Costume breakdown: Eruka Frog dress

This is where I reveal my secrets to how I constructed my Eruka costume.  The hardest part to this not so complicated costume is the dress, it is almost impossible to find giant polka dot printed fabric without custom printing it yourself.  I have searched and searched online for a good idea, and finally came decided to combine some of the stuff I have seen in others' costumes.  The idea is to get a black dress and either sew, print, or paint some kind of big circles on it.  Searching for the black dress was a mess, nothing was quite short enough or flared out enough.  I finally found a dress on Yesstyle.com for about $15 (currently out of stock).

Taken from Yesstyle.com

Obviously the dress had sleeves, so I had to take the seems for the sleeves out and re-serge some edges.  This entire process took me about 2 hours.

Now, for the dots.  There were couple things I really didn't like about either sewing or painting the dots.  If I had to sew the dots on, I had to find fabric 1.) that does not fray 2.) was not too thick or too sheer.  Then there was also the problem of not being able to cut perfect circles out of fabric.  Painting the dots would have worked with some stencil, however, I still had the problem of cutting perfect circles and make the paint go on evenly.  Eventually, I decided to use this old technique (lol) I have used when I was printing cheap J-rock t-shirts.  T-shirt transfer sheets for dark fabric!!!  I got the stretchy ones because the dress itself was stretchy.  I also obtained a circle cutter from my local crafts store (This type of thing), since the transfer sheets had the consistency of paper, it was very easy to cut.  With my perfect circles, all I had to do was just to iron them on.  Voila!

To make the dress flare out more, I used gray fusible interfacing and stiffened the entire dress out to obtain it's shape.  I have seen others use petticoats, but since in the anime Eruka only has a dress that has one-layer, I wanted to stay true to the show.

one layer, and it is gray

I also added some gray lace at the bottom to mimic the pattern.

I bought my hat....>.> yes, I know I'm a loser for that, but it was so much easier to just buy the hat.

Result:

More pictures should be coming in about a month or so.  I think I will do another post in the future regarding tadpole Jackson and the mistakes I have made while making him......Q_Q 

We have some more pictures of my Eruka costume now :D  Go to check it out HERE