Frozen’s Elsa-Inspired Dress
Every. single. day. Yup, we’re still living in a Frozen obsessed world over here. You know, we actually held out (and still do) when it comes to letting her watch “princess” movies. Frozen is the first and really only that she’s seen, but she has dove head first into obsession and we’re just kinda going with it. What’s the point of being a 3 year old if you can’t be an awesome ice power yielding queen.
After my last blog post, I decided that I wanted Yuki to earn the dress since she’s so used to getting things all the time and she’s starting to think that things come so easily. So I created a little sticker chart and told her that she needed to help out around the house to earn stickers and when she got 10 stickers she could have her dress. She did things like putting away everyone’s laundry, hanging diapers for drying, setting the table and wiping it clean after dinner, etc. She didn’t complain too much about doing the work and was super psyched to earn each sticker.
Ok, on to the dress . . . this is inspired by the dress Queen Elsa wears when she “lets it go” and embraces her ice powers. It’s definitely not a replica of what she wears in the movie, but heavily inspired by it. I had a few criteria when designing the dress in my mind. I wanted it to be knit – comfy and easy to put on and take off. I wanted it to be easy to clean. And I wanted the materials to be inexpensive.
At preschool, there is a group of kids that is REALLY into “dress up” and almost every time I go to pick Yuki up, she’s got a raggedy piece of tulle tied around her neck or head or wherever and she’s walking around like she’s the queen of the world. It made me realize that these kids don’t need some fancy expensive costume to make believe – they can pick up any simple prop and turn it into whatever they see in their fantastic imagination. So my goal was to make it special, but keep it simple.
I went to my favorite cheap fabric store, Fabrix. It carries “off-price surplus and closeout fabrics and trims” so it’s hit or miss what you’ll find in there, but sometimes you come across something perfect for a really low price. I get a lot of my solid knits there when I find good colors. Anyways, I walked in hoping to score some blue knit when I laid my eyes on this:
And the words that immediately popped into my head were FROZEN. FRACTALS.
Now, I have no clue what frozen fractals even look like, but if you’re familiar with the song, “Let it Go,” Elsa belts those words as she is constructing her beautiful ice castle at the climax of the song. Here are the images from the movie that I think of when I see this fabric and what became the inspiration behind the dress.
I actually went back to the store to see if I could buy more yardage to give away to one of you, but it was already gone!! :(
And that’s the actual Queen Elsa dress. So with those images in my head, I went to design a simple and kid friendly dress. Along with two yards of that frozen fractal knit, I got two yards of whatever sparkly tulle they had and a little bit of trim, all of it costing about $2.39 per yard. Score! For the sleeves and top of the bodice I used leftover burnout knit that I think probably also came from Fabrix, but I used in this shirt here.
I started with the ever awesome Flashback Skinny Tee pattern by Made by Rae for the bodice. I widened the neckline to more of a boatneck shape, but I think I went a little too wide and deep. I brought the sides in a little, rather than slightly flaring out at the bottom, shortened the bodice and changed the shape of the bottom to a slightly curved V. I cut the pattern along the colorblocked lines that you see and added seam allowance to attach the pieces. The sleeves are unmodified.
I was just going to make the dress purely knit and leave off any tulle so that I could throw the dress in the washer and dryer without working about it. But I worried that it looked too plain and not special enough, so I gathered some of the tulle and attached it with the skirt. I like the way it looks, but it does make cleaning the dress a bit harder.
Watch out! Ice power!
With the rest of the tulle, I gathered it a bit and zig zag stitched it to a piece of sparkly elastic from Jo-Ann, to make the cape. Elsa doesn’t even wear a crown for the second half of the movie, but Yuki wanted one, so I sewed some trim onto a piece of craft felt, and folded and sewed the bottom 1/2 inch to make a casing to slide a headband through. Took me just a couple of minutes – yay!
She loves it. She wants to wear it every minute of the day. She’s started telling people her name is Elsa. I’m happy that she is happy, but I really hope this phase doesn’t last forever because I can really only handle listening to
And the Queen does her chores. She wore her well-earned dress to a Sing-Along Frozen showing at the Castro Theater over the weekend. Her classmate wore a beautiful mom-made dress as well. They got to walk across the stage in front of the entire theater with all the other kids in costumes. She belted out the words to her favorite songs and stuffed her face with popcorn. She said it was the best day ever :)
