Donna Noble – The Unicorn and the Wasp

Made for: Dragon Con 2015

Background: My fav of Donna’s costumes!

Journal Entries: Read more at my Donna Unicorn tag

(Patterns Used: None)

Dress:
I actually started on this in 2014. I bought all my supplies (fabric, beads, embroidery floss) and dug in. Come early August, as I was staring at only about 1/100th of the embroidery/beading I’d done, I realized I was not happy with it and there was no way I was going to finish it for Dragoncon. So I set it aside, made Donna Fires of Pompeii instead, and thought to myself, “I’m never going to pick that up again.” (see: Bespin Leia from 2006 I say I’m going to finish every single year.)

Well in May 2015 I got called for jury duty. My brain immediately filled with images of myself sitting doing nothing for a week in a juror’s room like last time I had jury duty — or worse, getting put on some kind of sequestered trial for weeks. I dug around for a project I could easily take with me, and decided I’d tackle this costume again (of course, then I found out I couldn’t take needles or scissors with me, so there went that idea – but thankfully I was only there a day before getting dismissed!)

I started over from scratch and recut the dress panels again (basically just big rectangles). I printed every decent screencap I could find, and from those I drew out the designs in photoshop and printed them full size, then used that as a reference to trace the designs on with a gold paint pen. (I turned our glass top coffee table into a light table!). I found a serpentine stitch on one of machines I really liked, and I did the majority of the basic stitching using this, just following my gold paint pen lines.

I broke the front design up into 3 sections – top, bottom, and triangles. The triangles were the large 3 gold triangles at the bottom. I did each one at a time. After I’d get the machine stitching done on a section, I’d go through and bead it, do any embroidery embellishments needed (I hated those lavender triangles!) and then repeat the process on the next segment.

I actually got really fast at it. I finished the front part of the dress in just over a month, maybe about a month and half. I’m fairly certain all of this beading was done on a separate organza layer on the original, since you can see the gold fabric under layer in parts, especially in the large triangles at the bottom. I didn’t want to do it that way, so instead I made the large triangles as appliques with gold taffeta, black organza (both left over from other projects) and attached them separately – then did my stitching and beading and embroidery on top. Got the front dress panel piece attached to the back piece, lined, and added the straps.

For the cape, I used what was left of my black peach skin fabric, drew up a new design (there weren’t a lot of references for the back. I took some of the front elements and arranged them in a way I liked. I simplified it a bit – hers has a little more going on – but I needed to get it finished at that point.), and stitched/beaded/embroidered. I lined that and sewed it onto the back of the dress. I ended up having to take a small seam across it to make it lay right but it’s not terribly noticeable. (I think you can tell that, by this point, I was kinda over it.)

Jewelry:
Had a hard time finding beads I liked for the necklace. Finally settled on some purple beads from Michael’s, and I bought the lavender tassel online (I misunderstood the description and ended up with 6 of them. Only needed 1. Oops. Anybody need one?). I reused my Silence in the Library bracelets and my Journey’s End earrings.

Shoes/Accessories:
I picked up these heels at the second hand store last year. Thankfully they hadn’t gotten stuck in a box and lost in the interim, they were still sitting in a bag in my sewing room! I repainted them gold. The clutch is one that belonged to my grandmother, and the fan was given to me by my other grandmother. I ended up buying, like 4 different headbands for this project – I ended up using two of them, and adding an additional chain of rhinestones to the end of one to wrap into my hairbun.

History: I am so happy with how this turned out!

Progress Photos:

                       

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