DIY Cleopatra Costume

Halloween is becoming one of my favorite holidays because I get to dress up Miya in costume hehe. If you've been a long-time reader of my blog, you'll know I DIY'd her previous costumes here and here. So for this year, I decided to do a Cleopatra costume mainly because of her hairstyle hehe. It's hard to find pegs for Cleopatra costumes for toddlers but my main inspiration is our goddaughter's costume (store-bought) a few years ago.

It's also hard to find tutorials on how to do a toddler costume for Cleopatra so I relied on this video on youtube which is a tutorial for a Cleopatra costume for adult but you can just basically scale down the size for your child.



For the materials, I bought the following (pretty much everything from Carolina's Megamall except for the gold fabric which I bought from the store beside Fabric Warehouse (also in Megamall):

1. gold fabric - I can't find the same snakeskin fabric she used in the video but the material of the fabric I bought is almost the same with the one she used, I think
2. different colored stones for the accessories - bought from Carolina's (Megamall)
3. gold material for the headpiece - bought from Carolina's (Megamall). They don't have stretchy material that I can used so I also bought the next item on my list
4. garter - but I don't think this really worked so you can skip using this material
5. velcro straps
6. pentel pen - instead of using black paint
7. glue gun - borrowed from a friend. But I found out it's better to use super glue instead (more on that later).

I really just followed the steps from the video (although I didn't use the Modge Podge for the edges of the fabric. It's easy to do the rectangular parts to be used on the arms. The method she used in the video to make a circle didn't really work for me so I had to find circlar objects as my base. But I found it hard to find a circular object as my basis for the neckpiece. And I have to adjust the size to Miya's size as well. And then instead of using black paint, I used black pentel pen.

Basically I went all out with the beadwork hehe. As you can see, using the glue gun in sticking the stones is not going to give you a clean look (unless I'm really just an idiot in using the glue gun hehehe). There were a lot of excess glue and the stones tend to fall off rather easily. I also had a hard time gluing the velcro onto the fabric.

For the headpiece, my friend gave me her son's toy snake that I can use and a canister of gold spray paint. But Miya didn't want a snake on her head so I just used the stones again. I also glued the garter inside the gold accessory. However, I found that this didn't remedy the "stretchy" concern on the headpiece so I just added velcro on either ends of the headpiece. Sorry I forgot to take a close up photo fo the headpiece.

For the white dress underneath, I bought a white fabric to use but again didn't get to use it because I got tired doing all the other accessories haha. I also remembered Miya had a white plain dress so we tried that on her with the finished accessories and it already looked good so I opted not to DIY the white dress anymore.

To complete the look, I also made sandals for Miya. Well, I bought gold sandals from SM Store and then added the colored stones onto it. This time I used the super glue instead of the glue gun. As I've said I found it easier and better to use the super glue because the stones really hold up especially the velcro onto the fabric.

Next post for the complete look.