Anna’s Coronation Dress- All the Pretty Appliques

Despite planning to make Anna’s coronation dress from Frozen, I held back talking about this costume because I wanted to finish it first, then make a post about how I made it, complete with photos of the finished dress. Since I decided to make this dress over a year ago and I’m still working on it, I decided to make a post about my progress on the dress.

Although I can relate to Elsa and her struggles, especially since this past year was very hard on me, I look like Anna. My hair is the same color as Anna’s, I have freckles, and I have bangs. (I’m growing my bangs out but they’re taking so long I’m getting used to them) I can also be really awkward and say silly things when I’m nervous. (It’s especially obvious (and embarrassing) when I’ve go to conventions and tried to make small talk with not just the actors I’m getting autographs from but also people standing next to me in line, anyone I sit next to in panels, someone at the ticket counter, guys, ect.) So, I thought it would make sense to make one of Anna’s dresses and wear it at a convention. That way I could be awkward and everyone will not think I’m weird! XD

I originally wanted to make Anna’s peasant outfit for Phoenix Comicon 2014, but that ended up not working out. I still plan on finishing the costume, but since I got sick of running into the skirt fabric while looking for other fabric, I decided to finish the coronation dress first.

In case anyone forgot what Anna’s coronation dress looks like, here’s a picture of it in the Art of Frozen book…

Last year, when I began making Anna’s dress, I decided to draft the pattern for the skirt from scratch. Everything was going fine with the pattern drafting… until Simplicity released pattern number 746/1215…

After seeing the pattern, I debated if I should use my self-drafted pattern or Simplicity’s. It took me a few months of on-and-off thinking before I decided to use the pattern for my skirt.

I decided to use the pattern because it came with applique patterns and a placement guide for the appliques. Since I had problems figuring out how to place the appliques on the skirt and no energy to figure it out, I took the easy way out and depended on Simplicity to figure it out for me.

Although I like the pattern, I did modify the pattern some. I wanted the colors of the appliques to be as close to the colors of Anna’s skirt in the art book. Since Simplicity’s colors are different than the ones in art book, I changed them. Here is a list of what Simplicity listed the colors as and what I changed them to:

• Dark Green: Green
• Purple: Gold
• Magenta: Pink
• Turquoise: Light Blue

I also used poly/costume satin to create the appliques out of. Since the satin is super shinny, I used the wrong side of the fabric. It still has some shine to the fabric, but it’s far duller than the right side.

In addition to changing the colors of the appliques, I also changed the way I applied them to the skirt. The pattern says to use paper back fusible web. Unfortunately, my iron melts the glue on fusible web and some interfacing. Even at it’s lowest setting, my iron is too hot for the glue. Since I didn’t want to buy a brand new iron just for this project, I decided to hand sew the appliques onto the skirt and satin stitch around the edges to keep them from fraying.

So far I finished sewing all the appliques onto one skirt panel…

And I realized there was something I should’ve done to the appliques before cutting them out. I should’ve ironed interfacing to the back of them to give them some stiffness. It would’ve helped me while sewing the appliques onto the skirt panel and would also prevent so much fraying from the appliques. I plan on doing this when I sew the appliques onto Anna’s peasant outfit.

The fabric I used for the olive green skirt panel is silkessence. It’s from Joann’s and is synthetic silk. It’s also really thin so I needed to use fusible interfacing on the back to give it stiffness and make is more opaque, but I’m thinking of adding another layer of interfacing to the back to the panels to make it even stiffer.

The rest of the skirt will be made out of now discontinued casa satin and hunter green poly satin. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the bodice of the dress because I’ve been so focused on the skirt I ignored it. I did made a bodice last year out of poly suiting that I’m thinking of using, but I’m not sure if it will fit me after this year’s growth spurts. We’ll see what happens with that.

So that’s what I did with my Anna coronation dress! As of this post, I sewed all the pink appliques onto the skirt panels and now I’ve moved onto the gold appliques. I’m also sewing other non-Anna related things to give me a mental break from Anna all the time. None of them are done so I’ll blog about them when I’m done sewing them. 🙂

Thank you for reading!