Princess Leia – Star Wars, Dapper Day version

Made for: Disney Trip 2022

Background: After wearing my dapper Bespin Leia look with my husband as Han to Dapper Day in 2021 and nobody “getting” that we were supposed to be Han and Leia, I decided I needed to make a new dress no one could mistake as Leia LOL

Journal Entries: Read more at my Dapper Leia tag

Patterns Used:
Butterick B6094 (skirt), Simplicity ?? (bodice) and Butterick ?? (shawl)

Dress:
This was supposed to be a really quick, easy and simple build. Originally we weren’t going to do anything new for Dapper Day 2022 – we were going to rewear what we’d done the year before to get some more use out of them. But I decided I could make this pretty quickly and cheaply so off we went.

I used a basic white matte satin for the main part of the dress, and a white taffeta for the built-in petticoat. I used the skirt from the pattern above for the skirt portion of this dress – I like the shape and the petticoat and it’s easy to put together, so that’s where I started. Got the petticoat made and skirt assembled, then moved on to the bodice.

For the bodice I was originally going to use a different vintage pattern from my stash, but after being completely confused by the pattern pieces and instructions, I decided my brain just wasn’t in the right place to try to figure it out right now, and instead found the Simplicity pattern mentioned above – this was originally a standalone top, I just edited it to make it shorter so the waist seam is at my natural waist. This pattern was also MUCH more simple and straight forward than the other one I first tried to use!

One the top and skirt were sewn together, I put a zipper in the back and she was done.

Shawl:
The entire inspiration for this dress came from the pattern illustrations on the front of the Butterick envelope I mentioned above. That was the basic look I wanted – a simple dress with this shawl over the top. Thankfully this vintage pattern was already cut so I didn’t feel bad about using it!

I used 1 layer of organza for this – originally I was going to do 2 so the seams were enclosed and neat looking, but after cutting out 2 layers I felt like it looked too thick and heavy. So I went back to one and just made sure my seams and hems were as neat as possible.

For the rebel symbols all over, I cut different sizes out of silver glitter HTV on my silhouette machine. It took some experimenting to figure out how to apply these without melting the organza. Finally got it to work – had to remove the symbols from the carrier sheet and press them under a teflon pressing cloth. It didn’t turn out perfect – the bigger ones want to curl and curl the organza with it, and some of them didn’t completely stick. A few fell off on dapper day LOL. But overall it was the look I wanted.

Accessories:
the shoes were some I found at the secondhand store months before I even started on this – I saw them, recognized the brand as a pretty comfy pair of heels and thought a good basic white pair would be great to add to my closet. I did also end up buying a pair of flats too — I wore heels for the first half of the day at Dapper Day, and switched to flats for the rest of the day once my feet got tired.

The belt is one I had; I was trying to save time & money here. My husband designed and printed the concho for me, it just slides onto the existing belt.

The bag is my favourite part; I thought it’d be cute to have a Death Star plan bag. I found a good simple white rectangle purse to use as a base on amazon. When it arrived I scanned it so I’d have a template, and resized the parts of the death star plans to fit it. I cut all of the black lines out of some leftover black glitter HTV and ironed it on, and for the gold circular part, my husband 3d printed it from an existing file, resized to fit the purse. I painted in the black details. Last thing I did was shorten the strap – it came with a shoulder length strap but I wanted it to be more like a wristlet, so I took the hardware off, cut it down and then reattached the hardware.

2 last minute things were the hairpins and the necklace. I had been wanting to add a hat but couldn’t figure out how to make it work with the buns. Initially I’d been thinking about doing the buns further down and more towards the back (giving me room for a little hat) – but when I tested that out I didn’t like how it looked. So I decided to stick with the regular bun placement and skip the hat. Instead I decided I wanted a silver star hair comb – but couldn’t find anything in my budget. Finally found some singular star hairpins on amazon that worked great.

And also originally I kept waffling on the reference for the dress – was it based on senatorial Leia or ceremonial Leia? I’d been planning to wear my ceremonial necklace with it, but when I decided to do the Death Star plans bag, I realized it had to be senatorial and dropped the idea of wearing the ceremonial necklace. But after it was all done I decided it still needed a necklace. At the last minute I repainted my original 2016 disneybound Leia rebel pendant and restrung it with some fake pearls and necklace hardware I cut off an old cheap necklace. Not bad.

History: There was no mistaking we were Han and Leia (and Luke!) this time around. We had a lot of fun wearing these – managed to wear them all day!

                       

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