Carrie Fisher (and Gary)

Made for: DragonCon 2018

Background: Thought this would be a comfy downtime costume at Dcon.

Journal Entries: Read more at my Carrie Fisher

Patterns Used:
None

Outfit:
Both the pink sweater and black dress I bought on amazon. I also bought the floral appliques on amazon and sewed them onto the sweater. The tights were from Target, shoes from the secondhand store. The shoes weren’t what I originally wanted for the costume, I bought these for Garth… but after pricing other options I decided to just wear the sparkly Converse!

Accessories:
The glasses I had on hand… bought them in Epcot for a friend who they didn’t fit, was going to return them, and never did. So they came in handy! I painted the frames. The wig was actually wig #2… the first one was SO thick I could not make it work. (It did end up being cannibalized into my Crait Leia wig, so that was lucky.) I ended up buying a thinner lace front wig on amazon. I trimmed it, added the bangs, darkened the roots, added some blonde tips to the end and thinned it up a bit more.

In 2019 I decided to try to darken the wig just a HAIR since I’d had such good luck dyeing my Crait Leia wig, and I still had dye left over. Well I slapped it in some dye the Sunday before Dragoncon and ended up with an orange wig. OOPS. I didn’t dilute my dye enough. I had to quickly reorder the exact same wig as before (thankfully seller still had it on amazon, and yay for prime!) and quickly trim it the night before we left. Didn’t quite get it as thinned out as the first wig and it doesn’t have any of the darkened roots/blonde tips of wig 1 (didn’t have time!) but it worked ok in a pinch. I’ll update it again in the future.

Gary:
I have gotten into needle felting the past year or so, mostly little animals… I thought it would be fun to make something bigger. Like, maybe life-size? So making the huge Gary was my whole reason for doing this costume. I drew out what I wanted him to look like (a side view and front view), printed it out lift-sized and used that as a guide to carve the base. The base is made of 5 blocks of grey foam glued together – I traced the outline onto the foam with a sharpie, and then started trimming away with a knife. Did some smaller detail work on the face with small scissors.

Once I had the basic shape carved in, I covered the entire thing in black felt. I just hand-sewed it in place directly onto the form. The ears I made separately and sewed into place. Then I started the needle felting – I used black, dark brown, white, grey, pink and tan. I used some pink felt for this tongue and ear interiors! His eyes I bought online and glued in place, the nose my husband sculpted (couldn’t find anything big enough online!). Bought the collar and dog tag! Right up til the night before we left for Dcon I was still doing some detail work on the face.

He’s not perfect… he definitely looks cartoon-y (probably because it was based on what I drew!), he’s a little too big and my felting isn’t the best… but it was a LOT of fun to do. And hopefully as I get better with felting I can go back and touch him up in the future.

History: He got a little worse for the wear at DragonCon, mostly just where I was grabbing his collar to pick him up and carry him, it pulled some of the wool away. Nothing that will be hard to fix!

I kept this costume underwraps before Dragoncon… that way, if Gary turned out embarrassingly bad, I could just leave it home and nobody would notice, LOL. But I think he turned out cute so it was a fun costume to wear.

                       

Visit my FAQ | Contact Me
Please note that none of these costumes are for sale! This is my personal portfolio. Thanks!