Costuming and Cosplay, Part 1: Concept

So I've been having a gap year between college and graduate school, and I'm...not good at taking time off. I tend to find myself new projects. 

I've dabbled in costume and cosplay, severely constrained by a lack of time. I have, at this point, two full steampunk outfits. The first is an entomology-themed outfit, which I made in high school, and which most foully betrayed me at the last convention I took it to by shedding a good bit of trim and a large metal butterfly very loudly onto the floor in the midst of a panel. 

The second I made soon after Weather was published. I based it on a necklace that my godparents gave me for my eighteenth birthday; the necklace is gold with a garnet and pearls, a beautifully designed traditional Victorian pendant. I fell in love with the necklace when I received it, and halfway through undergraduate decided that I absolutely needed to graduate in a dress based on it, both because of its beauty and because of the significant role my family played in my life throughout college.


The dress itself has somewhat less grand origins. It's a pair of old prom dresses (not mine, cheaply bought at a thrift store) frankenstiened together and gussied up with a whole lot of trim. I'm  very proud of it, though I still need to put some boning in the bodice so it stops trying to creep off and have adventures while I'm wearing it. (For now, safety pins are made of magic and sparkles and do the job nicely.)

The graduation dress in question. It also goes to a lot of conventions with me; it scrunches up small and doesn't complain. Unlike certain humans of my acquaintance. 

Over the winter, it was too cold to go camping, and I had more time than I knew what to do with. So I started poking around thrift stores. 

And I came up with this. 

Support your local thrift stores, folks. You never know what will turn up.

It was perfect. I'd been looking for a good white underskirt for ages; this had a train that could be bustled up neatly, and really nice lace trim. So I bustled it, and sat there and stared at it, waiting for inspiration to strike. 

Now, this is the time I should admit that I'm terrible at planning things. I'm terrible at planning novels (they just sort of happen as they happen), I'm terrible at following recipes (I toss things together and it tastes good) and sewing is no different. What determined the direction the dress was going to go was two things.

1) I found a lovely purple satiny dress that was horrifyingly unflattering and therefore perfect to take apart

2) I started reading Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye. It is a spectacular series, and if you're into comics and looking for something new, I highly recommend it. Don't worry; it's nothing like those horrible movies. It's more like the offspring of Star Trek and Firefly that we've always wanted. Seriously, it's worth checking out.

I decided I was going to base the aesthetic of the dress on one of the major villains of the series, Tarn. For those unfamiliar with the series, Tarn is not only one of the Decepticons--the bad guys--but he's a fanatic. He and his team hunt down people they know to be traitors (using a fairly loose definition of the word) and murder them messily. He's a terrible person--and a fascinating and compelling character, who's more sure of his cause than he is of himself, and whose entire identity is threatened by the end of the war, and the events in Season 2 of the comic. 

One of the hallmarks of the series' writer, James Roberts, is his ability to create characters who do horrifying things, and are undeniably monsters, but make them sympathetic. I like this because I think it's a much more realistic portrayal of evil; evil is not only seductive, it appears completely normal and reasonable. It can live next door to you and have civil conversations over the hedge, and bring you cookies around the holidays, and still do things almost beyond comprehension in their cruelty, because it doesn't see them as bad. 

So, with a purple dress and a purple Decepticon, I reached a decision. I'd make a floofy steampunky dress based on a gigantic robot fanatic serial killer.

Because I'm an adult. 

Thing is, after that, I had to actually make the dress.