About a month ago, a couple friends threw a Harry Potter / Avengers birthday bash. Costumes were welcomed. I thought to myself, "Alright, I'm gonna make an awesome Hogwarts uniform and wear it to the party and it will be awesome." This begins my
epic terrible story about how
not to make a Hogwarts uniform.
The concept was simple and gave me a false sense of hope. All I needed was: 1) a white button-up shirt, 2) a blue-ish tie, 3) a black/gray sweater, 4) a blue stripe to go around the base of the sweater, 5) a skirt & stockings, a 6) a pair of black shoes. At first it was kind of difficult to find the right kind of shirt (surprisingly, I had to go into the men's department at Target to find one; y u no make women's button up white shirts, Target?!). Then I got a button-up, black sweater. I already had a black dress, stocks, and shoes for the rest of the outfit. So really, all it came down to was one simple task: putting a blue stripe on the bottom of the sweater to make it more uniform-y.
First I tried sewing a ribbon to the sweater by hand, but the sweater's elasticity and the small size of the ribbon made this task far too complicated for my level of expertise. My second attempt consisted of literally gluing a strip of ribbon to the sweater (/rubs temples). I had no tacky glue or fabric glue, so what did I use? Gorilla glue (/rubs temples harder). Looking back, I must have been drunk when I tried to do any of this stuff. Who even comes up with these kinds of ideas?! Okay, anyway. The gorilla glue didn't work out (duh) because globs of glue oozed out from under the ribbon, leaving stain marks on the sweater/ribbon and hardened sections. The sweater was no longer able to stretch and I found it unbearable to try and move around in the corset-of-a-thing.
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| Ribbon glued on with gorilla glue. |
So, I tossed the first sweater aside, bought another one (ugh), and started attempt #3 (which was
not allowed to fail because I don't know if I could have lived with myself after killing 2 sweaters for a mere Harry Potter outfit). For my third attempt, I stencilled a line onto the sweater using masking tape and filled in the area with blue fabric paint.
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| Masking tape stencil with blue fabric paint. |
At first, it seemed as though the masking-paint technique was going to be the ticket! But when I removed the tape from the sweater and tried it on... I saw that the paint hadn't made it into the crevices of the sweater's "ridges". I had a line around the base of the sweater, all right, but it was a
dotted line. Stubborn as I was to make this method work, I sat back down and painstakingly used a toothpick and blue paint to try and fill in as many crevices as I could. This by-hand method introduced some splotching along the line, but (luckily) it wasn't super obvious. A couple hours after starting attempt #3, I was finally starting to see the finish line... And then my cats showed up. I think I left the room for only a minute and came back to find blue paint smudged all over the front of the sweater.
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| This is why I can't have nice things. |
I was devastated, but also stubborn and resolved. I
would make this stupid costume work! So, via the hackiest hack known to man, I covered the blue paint smudges with black paint.
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| Like it never happened, right? |
After making sure to
leave my bedroom door shut and allowing the paint (both blue and black) to dry in peace, I assembled my Hogwarts uniform, derpy stripe and all...
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| Not bad from a distance, I guess. |
And then I wore it to the party...
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| Evil much? |
And probably had a bit too much to drink...
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| With someone's Luna Lovegood glasses. |
And thus ended my Hogwarts Uniform Adventure. THE END.
