I for the life of me cannot make my damned camera take a sparkly picture. I think maybe my camera has some weird sparkle reduction built in and while that’s super-great if you’re taking someone’s photograph and they have a shiny top on, it is not even remotely helpful when I am taking shots of my twinkle-magic costume. For example, I made two… well, they look like boob pasties. They’re just additional sea-foliage. They are made with rocaille beads which have mirrored insides (sparkly!) and iridescent brown/green sequins (sparkly!) and plastic breads infused with glitter (sparkly!) and would you look at this picture? So very drab. I haz a forlorn.
I realized that my bottom hoop was sagging on my hoop skirt and was visible below the edge of my painted skirt, so when God gives you lemons (saggy hoops) you make lemonade (attach additional kelp fringe). There’s a place near my job called Trims de Carnival and it has some crazy bright snazzy trims and sequins and whatnot. I picked up some yellow and brick-colored hairy ribbon trim, dyed them so they had green tones in them, and sewed them along the bottom. Problem solved. No more visible hoop. Booyah.
I also sewed that lace beaded kelp on the back of the jacket and sequined both the back of the jacket and the base of the skirt. WHICH YOU COULD APPRECIATE IF MY CAMERA UNDERSTOOD SPARKLY MATERIALS… oh, I just give up.
And I finished the hat! If you remember, the last time you saw the hat the bottoms of the tube worms were visible and you could see all the stitching and glue. Now it is all covered with frilly ribbon and more of that lace kelp (tying the whole costume together, very important) and some gold beaded thingies that were on sale at one of the fabric stores. It looks like I’m wearing a demented doily on my head when I put this on. It’s kind of fantastic.
Even though I have seastars and a big ole crab and barnacles and anemones and some other things to attach to the costume, I still have a great deal of surface area to cover. To assist with that, I made some felt cup shapes that can fit in anywhere and add dimension.
And in my travels around the trim-n-bead shops of Midtown I discovered a few stores selling these acrylic gems with crinkled tinsel in them. They add a lot of visual interest to my costume, so I’m going to sew them in a few areas to make it more exciting.
Now I’m working on my lobster face-mask which at this point looks like head-gear from a parallel universe. I need to find ways to make it more lobster-y. I went to three pet stores before I found a specific kind of cat toy that totally resembles antennae. Once I attach that, I’m hoping it will be more crustacean-like. We’ll see.