Making A Tinkerbell Starter Costume with Georgieanna

Making A Tinkerbell Starter Costume with Georgieanna

Over the past few weeks we have had the pleasure of helping our good friend Georgieanna with creating her first cosplay. G has joined our non-profit organization of Guardians of Justice and needed to have her first costume in order to be able to go to an event as something over than a handler.

With her being of such petite statue, I had the feeling that Tinkerbell would be a perfect fit. Surprisingly enough, her mother had apparently had a Tinkerbell costume that she had used back for Halloween that she was going to snag. After sending me the first photo of it tried on, we decided that it would be a good idea to make her very own from scratch instead. G’s statue wasn’t the only reason that Tinkerbell was an idea first costume, the original Peter Pan was also a big inspiration to her in life. On her wrist she has a script tattoo of the quote “Time to Fly”, even.

So, to begin the journey into making her own cosplay, Georgieanna knew that she had Mike and I to lean on and to help her along the way. Another person that helped her a lot happened to be this older lady at Joann’s…sometimes not one, but a gang of them, even. She told me stories of her coming in and the ladies all coming to her rescue when she didn’t know what she needed to buy. We weren’t able to accompany on her errands to purchase her fabric, notions, or pattern, unfortunately.

The first night that we all got together was Mike and I’s least favorite part of costume building, but it’s now G’s favorite: cutting out the pattern and fabric pieces. It took hours, but it always does. So, what should I expect? I showed Georgieanna how to read a pattern to see which pieces you wanted to cut out of which type of fabric…also how to make the sewing guides on the fabric that were on the pattern. Cutting was tedious but we soon finished and that was the end of our first “sewing” session.

The week following, we got together again to continue with our sewing project of the Tinkerbell dress. This time we began to get down and dirty with the sewing machine. We put together the bodice, showing G how to pin, sew, and iron out the seams for ease later on in the process. This was the fun part…especially accompanied with Georgieanna’s enthusiasm of saying “It’s a Thing!” and needing a photo to show her friends her progress!

The week after that, we continue on and had two separate dress, made in the liner and the actual fabric, just waiting to be put together. I did the harder seams of finishing the seam lines of the sweetheart neckline for her and ta-da…The two pieces were now one, just waiting for the zipper!

When it came time to put in the zipper, we tried a little something different and G ended up having to handsew a bit in order to fix a couple boo boos. But, by the end of that night, she had a dress that she could try on without having it hold it up…Which really is when “It’s a Thingee!” lol

The next bit of time was spent on that dang bottom zig zagged area. How to tackle it. Should the front and back be one, or should the two pieces be separate? After some “length” tests…aka Georgieanna bending over and me pinning where the safe zone began…We figured out how long the skirt needed to be. After that, G had the task of laying out the pattern for the points.

With the points in mind, Georgieanna made a paper pattern that would over lap so that she could draw the lines onto the fabric. Once we had everything laid out, we were able to cut the excess bottom area off and we were left with points, but we needed to finish the bottom to prevent fraying. This required some forethought because we didn’t really -want- to sew them like a regular hemline. So, Mike’s amazing brain was to the rescue! STITCH WITCH saved the day.

On our last night of construction for Tinkerbell, Georgieanna and Mike worked together to finish all of the bottom seams with the stitch witch….then the final fitting (followed by a happy dance lol).

Ta-Da! Georgieanna has officially become Tinkerbell!