Pirate Ariel

Made for: Disney Trip 2024

Background: I needed a pirate costume for pirate night!

Journal Entries: Read more at my pirate ariel tag

Patterns Used: None

The costume absolutely does not deserve to have a costume page. I was not going to make one. And then I thought, I have older costumes from when I first started out that are a similar kind of costume, and they have pages… so maybe I do one for Pirate Ariel? The thing that tipped me over the edge was seeing discussion about how bought costumes aren’t “real” costumes. At the risk of getting up on a soapbox, I want any younger costumers out there reading this to know that your costume is valid whether you bought every single bit of it, or you bought part of it, you commissioned it, you modified some found pieces, you made most of it by hand, or you made all of it by hand including making a wig from scratch, cobbling boots and everything! It’s all valid, it’s all costuming, and not everything has to be serious! I decided to go ahead and give Pirate Ariel an entire page to show that my collection has all different levels of costuming and I love them all.

So let’s talk about my Pirate Ariel costume. Disney cruises have a Pirate Night every sailing, and most people dress up like pirates! It’s a lot of fun, the characters are in pirate costumes too, there’s pirate music and a show with fireworks. So of course, I had to have a pirate costume.

I thought about it for a while… the only outright pirate thing I have was Ruby Heart from 20 years ago, and the pleather parts no longer exist. So I started going through costume parts in my mind. I had just done that Stevie Nicks costume last year, and I thought, that skirt with the pickups would be a great pirate skirt. So that was my first part.

Next up I realized I have 2 other things I bought last year that would work for the top – I had seen this white peasant-style shirt at Target last November, and I thought it would be great to wear to see Six as a sort of chemise top. So I got that shirt, and I paired it with a cheap black brocade Tudor-esque bodice I got off amazon. It looked cute for Six and I still had it all sitting in my closet, and I realized, perfect pirate top!

So pair all that with my black knee high boots and that’s a pirate outfit… but it felt like it was missing something. I decided with my red hair, if I could add a blue skirt over the black skirt, it would look pretty good as a pirate version of Ariel’s Kiss the Girl dress. At first I was trying to think if I had enough blue fabric to make something, then realized… duh I have my Belle village dress skirt, that’s perfect. I tried it all on together and just pinned the Belle skirt up to create a hitch to show the black skirt underneath it. I loved it!

Of course, I needed a hat, and I didn’t have anything even remotely resembling a pirate hat. I looked around online and eventually found a costume version of Elizabeth Swann’s hat from the POTC movies. I bought that, and when it arrived, decided I needed to add some Ariel-esque touches.

This was honestly the most fun part, just digging through all of my trim and whatnot finding things that would work it. I ended up using some sequin trim I had leftover from an American Girl-doll sized Elsa costume I made about 10 years ago – sewed that along the top edge. I also added a blue ribbon that didn’t make it into Marie Antoinette’s hat. And I had a silver rhinestone starfish in my box of random stuff, so I added that also. Finally, Chase 3-d printed a giant fork for me, and I added a little elastic pocket to the inside flap of the hat so I could stick the dinglehopper into it.

This was so much fun to put together, I’m thinking about bringing it to dragoncon as a fun downtime costume! And bonus, the hat is slightly too big on me, so if I decide to do a proper Ariel wig with it, it’ll all still fit just fine!

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(coming soon)

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