More than You want to know about the Cleo Costume

but I'm putting it out there anyway

Halloween isn't officially over until I've crammed my costume into the costume closet and blogged about it.

In the 6 weeks leading up to Halloween this year, this scrappy little blog received over 3500 hits, from people checking out my Barbie and Morticia Addams costumes. People definitely appreciate the effort of a homemade costume, judging from my image-google ranking. (One woman even called the shop and pleaded with me to rent the Barbie costume to her -just name any rediculous price! --I declined).

For my Cleopatra costume, I did some image-googling myself, and made an inspiration file, from which I created a sketch that incorporated all my favorite elements : A headress, a collar, simple straight skirt and sash, and meshy cape.

This did not involved any dressmaking or fancy skills. I simply pulled together a bunch of parts that all fit together into a bigger picture. Ultimately, this costume is just a combination of circles, rectangles and triangles dressed up in gold, with some dollar-store spiders, snakes, and rubber cockroaches thrown in.

90% of the materials were recycled, (big thank you to Carol Lavender at The Second Show Thrift Shop for the shower curtain and mesh!)

The first thing I tackled was the headress, built from a vintage nurse's cap I found in my own archive of tattered junk.

Painted it gold



And then just kept adding adding adding.

using gold trims and hand-cut craft materials.



The collar was a disk, made from the shower curtain and reenforced with interfacing,

and attached to a cheap second hand snaky choker necklace, then adorned with

cake decorating leaves, plastic fan parts, and the cockroaches.

Anything that wasn't already gold was spray-painted gold.

The cummberbund is a rectangle of shower curtain fabric


rouched and gathered party-popper style, with a zipper added.

And underneath the cummerbund is a thrift store slip that has a rectangle of gold hanging from the front and back, basted on.



(all parts, including skirt, are jazzed up with hot-glued details. Here, more trim and painted doilies)

Then a tie-shaped sash is attached to the cummerbund, using hooks and eyes, Jazzed up with Egyptian symbols cut out from leftover scraps.

The deco shaped mesh cape was adorned with gold x-mas beading (also from Carol) and attached to arm bangles (paper lanterns) with hooks and eyes:



I sacrificed last year's Morticia wig so I wouldn't have to buy a new one.

Here's Gretchen chopping it off during the "dress rehearsal":


And here's the lovely portrait she painted that day:


which I have to admit looks way more elegant than the actual finished product:

But I had a blast nevertheless.

Fun to make,

Fun to wear!:

(photo by Walter Hill)