Elsa the Snow Queen Revisited

During my first wearing of Elsa the Snow Queen, I figured out some details that could be improved, especially on the Sparkling Snowflake Cape. Since I knew I would wear the outfit again for my Frozen Sing Along movie night, I cranked away on changes, but only after finishing two girl-sized snowflake capes and crowns for my friend’s daughters! 😉

Considering that for the Castro Theatre Sing Along, I drove for an hour each direction, including a seatbelt to rub against all my ice shingles, the bodice held up extremely well! I did lose 3 ice shingles right where the seatbelt hit my waist, so I’m glad I had some extras for repairs. Some ice shingles curved up more because of how I bent as I sat, plus more seatbelt issues, so I pinned those and used the rest of my flexible stretchable fabric glue. I am definitely impressed with that glue, because it does remain flexible and stretchable, even though there are enough layers of the bodice that it could almost act like armor. 😉

The perfect ice blue crinkle shimmer translucent iridescent fabric had been sold out since January, but I had bought just enough back then for my double-layer almost 6-foot long cape plus two single-layer 4-foot long capes for Nola and Violet. When I was using my cutting machine to cut my snowflakes, I just kept cutting until my fabric ran out, so I had enough set aside to make two matching girl-sized capes too. The smaller capes used many of the snowflakes where the interfacing backing refused to come off, so I couldn’t iron them on the capes. Out of necessity I used the crystal glitter fabric paint around the entire snowflake to anchor all of them, but when I was finished, I really liked how it looked, and I did have a couple of my lager snowflakes start to pull away from my cape because I only used accent dots of glitter paint…so I went around all my own 65 snowflakes with a full line of crystal glitter. It does help highlight the snowflakes better, and now they will stay on no matter what. 🙂

Since I was finished with the girls’ capes, I quickly made them a couple Elsa crowns using my template, this time fitting two crowns from one quart size yogurt container. I had painted a separate jewel from foam for my crown for the coronation outfit, but since I had plenty of crystal glitter paint leftover, I used aqua nail polish over the jewel area of the crown, then I built up a big mound of crystal glitter paint that tapered down to all four edges. Because the crystal glitter is clear until you have too many layers, it gave a nice fading glow and a good shape. I also made 6 more of these crowns as favors for the Frozen Sing Along party.

There was also a request for any possible fabric snowflakes to use for hair clips and dress decorations, so I ran all my leftover hand-laminated aqua shimmer ice fabric through my cutting machine too. Some of the snowflakes delaminated themselves, which were still pretty as sparkle satin snowflakes, but there were plenty that were usable. I sent most to the girls, but I saved some small ones in the perfect sizes for better snowflakes for my Elsa braid. I love the sparkle of the rhinestone snowflake jewelry I bought, but they were a little too delicate to see in photos, and they fell out of my hair at the Castro Theatre Sing Along a couple times, so I didn’t want to lose them.

I knew the fabric was cut so small that they would be too delicate on their own, plus I wanted a more jewel-like look, so I added beads of crystal glitter paint at all the tips and outlined the points. After those were dry, I used crazy glue to add the little star spring hairclips, trying to hide as much of the clip from showing from the front side. I made sure the clips were open as I glued them, so they wouldn’t accidentally glue shut! After those were dry, they still didn’t seem stable enough, so I coated the clip side with a couple coats of Modge Podge, so there was a full layer over the crazy glue seal. The Modge Podge layers make the springs a little harder to close, but they stayed in the braid all night during my Frozen Sing Along movie night and they looked great!

I love my fiber optic fabric but that subtle sparkling effect only shows up in low ambient light. For the Castro Theatre I had pinned 5 LED balloon lights around the bottom last-minute so they would glow even in daylight, but they overwhelmed the fiber optic fabric. On Amazon I found some cheap battery strings of 20 white LED bulbs on clear wire, so I added those down the sides and around the bottom of the cape. I cut a small slit in the top seam of the cape under the drawstring casing to feed the light strings between the two layers of cape fabric. Before feeding the lights through, I sewed a matching fabric pocket for the two battery packs. With the battery packs inside the pocket, I fed the light strings through the hole between the layers enough to be out of the way, then sewed the pocket to the cape. At that point, it was easier to pin the cape to my wall so I could stand, plus gravity helped feed the lights between the fabric layers so I could position them where I wanted. There were only 20 lights on each string, so I couldn’t aim every bulb for a snowflake or make them as random as I would have liked, but this was already 3 battery packs on the back of my bodice, and you can see that they were already too heavy for the cape to stay in the correct place on the top edge of the bodice!

After maneuvering the lights where I liked, I pinned them on both sides of each bulb so they wouldn’t slide out of place, then I hand tacked them with small stitches, looping around the cord, not through of course! We didn’t have time for a proper photoshoot at my Frozen Sing Along movie night, so only flash photography, which washed out the poor fiber optic fabric again. Also, after the photos I realized that the bottom battery pack had come apart from dragging on the ground all evening and lost batteries out of it, so the bottom LED wasn’t lighting the fabric anyway. No wonder you couldn’t see it! At least it made for a cute photo with Olaf, and we all had an “icy blast” at our singalong! 🙂

Before giving up completely on the fiber optic fabric for this project and re-engineering with all LED light strings hacked into one battery pack, at least we documented the fiber optic fabric well in a proper evening photoshoot using Jerry’s fancy new low-light lens before Halloween got into full swing. Labor Day evening I got into costume and we walked the short distance to the park near my house near dusk to get some fading light by the lake with the fountain, some trees and hills, as well as full darkness. I expected a few joggers snapping photos as they went by, and smiles and points from strolling people, so I smiled and waved. What I didn’t expect was so many people having family barbecues at the park, so we were distracted by a bunch of adorable kids wanting my photo! I kept hearing “zapatos” while the girls pointed at my shoes, then they had to take turns taking photos with me, even the boys. Then another tiny girl’s mom told me how I was her daughter’s favorite character, so I started singing Let It Go so she could sing with me, but she just stared up at me in awe. I loved it, and Jerry caught several good photos of my “fans.” 🙂 It’s hard to choose the best, so the full gallery is below.

Never fear, this is not yet the end of Elsa! I’m going to improve the cape lights and wear both outfits at Disneyland for Halloween, so there will obviously be a TON of photos there! Then after Halloween is over, I should be able to finish my Let It Go cover video to include both dresses…heehee!