Peacock Costume

Tutu's in every form are the new little girl halloween costume. It seems that there are entire websites dedicated to these costumes. Check this one out. Ghosts and Witches, to Dorothy and Belle costumes are all being embellished with accessories after the initial tutu is decided upon.
Well, any who … Ellery is going to be a Peacock and so I was enlisted to make one of my very special tutu's. I then changed it up a bit and made another version.
Most tutu are made like this.
*   Take tulle any color you please and cut it in strips twice the length plus about 1 ½ inches you want
      your finished tutu to be.  Double the tulle up (fold it in half) and pull it around a strip of 1" elastic
      pulling the cut ends through the folded other end of the tulle. Continue around the elastic waist
      forming a circle.  Keep on going.  Keep going until it is as full as you wish it to be.
Then there are those that are made like this.
* Here you take strips of chiffon fabric and gather them like crazy row after gathered row and then you
     do it again on the inside of the skirt.  This takes an especially long time.
Now this time I decided to do the peacock tutu a little different way. I used the gathering chiffon effect and layered it with graduating colors going down toward the bottom. Not attaching them layer after layer to the layer just on top of them, but actually attaching them to lining fabric underneath the skirt so they all come off separately, making for a cascade of ruffles.
Kinda like this skirt. Basically a combination of several ideas.

 Notice the top layer is 2" of chartreuse green along with 4" peacock blue. Then I added a back layer to attach the next 2 layers of the same blue and teal. Then teal and royal blue, and finally royal and tan.

 The same colors that are in a peacocks feathers. See the feathers here and I then made a "tail" that fans out the back of the waist and connects with a ribbon bow in the front of the skirt.

I attached the feathers with glue and some ribbon and Katz is going to have to figure out how to get the tail to stay up around Ells shoulders after she tries it on her.

Fast forward 4 days. The postal service did pretty well.

So far she looks like she will just hold onto it forever.

 "Okay, you can take a picture of it down."

 "But I really like it better THIS way."
More pictures next month in full regalia. (Is that spelled correctly?)