Halloween '08: green fairy

I love fairies!
yay! this is my first real fairy costume, even though I've always loved them and always thought about making costumes.

I saw the shirt and skirt on the $5 rack outside a thrift store on my way home one day and the style was simply perfect for a fairy!! ...only the top was two shades of dark/dusty blue, and the skirt was white and yellow with pink roses -definately not going to work together, heh. BUT! with my newly found dyeing powers I figured I could just make them green (my favorite colour). However, as it turned out the shirt wasn't taking the dye at all because it was polyester, and the skirt was only sort of taking it - I think it's something like spandex. Luckilly pointed me in the direction of idye dyes which have some specifically for polyester and it worked fantastic! I was so pleased when they finally came out lovely shades of green! though at first I was thinking I might want to try and make them a little less vibrant...more earthy, but now I'm thinking I might just leave them as they are. Because the shirt was already two different blues, one darker and one lighter I was able to put the whole thing in the same dye and have it come out different like that - first I put it in green, then because the darker blue still looked a bit blue I put it in straight yellow which did the trick. For the skirt I put the top layer in the same green as the shirt was orriginally in (by tying up the under layer and hanging it from a cupboard over the dying pot), and then I put the bottom half in a lighter green, and then ended up throwing the whole thing in with the yellow that I put the shirt in. I like how some of the lighter green seeped up from the underlayer onto the waistband portion.

I also threw in some nylons to the dye bath just to see how they'd come out too, and then decided to use them as extra long sleves...since I was orriginally going to try for a green skin look and got the costume make-up and everything...which just turned out making me look really sick, heh, so I scrapped that.

Since I was gonna wear it to work where we're not allowed to show much skin I got the brown leggings and cut them off a bit jaggedy on the bottom, and put a brown tank top under the green shirt as well. And I kinda liked the brown with the green anyways.

To complete it I added some green wings I'd gotten at the Summer Solstice festival this year - I wish I could rememeber the name of the vendor - and I found a couple sparkly necklaces along with my copper leaf there, tied a green ribbon in my hair, and there's a little green jeweled butterfly clip on my head somewhere too, and did my hair all crazy-foofy like that, hehe I rather like it that way. I also drew bown swirlies and leaves on my face and put glitter all over myself ...though as I took this picture at the end of the day on my way home through the park its mostly worn off and the wings are a bit sagging - they got kinda smooshed a couple times during the day