of other costumes I've seen have the fullest part of the sleeve hanging from the wrong place, or the sleeves are full all the way through), but thank goodness I had plenty of (free) fabric! I think I might have used about 1.5 yards of fabric just making trial sleeves. In the end, the sleeve shape was not anything I would ever have predicted.

Wtf, amirite?

I lined the inside of the sleeve with some random black scraps I had, added the gold bias binding, and called it a day. No hemming or seam finishes -- it's a costume, after all, and I don't even have anywhere to wear it to! I just wanted to sew it up for the sake of using up as much of this fabric as possible. I finished it in time for April's Vibrant Color Stashbusting challenge, but since I didn't blog it until now, I suppose it also counts as May's Knit Stashbusting? I mean, it's stretchy, even if it's not what one typically considers a knit.

Now, my wig wardrobe is not particularly deep. I've got the short white one (mad scientist and Ursula) and then I've got my old Bellatrix one. Neither is an exact match for Mother Gothel, but obviously the Bellatrix one works better. So excuse the not-quite-right black curls, but here goes!

The lighting in my apartment also makes the fabric look more red and less burgundy.

I didn't think to look at what exactly her pose was before taking these pictures. Oops. 

I'm really in love with these sleeves. 

This is what the back looks like. You can kind of see where my underarm seam ended up. 

I'm sorry I don't have any full length pictures showing the full sweep of the gown's skirt. 

That's because once we start getting zooming out too much, inappropriate things start showing up in the frame, like this ridiculously cute (and decidedly non-villainous) elephant humidifier. 

Summary:
Fabric: 7 yards or so of 54" wide burgundy stretch panne velvet, 1/2 yard of black stretchy mesh (leftover from Ursula's skirt), a strip of burgundy sheet (leftover from Ballister's cape) for the belt.
Notions: Less than 1 yard each of gold braided trim and gold bias tape, both from the stash, and 2 yards of gold trim leftover from my Regency ballgown. That's a lot of stashbusting right there!
Hours: Maybe two for the actual sewing, but another three for the sleeve trials.
Will you make it again? I'm a sucker for vaguely-medieval swooshy maxi dresses, so I'm pretty sure I will at some point.
Total cost: I'm just going to say it was free, since it was all made from stash!
Final thoughts: I feel a little sheepish making a costume for a character from a movie I've only seen once (and don't entirely remember, TBH), but I certainly enjoyed the making and wearing of this one. It's really quite comfortable too (thanks to the stretch factor), albeit warm, but that's panne velvet for you. I just need to find an appropriate convention to swan about at!

I've even got a convenient dagger in my costume trunk. I got it over a decade ago in Taiwan, managed to get it back through customs, never used it for anything, but still somehow managed to save it until now. 

I'm all ready to go after Rapunzel for her hair!

Okay, so maybe I got a little carried away...

Okay, let's get serious about killing our adopted daughter, like in this screenshot. 

Now, I don't know if you noticed this in these pictures, but the last time I made a magenta maxi dress, I was quite a bit leaner. Now, I could say that it's just because the velvet adds a bit of thickness, or that this dress is cut looser, or even that I've been indulging too much in the start of summer berry season...but it's really because my Mother Gothel is, well, going to actually be a mother.

Is this the world's weirdest bump pic or what? Oh well, it's not like I'm exactly conventional in my "normal" clothing either.

Is it wrong to dress up as a notoriously un-maternal character when one is preparing to be a mother? Let's just say I enjoyed the irony of it.

I'm so thrilled to be able to finally share this with you all (and to be able to finally reveal my biggest excuse for the lack of blogging this spring!). Our SHB is due at the end of September, and I'm both excited and petrified that I'm already more than halfway there! And for those of you are thinking it's been a while since we saw Walnut on the blog, this was what we used as our announcement photo:

He's been super affectionate lately, following me around and sitting very close in the evenings, but I can't say he was a fan of taking the announcement photo. He seems to find ultrasound picture paper extremely tasty, so he kept trying the chew on the corner! 

Wanna see a really creepy ultrasound shot? I went in for the 20 week anatomy scan and the tech snapped this picture of SHB's head:

I added a skull diagram in case you're having a hard time identifying the eye socket and jaw. When I showed this picture to my students, one kid asked, "Wait, does your baby have any skin?!?" Yes, it does, child. At least I certainly hope so!

Anyway, happy Mother's Day to all the amazing sewing mamas that I've had the pleasure to "meet" through blogging! You ladies are seriously inspiring to me as I see how you sew with, around, and for your SHBs. Here's to hoping I can do the same!