Girl Stinky

For Dragon*Con 2013, I made a Girl Stinky costume from one of the later Sam and Max games.

Clothes and Shoes
The shirt is a regular plum-colored tee shirt. The pants were hard to find, but I settled on some violet pants from TJ Maxx that felt more like leggings and hemmed them up to be capri length.

I couldn't find dark purple pumps that fit, so I painted a pair with Mod Podge and a mixture of acrylic paint and textile medium (half and half, to make it flexible).

It probably took five coats to hide most of the brush strokes, and the final step was two coats of a spray enamel because the paint was a little sticky even when dry.

Crown and Bracelets
I started with a metal tiara, taped paper to it, and traced the shape. Then I held the reference image in front of me and drew the design on as best I could. I did half the swirls, traced them on the opposite side, and freehanded the horse in the middle.

Same basic idea with the bracelets.

I didn't want to draw on or paint the craft foam more than necessary, so I transferred the pattern by putting the paper on top of the foam and poking holes along the pencil lines and connected the dots with marker.

The crown foam was glued to the tiara and the bracelets got velcro closures.

Unfortunately, the crown was too big and lumpy. So I made a second version at about 2/3 this size, and clipped it directly to the wig.

Apron
This and the wig are the things that caused me the most anxiety. I'm still new to the sewing machine, and there are so many ways I can mess up a time-consuming process of putting the fish tail on the fabric, especially since I was planning to include a fish-tail-shaped pocket to carry my essentials (ID, money, phone/camera) at the convention.

Reference from the game character skins.
Apparently you can download those, and it's super helpful.

I went through a lot of trial and error with colors and media. I liked the pre-made colors and control of pastels and crayons, but they didn't soak into the weave of the fabric and looked like a kid's drawing on rough paper. So I bought a bunch of ¥100-yen-store acrylic paints and used almost an entire bottle of textile medium to mix six colors and paint them on the fabric.

1: paper pattern

2: canvas with pencil outline and scales

3: blue-green paint

4: green paint

5: dark green paint, slight white wash in center

6: white highlights, scales darkened with pencil (hard to see at this size), purple added

The painted part is the front layer, the back of the pocket and ribbon are the back layer, sewn on about an inch from the edge. This is so the back layer is keeping it to my body, and I can lift the front layer open the pocket.

Necklace and Earrings
I tried real seashells for earrings, but they were too heavy and just looked like white blobs from a distance, so I sculpted both both the earrings and sand dollar from a lightweight clay, sanded them smooth, and painted them. The pearls are wooden beads painted white and coated with a pearlescent nail polish.

The star on the sand dollar was drawn on masking tape, placed in the center of the sand dollar, and pencil was smudged around it until I was satisfied. The tape was peeled up, the darker accents were added, and I sprayed it with a sealant to keep it from smudging. After spending what felt like a hundred years on the wig (from Arda Wigs, and the quality is good, but turning a wig with bangs into a wig with a bare hairline is not easy), I ended up with something that works well enough for photos, even if the ponytail is a little loose in the back and the hairline in the front is a little thin.

Test run, without wig

Details: heavy eyeliner, blue eyeshadow, purple lip gloss, and green brush-in color over eyebrows.