Princess Euphemia Skirt Embroidery

To make a long story short, I had an idea back in 2008 to make a cosplay of a gold/white dress one of Clamp’s characters wears, but instead of painting or appliqueing the gold designs on the dress I would embroider them onto the dress by hand. I ended up deciding to make Princess Euphemia’s gold/white dres from the anime Code Geass….

Because I only have so much time in the day and I can only work so long before I have hand cramps, this costume takes a long time to make. I’m already on year two of making this dress and I’m not even nearly done with it.

I did recently hit a milestone with the dress though. I completed the “under” skirt and the embroidery on it. (The underskirt goes underneath the petal/feather decoration of the the skirt) It’s not much when I think of it, but at least its some sort of progress.

Here are some photos I took of the skirt on my dress form and with the petticoat I use with all skirts like this underneath it.

The whole skirt on the dress form….

Shot of the embroidery on the front of the skirt. I based the look of the embroidery off Kate Middleton’s wedding dress…

Top embroidery design…

Middle bottom embroidery design….

Bottom side embroidery design. I wanted it to look like feathers, but I don’t think it looks like that now. Still, I like the way it looks very much…

This whole skirt took me about a year to finish. It took me so long to finish it because I took a nine month break in which I worked on other costumes. I started it again because I got tired of a pile of unfinished costumes and sewing projects sitting around my house. ^_^ There are other projects I’m working on right now that I started but set aside to work on other stuff and they’re nearing completion themselves. The progress on them has been slowed down to a snail’s pace because my sewing machine broke so if I want to sew I’d have to hand sew everything like I used to. That puts a damper on my plan for making myself a Halloween costume. >:(