Possibly Maybe Melody

I have always maintained that I can't sew. I once got an "F" for a pillowcase I made in year seven. A pillowcase for goodness sake! All I had to do was sew three straight lines!

Over the years I have continued to try and continued to fail, so my belief in my ineptitude with a needle and thread is fairly solid.

And yet, I was recently invited to a costume party and for reasons that still baffle me, it never actually occurred to me not to make the costume myself.

It was a "B" themed party and I had originally planned to go as Bender from Futurama, but while I could fairly easily visualise the costume itself, I had a lot of trouble visualising sitting down in it. So I did some more thinking and eventually decided to go as Bjork from the 2001 Academy Awards.

Amazingly, the costume worked. It didn't even come apart or fall off or anything!

No, Mr Doorman, I have not come dressed as Ozzy Ostrich.

Anyway, I thought I'd share with you how it all came together, just in case you want to a) make one yourself, or b) laugh at my technique.

Names of fabric and phrases like "cutting along the bias" are meaningless to me. I just bought a bunch of cheap white stuff, put it on the floor and folded it over to the length I wanted it. (I measured this by lying on top of it, getting up, folding it again then lying down again until it was about right.) It was then that I realised I didn't have any proper pins. Well, why would I? But I did have a box of safety pins so I used them to hold it in place while I measured and sewed the waist.

I measured the waistband with a ruler and a pencil, then hand sewed along the line using some kind of stitch that probably doesn't have a name.

I threaded the elastic through, folded the soon-to-be skirt in half, pinned the ends and sewed it together.

Once it was sewed I cut the bottom off to make it more even which, as you can see, didn't really work, and then I unpicked the last seam because I'd stupidly sewn both layers of the skirt together.

I hemmed the ends using bonding tape because I really couldn't be bothered sewing it. Besides, no one was going to see it. Then I rejoined the inner and outer skirt. Separately this time. Then came the netting. I pinned it to the outside of the inner skirt using precision-like guesswork, and sewed it down in almost even-ish ripples.

It wasn't perfect, but I was quite impressed with the finished skirt. And Kitty was quite impressed with the leftover pile of netting.

He was even more impressed with the pile of feathers, but I don't think they tasted as good as he was hoping. This was 3.2 metres of feather boa. I attached it at fairly even points around the outer skirt, then went back over it and stitched any droopy bits that were creating featherless bald patches.

Then I got distracted by how pretty the feathers looked in the sunlight so I spent a few minutes just taking photos.

With the skirt complete I started on the neck, which was one leg of a pair of white stockings stuffed with, well, stuffing. I put the other stocking leg over the top to better hide the insides.

Then came the face, made from felt and the eyes I used back when I crocheted that unusual cat thing. I thought I'd just use glue for this bit.

I put the skirt on, held a piece of baking paper to my belly, and drew a couple of wonky lines on it to mark the piece that would join the skirt to the swan's neck. Very professional, I know. To make it even more professional I used glue to hem the edges. I was a bit over it by this stage. Plus I had a cold and I wanted to go have a bit of a lie down.

I sewed the neck shut then attached it to the fabric I'd just glued. No, I didn't wait for the glue to dry.

Then I sewed the bottom of the neck to the waist of the skirt and the rest of the neck fabric to a singlet. I attached a small leftover strip of feather boa to the base of the neck, then covered any gaps around the neck base and waist by globbing on some glue and pressing a few feathers into it.

The finishing touch to the costume was adding sparkles to the legs:

Oh, and a camel-coloured cardigan because it was freezing, but I didn't get a photo of that.

All in all it was something of a success. At least, enough of a success for me to really want a sewing machine now. I'd like to have a go at making something I can wear more than once. Something without feathers, perhaps.

Which one's Bjork? Which one's Melody?
Oh, it's just too hard to tell the difference.