Monday, September 2, 2019

Mermaid's Tale of the Sea - Making mermaid costumes for bellydance


 

Themed belly dance shows can be really tough to figure out.  How do you stay within the theme, but keep the integrity of the dance, while also paying tribute to the theme in a way that is unique and exciting.  Usually it's a requirement to use either music or costuming or both that fit the theme.  Some themes are easier than others, of course, especially if they already lend themselves to the familiar aspects of your dance, such a pirates (long skirts, swords, corset-style Renaissance Faire/bedouin clothing).  Other themes are definitely harder (Boy Band comes to mind!).  (photo above, selfie of a mermaid skirt off the rack from Spirit store).

I was excited to bring both of my student troupes to the Pirates hafla where we would be doing two separate takes on the theme.  One group would be mermaids, the other would be pirates.  Since this is one of the most-documented of my costumes, I'm featuring the Mermaid costumes on my blog.

For the mermaids, fabric is key.  Luckily, a lot of really cool mermaid fabrics have come out recently, especially with the popularity of cosplay.  Being a fan of both cosplay and bellydance, it's twice as awesome for me.  I happen to find a ready-made skirt at the local seasonal Halloween store, which was. beautiful, but way too long to dance in, but I was confident I could fix it.  The skirt had a train on it that was about an extra 8-10 inches long.  I wanted to have a matching bra and hopefully arm bands as well.  So I took the skirt home, and with simple modifications, I trimmed the excess off the bottom and took in the sides a little, and added slits for a perfect fit.

There was plenty of fabric leftover from the ridiculously long skirt to cover a bra and make upper arm bands.  I found some pretty chiffon fabric in blue with fish on it to add a little flounce to my arm bands (from the Yaya Han cosplay fabrics line at JoAnn's).



I had an idea to add pearls to the bra mimicking the shape of a seashell.  I ultimately did not like the result and took them off, leaving the bra to shine on it's own with the fabric and a dropped jewel from the center.



I did not have enough mermaid fabric to cut a belt but I definitely wanted something complementary to finish my mermaid costume.  I used a plain purple, with interfacing and I found a pretty "bubble" fabric in bright blue stretch which complimented the mermaid fabric.  The mermaid fabric has a blue-purple-green iridescent look to it, depending on the lighting.

I also wanted to make a mermaid crown.  I researched crowns and found a lot of them on Pinterest, but it was harder than I thought to make something that was both pretty and practical.  I bought some sea stars, painted them silver, and put crystals and glitter on them, but they proved to be troublesome on the crown, poking me and not sitting well.  I opted for only one in the center of the crown.  I did end up using two stars on the belt and one sea shell in the center.  My kids commandeered the other sea stars.


I also had a lot of seashells, which I incorporated on the fishnet-style drop I had on the belt.  I added some rhinestones as well and put glitter on the seashells.

Sadly, I did not wear the crown because it was interfering with my sword dance.  Here's the finished costume, and my troupe-mate's similar mermaid costume.  Her costume used fabric from JoAnn's Yaya Han line of cosplay fabric.  I was really pleased at how our costumes came out and looked together!


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