Megara – Disney’s Hercules

Made for: MomoCon 2014

Background: I had originally planned this costume for Halloween 2004! (In fact, if you dig back through my blog tag for Meg over there, you’ll find a few mentions of it back then!) I dropped it and did Leia instead, but it’s always floated around my “want to do” lists since. So here it is, only 10 years late.

Journal Entries: Read more at my Megara tag

Related Costumes: Jane Porter, Sarah Sanderson

Patterns Used:
Butterick 4301

Dress:

I started out by making a base dress out of some slinky, thin purple material I got locally. I picked the pattern above, because, even though it needed some tweaking, I liked the interior support system it called for. I ordered some silk chiffon from Dharma Trading and dyed it. I was SUPER happy with the way the colour came out! Purple with a pink tone. I did some gradation into a darker, bluer purple at the bottom. I cut my fabric into 6 basic pieces and pinned them around the base dress.

I went through lots of different ways of doing pleats. None of which I was happy with and set me back quite a bit after I undid a several days worth of work, several times. I finally settled on sort-of cartridge pleat at the top (which basically just turned into a gather after I attached it to the base dress at the top, and was a mess digging each pleat back out to stitch down), and stitched in between each pleat to attach it the dress, and then ironed them down. I also went through and tacked the center of each pleat down in a few places to force it to lay flat against the base dress as much as possible – I didn’t quite get that finished before con and it needs some clean-up work before next wearing.

The interior I made out of the purple fabric and some black cotton, with minimal boning. The straps were also made of the purple fabric.

Sashes:

I found some really beautiful purple chiffon locally, but it was much darker than I wanted. I decided, screw it, it’s so pretty and I love the drape of it, I’m using it. I made a base for each sash out of some heavy-weight lavender satin I had on hand, covered in my purple chiffon. One of my machines had a great decorative stitch that I did on each of the sash pieces. The draped sash pieces on the side I made out of two squares of the leftover chiffon, and attached them with some buttons I found in my stash.

Wig:

One wig, 2 packs of extensions, and a clip-on ponytail from Arda, with a foam build-up for the ponytail. This wig wasn’t exactly made for an up-do, so I did the best I could – I braided parts back to held keep them in place and neat. I should’ve stubbed the ponytail but I didn’t, and that made it heavier than it should’ve been. First time I wore it at Momocon, it was back heavy and I had to go back to the room and add a sew-in comb to the front edge which fixed the problem – but it’s still heavy. Live and learn.

Accessories:

The brooches I bought at Hobby Lobby and repainted. The sandals in some photos are my Hippolyta sandals, but they were difficult to wear, so in some pictures from Momocon, it’s just a pair of brown leather flip-flops. LOL

Final Thoughts:

Overall I was decently happy with how this turned out. If it’s not laced up exactly right the pleats don’t sit right and that bothers me. Maybe in 2034 I’ll remake this just to see how far I’ve come from this original version LOL.

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