Accio Sparkly Tulle

Sorry the posts have been a little light. This is my insane time of year at work, there have been some family things going on, and we scaled back our adventures a bit to conserve resources for our upcoming vacation.

For the past several years I've tried to attend The British Chip Shop in Haddonfield’s Harry Potter night, but every year my attempts have been thwarted in some way. This year, I was determined to go.

Harry Potter night is of course appropriately held on July 31^st. For all of you muggles who may not know, July 31st is Harry’s and J.K. Rowling’s birthday. 

I called The British Chip Shop at exactly 11am on July 1^st (the first day they were accepting reservations) and succeeded in securing a table for me and three of my fellow geeky girls. 

I followed Wil Wheaton's advice to "get excited and make cool stuff." For this occasion cool stuff equaled a fun outfit.

I was inspired a while ago by an image I saw online of a girl wearing a Golden Snitch outfit. I liked the idea of being a thing rather than a specific character. With characters you usually have to work harder to get the details right (my glasses always get in the way of being a character). I felt going as a snitch would give me more room for creativity and interpretation. It was also an excuse to be sparkly.

 I have had the desire to make a no sew tutu for about a year and the snitch outfit seemed like the perfect excuse to give it a whirl. The directions seemed easy enough so I bought some sparkly gold tulle, a spool of sparkly gold ribbon, and went to work.

 For the length, I simply used the length that the tulle came in which was about 28 inches. I cut the tulle into 12 inch wide strips, 

then folded each strip in half, and used a slip knot to tie it around the ribbon (you can find plenty of YouTube videos that show exactly how to do this).  

I am not the most crafty person and I found making the tutu incredibly easy.  Maybe my knots weren't exactly the same size or the neatest, but I thought it turned out just fine.

The most challenging part of the process was my cat who  loved the sparkles and kept attacking the tulle and ribbon. A few times I had to pull her off of the tutu carefully detaching her nails from the tulle.  The tutu making elicited a lot of exasperated cries of,

“No kitty, please stop!”

In the books, the snitch is gold with silver wings, so I made my overall color scheme silver/grey and gold.  I wore grey yoga pants under my tutu and sparkly silver tennis sneakers on my feet.

In the picture that inspired me, the girl has a gold helmet.  I went to a few stores and tried on helmets. I did not love how they looked, but I do love slouchy hats, so I decided to get a gold knit hat and silver-grey feathers. (Note-If you like knitted woollies like I do, the summer is a great time to shop for them on Etsy as many of the sellers have them on sale)

For my top I got a snitch t-shirt from Redbubble. Since the screen print for the shirt was yellow-gold I got the shirt in Gryffindor red because 1) the print looked the best against the red, and 2) the t-shirt will look great on its own when we go to Universal next month.

Finally I had all sorts of small details, most of which I bought cheaply at Five Below.  I bought sparkly gold and sparkly silver nail polish. I had sparkly eye shadow, eye liner and mascara.  In the photo of the other snitch girl, I liked the jewels on her face.  I tried a test run of it earlier in the week, but as my glasses are fairly pronounced, the jewels got completely lost on my face. I still wanted to use the jewels so I decided to use them to bling out my glasses instead.

The outfit was a complete success and I got lots of complements throughout the night. 

I’m excited that I have a new acquired skill, tutu making, but I’m going to try hard not to over use this skill.  I would like however,at some point later in the year, to attempt a mash-up and dress as a Weeping Angel Fairy.