Post Mortem

One week since Halloween, and I'm still yet to blog some of the things I made, so the full post mortem will occur sporadically. In the meantime, here I am in my full Corpse Bride attire. I have started to make weird little situations in Photoshop for some of the portraits shot at the party, this is mine: Corpse Bride sulking in a suitably blue graveyard. The tiara held up quite well in the end, but gathered a bunch of cobwebs from the twigs I had suspended over the buffet table. Not too much of a problem, they just added to the whole ghostly effect. The make up took about 45 minutes to apply and I ended up wearing the blue eyelashes I bought actually stuck about 1cm below my lower eyeline, it worked well to give a round-eyed, doll-like appearance, and the beautiful blue wig that I worried would not arrive from Hong Kong was perfect, comfortable and didn't budge all night long.

The Corpse Bride's wedding trousseau

One week till Halloween and I am putting the finishing touches to my Corpse Bride accessories. The shoes have been an ongoing project, sitting patiently on newspaper on the dining room floor, for a couple of weeks. Here's a little round up on how they evolved. I bought a pair of pointy, witchy slingbacks on Ebay for 99p. I didn't much care what the colour or finish was, I just wanted something pointed and elegant and not too high, and these turned out to be just right, but in a navy grosgrain fabric. First step was to prime them with a white undercoat, then paint all over with a pale blue emulsion, I bought a sample pot from Homebase for this job. I then built up layers of blue, cream and a muddy brown so that there was some texture to the finish. Finally, I stuck some fabric and lace scraps on randomly and used a few dabs of a gold iridescent nail varnish here and there. I'm not intending to leave the house in them, but if I were, I'd paint the whole shoe at this point with a matte varnish so they stood up to the elements a little better than these might.

Top left: 99p shoes, reborn. Top right: watching paint dry. 

Middle: work in progress. Bottom: Cockroach toes.

The crowning glory however, are the cockroaches that adorn each toe. These started life as plain black plastic Halloween insects, again bought on Ebay at about 99p for six of the little devils (I bought centipedes, flies and spiders too!). I roughly painted each one with the same blue emulsion and while it was still wet rubbed it off so that the paint just stayed in the cracks and grooves. Then I painted it all over with a thin coat of the gold nail varnish. They look just like dirty burnished metal and I'm very pleased with how they turned out! Here are some flies that I've done in the same way. These are going on the bodice of my outfit so I did them slightly bluer.

And here are the finished shoes, and my tiara, constructed from twigs, dried hydrangea petals, plus an assortment of beads I had in my bead boxes just waiting for the occasion.