Megara – Disney’s Hercules

Made for: MomoCon 2014

Background: I had originally planned this costume for Halloween 2004! (In fact, if you dig back through my blog tag for Meg over there, you’ll find a few mentions of it back then!) I dropped it and did Leia instead, but it’s always floated around my “want to do” lists since. So here it is, only 10 years late.

Journal Entries: Read more at my Megara tag

Patterns Used:
Butterick 4301

Dress:
I started out by making a base dress out of some slinky, thin purple material I got locally. I picked the pattern above, because, even though it needed some tweaking, I liked the interior support system it called for. I ordered some silk chiffon from Dharma Trading and dyed it. I was SUPER happy with the way the colour came out! Purple with a pink tone. I did some gradation into a darker, bluer purple at the bottom. I cut my fabric into 6 basic pieces and pinned them around the base dress.

I went through lots of different ways of doing pleats. None of which I was happy with and set me back quite a bit after I undid a several days worth of work, several times. I finally settled on sort-of cartridge pleat at the top (which basically just turned into a gather after I attached it to the base dress at the top, and was a mess digging each pleat back out to stitch down), and stitched in between each pleat to attach it the dress, and then ironed them down. I also went through and tacked the center of each pleat down in a few places to force it to lay flat against the base dress as much as possible – I didn’t quite get that finished before con and it needs some clean-up work before next wearing.

The interior I made out of the purple fabric and some black cotton, with minimal boning. The straps were also made of the purple fabric.

Sashes:
I found some really beautiful purple chiffon locally, but it was much darker than I wanted. I decided, screw it, it’s so pretty and I love the drape of it, I’m using it. I made a base for each sash out of some heavy-weight lavender satin I had on hand, covered in my purple chiffon. One of my machines had a great decorative stitch that I did on each of the sash pieces. The draped sash pieces on the side I made out of two squares of the leftover chiffon, and attached them with some buttons I found in my stash.

Wig:
One wig, 2 packs of extensions, and a clip-on ponytail from Arda, with a foam build-up for the ponytail.

Accessories:
The brooches I bought at Hobby Lobby and repainted. The sandals in some photos are my Hippolyta sandals, but they were difficult to wear, so in some pictures it’s just a pair of brown leather flip-flops.

Progress Photos:

                       

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