dressing for disneyland: anna of arendelle
photo from http://movies.disney.com/frozen
(Hi, there! If you are just joining us from Pinterest and looking for a few more easy costume ideas, try Belle, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, the Rockstar, and Merida and Snow White. Thanks for stopping by!)
If you haven’t seen Frozen at least three times by now, you either don’t have daughters or have been living under a rock. For those uninitiated to the craziness that is Frozen-mania, the movie is the most recent princess movie in the Disney Dynasty and tells a story of two sisters (Elsa and Anna) that is loosely based on The Snow Queen. This Disney movie is unique in that (spoiler alert!!) true love does not always come in the form of Prince Charming.
I completely underestimated how much my youngest daughter would identify with one sister over the other. They are both princesses, right? Wrong. Before we saw the movie, we purchased a small Elsa doll as a surprise to put in Théa’s backpack for a long flight. We saw the movie. She found the Elsa doll in her backpack. She immediately changed the doll’s name to Anna. Théa’s older brother knew just what to get her for Christmas. And when I saw this excellent homemade Anna costume online, I knew I needed to try to make something similar for Théa.
Let me start by saying that I can sew, but that doesn’t mean that I am good at it. I prefer to get creative with shopping rather than start from scratch. After coming up with passable Mickey and Minnie Mouse outfits for the kids to wear to Disneyland, I tackled Anna. I tried searching for blue dresses to no avail. Blue skirts were almost as difficult. Thank goodness it was Easter clothing season when I began my search or I would have had to make that cute costume from scratch. Let's not kid ourselves that I almost just bought the tacky polyester version. Hmm. Sold out.
I found an adorable tutu at Target and while there, found a nice aqua t-shirt for the sleeves on Anna’s dress. Whether Théa would actually wear a tutu remained to be seen. I wasn’t sure how I was going to create the bodice of Anna’s dress, but when I went back to look at the DIY dress, it occurred to me that the top looked just like a tank top. Bingo. Gotta love Old Navy.
{1} black tank top for bodice, {2} aqua shirt for sleeves, {3} navy tutu, {4} felt and gold ribbon trim
Not being an artist, I was a little stumped as to how I was going to create the design for the bodice of the dress. I went back to the DIY version once more for tips, but no luck. So I searched for the dress detail and found exactly what I was looking for here. I printed it out full size on an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper, cut slightly outside the lines, and tried it on my (washed) tank top.
It was perfect. From here, all I needed to do was trace, place, and stitch.
I added a bit of iron-on interfacing to the inside of the tank top to cover up my thread ends and protect the sewing from typical four year-old wear. The last step was to sew some gold ribbon around the neck, armholes, and base of the tank top. (Thanks, Mom!) Done!
How fantastic does this kid look?
And an update from Disneyland...Théa refused to see Anna and Elsa while at Disnelyand not because of the four hour wait (!!!!) but because she was absolutley mortified for Anna to find out that they were dressed the same. The exact quote was "I wouldn't want anyone to be dressed like me."