It's CARNIVAL!!!!

One of my favorite times of the year is when Caribbean Carnival rolls around. There's nothing like jumping in the streets with large trucks playing Soca music. If you've never participated or witnessed it before, you're definitely missing out. It's always an amazing time. I've been going to carnivals since I was a younglin back in Boston. However, it wasn't until recent years that I began to play Mas. Here's a few photos from carnivals past. 

Sometimes we're in costumes and sometimes in t-shirts, but either way we always have a ball. This year there must have been something in the water because carnival costumes sold out in hours. It was crazy. So rather than frown, folks decided to go with t-shirts, but get fancy and fun with it. Just because you can't wear a costume doesn't mean you can't be in feathers and bling. Let's call it a costume-shirt hybrid. I've never made a costume before, but it looks like fun and right up my alley. I was pretty excited about the whole thing.

I had a few ideas about how this was going to go, but mentally prepared myself to improvise if necessary. First task at hand was to make a feather collar. I looked at pictures from Trinidad and Jamaica's carnivals, and realized that I definitely wanted that to be a part of my hybrid situation. So I checked out a few tutorials. However, I found the best one by the very talented Ms. Angela Panama. She is a Carnival Expert, and participates in them all over the continent. Luckily for me she not only had a written tutorial, but a YouTube video as well. Double score! 

First you start with a semi-circle made of cardboard. This will essentially be the base of the collar. I used an old collar I had on hand for reference. 

Then I hot glued heavy duty wire to the inside. This will help keep the structure.

Next, I wrapped black fabric around the back to cover the cardboard. This probably should have been more fancy, but I was trying to use things I had on hand already. Unlike the picture I did not use e6000. I started, but it wasn't creating a good hold with the fabric. So I went with white Tacky Glue. After letting the fabric and glue dry I added gold ribbon around the bottom edge. This is so that I can tie it around my back.

Now for the fun part, the feathers. Being that I am a total procrastinator and I should have started weeks ago, I missed the window to get inexpensive wholesale supplies online. Feathers are not the cheapest, especially not the amount that I was going to need. So the goal was to reuse and recycle as much as possible of what I had from carnivals past.

I had plenty of yellow feathers from a costume I wore 2 years ago, so that would be the main color. Luckily the t-shirt had yellow in it, so it worked out. I plucked the headpiece and collar of all of the yellow feathers.

Since they were all loose feathers, I had to hot glue each one individually. Quite time consuming, but it came out nice. 

Next I added blue feathers. I had these from one of the headpieces. I pulled those off and added them on top of the yellow. They were actually sewn together so it took me a lot less time to add them.

The next layer I went with black feathers. The t-shirt had black in it, so I wanted to tie in the color somehow. I bought a pack and combined that with some leftover feathers I had from my Black Swan Halloween costume. The only problem was that they were all small and loose. I looked for a string-o-feathers, but couldn't find anything. Gluing them individually would have taken forever. So, I came up with an alternative solution. I made my own string-o-feathers. I grabbed black duct tape, and laid down a long piece sticky side up. Then I placed the feathers down  on the sticky surface one by one until I had covered the entire length of the tape. 

When the whole strip was covered, I folded the bottom half of the tape over. Thus creating a feather trim. *Snaps for me*

I hot glued my trim around the bottom portion of the collar. Then I covered it with black ribbon to conceal the industrial appearance.

To finish it off, I added some gold trim to the bottom edge. This not only covered the edge, but also added a little extra flare.

Then I added a second piece of trim on top of that.

For the final touch, I wanted to add a little sparkle. One of the headpieces had long orange feathers in it. I cut those out. 

Then I spray painted them gold, and sprinkled them with gold glitter.

I spread them out and stuck them in the collar.

What do you think? I'm pretty impressed with my first feather collar. It came out better than I thought. Just think what I could have come up with if I had actually gotten my life together and planned earlier. Maybe next year.

So at this point I kind of got into the costume making. I had extra feathers and left over trim, so I decided to create decorations for my boots. I wore my black boots, so I couldn't do anything permanent. 

I hot glued clips to the back so they stayed on the boots, and taped gold ribbon around the top. 

To polish the whole thing off I made earrings. I haven't made earrings in a while, but I wanted something extra to represent Barbados. I grabbed 2 wooden circles from my stash, and painted a flag on each one. 

Now to put the whole thing together.

I cut my t-shirt into a halter top and wore high-waisted black shorts. What do you think? I am very excited about the way it came together. No time for rest though because I wasn't done. I somehow ended up with an extra project. My lovely friend Naisha wanted a bra top with her flag on it, and because I am such a good friend I agreed to help. She represents Panama. So at the last hour I was bedazzling. I put the bra on my mannequin and marked off a straight line. Can't have lopsided looking boobs.

Per her request I used rhinestones to make the flag. I purchased bling on a string. I found the red roll at Michaels' and the blue at Hobby Lobby. Originally I attempted to just place the entire piece down. However, because of the shape of the bra the rhinestones were not lining up the way I wanted. So I decided to cut each piece into individual strips. Definitely a lot more time consuming, but the perfectionist in me was surely a lot happier.

Once I got the main sections down I added the stars. Once again my sense of perfection kicked in. I played with a way that would allow me to leave them attached, but nothing was looking the way I wanted. So I cut them off. That's right, I cut each rhinestone off the string and placed each one individually. 30 stones for each star. 

I glued each stone on and let everything dry for 24 hours. It looked beautiful! The only thing left to do was put it to the test. I had to make sure it would hold up and withstand lots of jumping and winding. I shook it up and down, swung it around, and picked at the rhinestones to make sure everything stayed secure. When I was done this was the final product.

Here is Naisha in her new accessory. She loved it! 

So that's it for costume making. It's time to hit the road.

What a fun day! Well other than the sun burn on my nose. Not so pleasant, but I'll live. Can't wait to do it all again next year. The whole weekend/carnival experience was AMAZING! Nothing but good vibes, good tunes, good people, and most of all GOOD TIMES! 

Until then... it's on to the next project.