Lily de Mauvoisin

So: MomoCon! MomoCon is a free convention in ATL, GA on GA Tech campus, so. Needless to say, it is not very far away, and this was my third year in a row. All my lovely Hannafags from Dragon*Con this past year, and LOTS of other people besides came, all dressed as HiNaBN characters. BUT THAT IS FOR ANOTHER POST.

The 4 D*Con-ers (myself included) decided we'd go have a picnic in Oakland Cemetery the Friday before MomoCon. Two other people came along with one of them (mostly I think because she couldn't get rid of them), but we still had lots of fun. Since it's a con, and we never actually need any excuse to dress up (but there's one anyway), we decided to swap original characters. I... do not have any. The two girls who don't live in GA swapped characters, and Salmon went as her character Adam. I thought it was lame that I couldn't think of what to do, but then I remembered this little gem that Salmon commissioned for herself from Lyndsey on dA:

 Her name is Lily de Mauvoisin, and she was Adam's first wife (feel free to hit me and correct me if I'm wrong, Salmon). That dress is in NO WAY historically accurate, but I do have a hoop skirt and I'd just ordered me some fancy white lace-up boots, so I thought, What the hell, why not? So! I snuck around LIKE A GREAT BIG SNEEKYPANTS to make sure I could actually pull this off (and really, that was silly, because I can always pull anything and everything off if I try), and I had the whole skirt portion done minus the lacing in the back by the time spring break was over.

Now, I used McCall's 6097 for that skirt, with some ornamentation on the front contrast portion, and I made it unnecessarily complicated by trying to make it look like it had layers to the skirts without it actually having anyway, when no one notices these details but me. Then, I was going to go with the top in the pattern, but I felt the bodice in the commission art would better translate to a buttoned front, based on how the shirt splits in the front (although now, looking at it, I could probably get away with saying the bodice just comes to a point). So I went back to my standard lolita pattern, drew the lines in from the contrast portion of the bodice pattern from M6097, but kept the back of the bodice the same, minus the lacing, and somehow managed to finagle the top out. The sleeves... well, let's just say the sleeves had no pattern, and are really just giant circles with a lot of elastic bunching it together. I was so afraid they weren't going to be long enough, and I had no more time or money for more fabric. BUT! It somehow managed to all work out beautifully in the end.

So I added in my mother's blonde wig (which I didn't realize had glitter in it until we got to the MARTA station and Salmon was like, "WHY ARE YOU GLITTERING ON ME? WE ARE NOT THOSE SORT OF VAMPIRES."), and I ordered the feather fascinator/hair piece from someone who's work I really trust on Etsy. I made the bow on the front of the bodice with double wide ribbon tape stuff (idk, I got it from my mother's bag of tricks), and the hair bows on alligator clips that went on my shoes. I also decided the night before, somewhere around midnight, that I wanted a plain petticoat to go under the hoop skirt and over my knee-length bloomers (which are not very opaque at all, and btw, totally made those for this dress too), aaaand I ran out of white thread just as I started to sew it together. And then I ran out of the light purple I had been using for the rest of the dress and had to use yellow. And then I gave up with the waistband portion, and it looks TERRIBLE, but you don't ever see it anyway :P

Salmon has affectionately captioned this photo "Huge...tracks of land!"

Lily and Adam (me and Salmon): a spat between partners that has been going on for centuries (I'm totally trying my hardest not to crack up laughing there)

Sitting in hoop skirts is hard :( Here you can see my extra petticoat, and my boots

My boots :)

And there you have it. You wouldn't recognize either of us walking down the street based on these pictures, since we are that good at disguising ourselves (or at least Salmon is), so I'm not apologizing for giving away my non-existent secret identity with a mass overdose of pic-spamming.