Construction Details:

Anna constitutes the most hours I have poured into a costume, by far. I will go piece by piece.

The wig is a braided Arda Chibi. I used hot glue and a small amount of cloth to make the white weft out of braiding hair ordered from Amphigory and hand-sewed it into the part.

I made the teal shirt by modifying a commercial pattern to have bigger sleeves and tighter cuffs. The accents at the collar/down the front are hand-painted and embroidered.

The vest was by far the most difficult part of the costume. I was able to modify a corset pattern to include shoulders, and my first iteration went fine, however I attempted a method of attaching the gold trim that I discovered to be very difficult because of the nature of satin slipping around easily on velvet, and ended up tearing that version apart and using it as a dummy on which to experiment with other gold trim attachment methods. Ultimately, I ended up constructing a new vest and using muslin to draw 1-inch trim around the entire perimeter of each raw edge in a custom-fit pattern, then cut it out of doubled gold fabric and sewed/pressed it into custom bias tape, which I attached by hand while it was pinned to my dressform. The gold still ripples, but is attached with a very careful invisible slipstitch, so I am very happy with the cleanliness overall. I might remake this piece eventually.

All the embroidery pieces on the costume (the floral design on the vest and all the flowers/small fleur accents on the skirt) were hand-vectored and designed by me in Photoshop, after which I passed it on to the incredibly talented Serephita (Serephitic Patches on Etsy) who put it through her machine for me!! Thank you so much again for being an amazing artist to commission from, my dear :D All in all, it took about four hours to sit and carefully cut out all of the embroidered pieces on the costume so they could be seamlessly attached.

The skirt was hand-patterned by me. The most important thing to me was to achieve the pleats in the same place as the art, and the nice volume/flowiness of a Disney princess skirt, but without going as full as a circle skirt (I wanted to avoid the excessive volume and ripples that come with a circle pattern). The scalloped trim at the bottom had to be mathed out (PARABOLAS) and then hand-patterned on the bias on the flat pieces of the skirt, after which I heat-n-bonded it to the skirt and then attached the embroidered flowers.

The cloak is in two pieces, and was hand-patterned by me to get the shoulder seams in the same place as the Anna character render. Once the small top capelet was patterned, I laid it flat and used tracing paper to trace a line 1cm in from the edge, then used a shotglass to carefully draw out the scalloped dark trim all in one piece. I jigsawed pieces of heat-n-bond to the paper pattern once finished, and cut out/heat bonded the accent to the capelet. Afterwards, I used the scraps of already heat-bonded material to cut out 45 tiny half-moon shapes, cut myself a tiny cardstock stencil with an exacto knife, and individually hand-stenciled all of them. I then individually heat-n-bonded all of these inside the scallops on the capelet. I repeated this entire process for the larger cape, which utilized 68 larger half-moon shapes that also had to be individually hand-painted.

I hand-dyed pompoms that used to be light pink to match the darker berry color of the trim.

I hand-drafted the collar based on the final neck measurement, reinforced it with interfacing, and lined it with a sample of faux wolf fur ordered from Distinctive Fabrics (this same fur will match my Kristoff when she finishes her costume!).

I hand-sculpted the heart-shaped cloak clasp pieces from silver Sculpey, and glued it to the back of a real cloak clasp before attaching it to the cloak.

The boots were a brown thrift store find originally. I spray-painted them black, then painted the heels the same dark violet-pink that I used to hand-paint the scallops in the cloak. I used a thick oil-based paint pen to hand-paint the gold rosemaling on the boots. I used a picture I took of the official Disney Store boots as a reference for the design on the back of the heel.

Personal Thoughts:

DO YOU WANNA BUILD A SNOWMAN BECAUSE I SURE DO

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