Construction Details:

I've wanted to make a turn-of-the-century dancer costume for years; I've always admired images of dancers like Maud Allan, and had been slowly collecting images of Mata Hari. At some point I decided to do her for Costume-Con, and once we knew for sure we were going to CC26, I went into high-gear to get it done. Mata Hari involved hours and hours of fiddly work wiring beads together, hand-sewing innumerable filigree pieces and rhinestones, disassembling found jewellery for the parts, and of course glueing the thousand or so tiny 1mm rhinestones on the headpiece and armband medallions. It seems like an awful lot of work for a small amount of costume...LOL I made the bra cups out of Fosshape as I needed them to be perfectly round; covered them and the belt with metallic spandex and then hand-sewed all the filigree and rhinestones. The headpiece and armbands are made from heavy-gauge brass wire with brass filigree components and beads; the skirt is a fancy Indian silk saree.

Personal Thoughts:

This costume wasn't super difficult per se, just really really time-consuming. But I perversely enjoy crazy fine details; I find hand-sewing relaxing in a meditative kind of way.

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