Narnian Costumes: Part 2

Hello everyone! I’m Mallory’s infamous friend, Hannah. We’ve been close friends for a couple years, and there is no one else I would want to host a joint birthday party with. She’s the best of the best, and it was so fun to dream all of these plans up with her.

I have a few costumes that I want to share with you today, so let’s get right to it.

I have been a huge Narnia fan for many, many years. My sister and I were members of a Narnia fan site back in the day, and just generally became the biggest nerds about the movies and books alike. During the buildup to the release of Prince Caspian in 2008, we got inspired by the costume designs and decided to try our hand at making our own. Being the overachievers that we can sometimes be, we chose to make Susan’s battle dress.

Nothing like going big or going home…. 🙂

First off, we didn’t want any of that fake mesh stuff that you see in some homemade costumes. No. We wanted REAL chainmail.

My sister really deserves all of the credit for the whole design. She studied all of the images that we could find of the costume from the movie, counted the rows of rings in the chainmail, and created a pattern off of that. We ordered several pounds of aluminum rings on ebay, got some needle-nose pliers, and away we went. To minimize the weight and bulk caused by a full chainmail shirt, we designed the chainmail shirt to be an upper half and a lower half that was connected by a corset-type middle. It worked wonderfully, and after many hours and lots of callouses later, the shirt was complete.

The dress is a simple princess-seam style, with two slits in the front, and a pair of pants underneath.

The cuirass was based on a corset pattern and made of vinyl (I would have loved to do real leather, but we had to stop somewhere). We bought leather scraps from Hobby Lobby to create all of the straps going around it. And we formed the medallions out of clay and painted them to look like metals.

It’s quite a process to get it all on.

I was trying to be artsy, then she pretended to bite a leaf, and it all went downhill from there. 😉

Let’s try to convince Mallory that this should be her new bio photo on here! 😉

I could share more about this costume, but I don’t want to bore you, so let’s move on. 🙂

Part of why this party was so enjoyable was the opportunity to make costumes for my kids. It was the first time I had attempted anything for them, and I loved it!

My 3-year-old was Edmund Pevensie, and I’m so happy with how his costume came together. The blue tunic Edmund wears in Prince Caspian has always been my top favorite of the boys’ costumes in the films, and I knew I had to go for it when I found the perfect fabric. That fabric happened to be a large pair of velour track pants that were part of a previous costume (yes, another one), and I had just enough to make a tunic for him. It ended up being shorter than I had hoped, but I had limited length to work with, so I can’t be too picky.

So serious.

I found these boots on amazon that worked great for the costume.

Cracking a smile. 😉

Now for the other birthday boy! From early on, Mallory and I knew one of our little boys had to be Tumnus. The thought was too cute to pass up! I found some faux fur at Walmart, and jumped! I bought half a yard, and used this pattern for the pants. I specifically wanted a pattern that didn’t have any side seams, so it wouldn’t be noticeable with the fur, and this pattern worked great (I eliminated the waistband on the pattern and just cut the pants a little taller to make up for it)! I hand stitched the fabric around the elastic at the waist, so I wouldn’t have a visible line around the top, and I also hemmed the pants by hand. I loved how quickly these came together!

My niece crocheted the red scarf for him.

I hot glued some felt onto a headband to cover it, then cut out little ears and horns and hot glued them on as well. It was a little chilly the day of the party, so I put a onesie on him instead of just letting him be shirtless (even though the baby rolls would have been adorable).

He kept taking the headband off, but he wore it long enough to get the general effect.

My husband dressed up as C.S. Lewis.

I didn’t want to make anything from scratch for myself, but I had a green dress that I figured I could pretty easily turn into a dryad costume.

I cut the leaves off of a spray from Joann’s and hot-glued them in clusters onto pieces of felt. Then I could either stitch or safety pin the clusters wherever I wanted them. So easy!

I took the smallest leaves from the spray and bobby pinned them into a braided crown in my hair.

That’s all, folks! Many thanks to Mallory for asking me to guest post on here! I’m so thrilled that she has started this blog, and I know she will do amazing things with it. Thanks for reading! ❤