Faerie Costume

This is one from a couple weeks ago, that I just haven't gotten around to posting yet. One of my friends here choreographed a belly dance ballet entitled "The Block: A Fairytale". It was a very intricate and beautiful story, focused on a writer and his quest to rediscover his creativity after losing his girlfriend to suicide. Among the many figments of his imagination was a group of four elemental faeries, consisting of myself and three other girls. I was the Air Faerie, so I needed to make a costume that represented that. This was a very exciting prospect for me--I love making costumes almost as much as I love wearing them. This goes back a long way; when I was a kid, my grandma would sew me all sorts of costumes, be they for Halloween or just playing dress-up (the most popular pastime for me and my sister). Somewhere, tucked away in a closet or attic at my parent's house, there is a costume for every Disney princess there ever was. Anyway, now that I can make the costumes myself, it's twice as fun!

The most important part of a faerie costume is, of course, the wings. Was I just going to go to a costume shop and buy them? Certainly not! I found more than a few wing-making tutorials online, my favorite of which was this one. Since it's for a TV show, it moves pretty quickly, but it's not too difficult to get the general idea. Instead of wire, which I did not have access to, I decided to use coat hangers.

Materials:
Four wire coat hangers
Pliers/wire cutters
Two pairs of queen-size pantyhose
Electrical tape
One stick incense
Cardboard
Hot glue
Acrylic paint
Rhinestones, fake flowers, ribbon, glitter, etc.

Step 1: Using some pliers and/or wire-cutters, bend the coat hanger to your desired shape. I decided against untwisting mine, and instead just bent off the hook at the top and used pliers to bend the hangers to my will. I made the two top wings wider, and the bottom wings more narrow.

Step 2: Cut the legs off of the pantyhose, and stretch them out with your hands. Carefully stretch the pantyhose over each wing shape, beginning at the top. Twist around the bottom and seal with electrical tape.

Step 3: Use an incense stick to create lacy-looking holes in the wings. Light the incense stick, and poke it through the wings in any desired pattern. Watch the video I linked to get a better idea of how this works. (Note: you can also use a cigarette, a soldering iron or a wood burner, but I can promise you that it will not smell as nice.)

Step 4: Time to decorate! The wings are generally much more easily decorated before you attach them all together, but I did some of these steps after I attached them. If you're a painting novice like myself, you may want to use a light-colored marker or pen to draw on the designs before you paint them:

Then, just mix up the colors and get to paintin'! I started out with three colors; metallic blue, metallic purple, and silver. I mixed them in varying color combinations to paint the swirly designs, and painted all around the outside of the wings, dragging color in to create a fading effect. They came out looking like this:

Step 5: Attach the wings to something. I used a cloth-covered piece of cardboard and lots of hot glue, and spent quite a bit of time playing with the angles of the wings to make sure they would sit right on my back. To cover up the mess of hot glue and electrical tape, what better to use than pretty flowers?

At this point I decided that my wings were nowhere near sparkly enough, so I added some rhinestones with tacky fabric glue:

Step 6: To attach the wings to yourself, poke four holes in the cardboard, one at each corner. String a piece of ribbon or elastic through each side, and tie on at your shoulders.

I also added some extra colorful flowers, and some long pieces of colorful ribbon to the back of the wings, to trail down my back. Here's the finished product!

Pretty nifty, huh? I'm excited that a first attempt could turn out so well.

Another new challenge for this costume was making the pants. I won't go into too much detail, but with the help of my trusty sewing machine they were surprisingly easy to make. I loosely followed this tutorial, using a bedsheet and two layers of cheap white chiffon (which, by the way, is the most annoying fabric to work with, ever). I opted to tie them in back instead of in front. They came out thusly (although the photo is kind of hard to see):

For the top I used the same bedsheet and an old pattern for a renaissance bodice I had lying around, cropped to make it more bellydance friendly. This was also a tricky undertaking, as I decided to put a canvas lining in it. I wanted to make it reversible, but suffice it to say that it didn't work out that way (armholes are weird.) I was pretty down to the wire on this one, as I had to rip it apart and start over halfway through, but luckily boys are awesome and will pound eyelets into your unfinished pieces for you while you run around gathering up the rest of your costume.

Add some body paint and lots of glitter*, and you have yourself an Air Faerie!

*Sidenote: This show was almost two weeks ago and I am still picking glitter out of my scalp.

I felt so pretty in the finished costume that it was not terribly difficult to flit merrily about and stay in character during the show. My favorite part of all of this was the body paint:

All body art for the show was done by Amber Atkisson, an absurdly talented body painter. Seriously, if you live in Columbia and ever need any sort of face/body painting done, she's your gal. She did this in about 15 minutes! In comparison, it took me hours to paint the same kinds of swirly designs on my wings.

Until I have another opportunity to dress up as a faerie, my wings will be hanging on my wall, looking pretty. Only good things came from this project (except for the horrendous mess it left in its wake:)

Apple Pie

Apparently I'm not entering my accomplishments chronologically, as I've finished several projects in the last few weeks. However, this is the one that I'm most excited about.

I baked an apple pie. From scratch. Well, mostly from scratch.

Here's how it went down. Eric (my boy) and I decided to go apple-picking at this place about forty five minutes away from where we live. It was just a tiny little apple farm that, interestingly, also had alpacas. When we  arrived, the nice lady who greeted us handed us a large bucket and a plastic bag and lead us to a golf cart, apparently a necessary mode of transportation to travel the 300 feet into the orchard. The apples left were relatively small, so we just picked a bunch of them. And ended up with nine pounds of apples. Nine. Here's what that looks like, after we took out about eight or nine for the pie:

What to do with the rest of them, I still haven't figured out. But I'd be damned if we weren't going to make an apple pie. A quick Google search lead me to this page, a five-star apple pie recipe with 1,061 reviews and 23,197 people who had saved it. Sounded like a pretty good deal, so I decided to give it a try.

We began by peeling and slicing up the apples. Assembly-line style, we were able to get this done pretty quick. We put them into a bowl with a tiny bit of lemon juice, to keep them from browning.

Next I started to simmer up the butter, flour, sugar, and brown sugar concoction as per directed by the recipe. Always my mother's child, I added a tablespoon of vanilla. Eric also had the brilliant idea of adding some Fee's Brother's Bitters to the sauce. It's something we use quite a bit in cocktails, but never before in cooking. After he gave me an apple slice with a bit of the bitters on it, I was sold. I may start using that as an alternative to peanut butter when I eat apples. To the apples, I added cinnamon and nutmeg, a suggestion made by many reviewers of the recipe.

For the pie crust, we used a pre-made Pillsbury refrigerated crust. Next time I may try my own, but for my first attempt at any sort of pie, I thought that it may be better to simplify. After carefully unrolling one crust into the pie pan, in went the apples in their cinnamon and nutmeg-y goodness.

Next came the part that I was dreading the most: the lattice crust. About half of the reviews on this recipe  had decided to forgo it, something I was tempted to do myself. However, one review I read said something to the tune of "DO NOT SKIP IT IT IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY AND NOT THAT HARD", so I decided to give it a go.

Step 1: roll out the crust and cut it into 1" strips.

So far, so good.

Step 2: Take the two longest strips and place them in a 90 degree cross over the pie.

Step 3: add the rest of the pieces one at a time, weaving them in an over-under fashion, making sure to leave sizeable holes of visible apples.

And there it is. When I finished this I was amazed. Weaving. It's not that hard.

Next I poured the butter-sugar-vanilla concoction over the pie, which left a delicious-looking glaze on the crust. The next time I do this, though, I think I'll seal up the edges of the pie crust first, so that the sauce doesn't go running down the strips of pie crust and onto Eric's nice clean stove.

After rolling up the edge of the pie crust, this baby was ready to go into the oven. 425 degrees for 15 minutes to bake the crust, then 350 degrees for 35-45 minutes. This would have been a good time to clean up the huge mess I had just made, but I decided to go outside and play with Richard the cat instead.

Despite how angry he looks in the photo, he's a sweetie.

After about 45 minutes of playing with cats and resisting the urge to peek into the oven every five minutes to see how my precious baby was coming along, out came the pie!

I'll be darned, it looks like a real pie. After taking it out I was glad that I had decided to heed the advice of the more seasoned piebakers on Allrecipes and put a baking sheet underneath the pie, because man, did that sauce go everywhere during the baking process. It also left a nice, shiny, sugary glaze on the crust, as that particularly adamant reviewer had promised. But just because it looks pretty don't mean it's pie. I'm thankful that we had to leave immediately to go to a concert, because otherwise I may have ended up cutting into it before the filling had a chance to set!

Upon our return later that night I went straight for the pie. We heated it up and served it with ice cream (chocolate chip, as there was no vanilla to be found).

Oh. My. God. Not only was it actually apple pie, it was the best apple pie I've ever tasted. Now, I may be a little biased, but trust me when I say that it's pretty darn good. Saying that I was proud of myself for accomplishing this task would be quite the understatement. I think I spent the rest of the night with a ridiculous grin on my face, repeatedly informing Eric, "I made pie!" I can't think of a single change I would make to this recipe, it was perfect.

Now we just have to figure out what to do with the rest of those apples...