Dinosaur Prom Dress Adventures!

Happy 2010 everyone! I hope everyone had a wonderful time ringing in the New Year--I most certainly did! As I have mentioned in this blog before, my friends and I love to throw themed parties. And for us, New Year's Eve is yet another opportunity to throw a really great party! And I have to say, this year's party was AWESOME! Our theme was "Dinosaur Prom", a theme we first came up with in high school. It was so neat to see everyones interpretations of the theme, and I thought I would share mine with you here!

For my Dinosaur Prom outfit I wanted to combine the two ideas. So first I needed a Prom dress. I'd already donated all of my high school prom dresses, so I went to Goodwill to see if I could find anything. And there, for only $5, was this beauty:

It was perfect! I was hoping to find a green floor length dress, and this one was cute as well!

I loved all the rhinestones on the front!

I wasn't a huge fan of the fact that it had an open back, but since the dress was a few sizes too big for me, it was extremely convenient. Instead of having to take the dress apart and alter it, I simply had to shorten the criss-crossing straps that ran across the back of the dress. Worked like a charm!

So now that I had my Prom dress, I had to somehow make it a Dinosaur Prom dress. I had two different ideas for how to do this: add spikes down the back, and add a huge frilled collar around the neck. I was hoping to be a cross between a stegosaurus, and a dilophosaurus (the spitting dinosaur from Jurassic Park).

For the stegosaurus part of my dress I made these spikes out of stiff felt. Each spike was made out of two pieces of felt with the top halves attached. I then folded the very bottom of the spikes over so that there was about an inch long tab, which I then glued to each other and then attached to the dress.

This helped give the spikes a little bit of dimension. I cut off the front of the dress to just above my knees so that it would give the effect of my dress having a tail! I loved how it turned out!

Now, for the dilophosaurus part of the dress I recalled a tutorial for a ruffled neck piece that I read in one of the blogs I follow. I used this tutorial to make a long black and dark green ruffled neck piece. But unfortunately it wasn't giving me the dilophosaurus effect that I had hoped for. But then I remembered that my dress came with a shawl. I then ruffled up the shawl, and it was the perfect length to go around the neck of my dress. And it helped give the other ruffle layers the "oomph" that I wanted.

I loved how the collar looked when I attached it to the dress. It was just how I had pictured it in my mind! I had some extra length of the black and green ruffled fabric, so I decided to sew it onto the front of the dress that I had shortened to get the tail effect.

So here is the finished dress, from the front:

And from the back:

I also made a bunch of dinosaur hairpieces for the party, including this stegosaurus one:

This was the most involved costume that I've made yet. And also the first time that I had a vision in my mind of what I wanted my costume to look like, and the end result actually looked like it! I was SO happy with how it turned out, and everyone at the party loved it!

And finally, here is a picture of my wonderful husband and I re-enacting that fateful scene from Jurassic Park with the dilophosaurus and Dennis Nedry (my husband's costume)