Regency Zombie Slayer

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies!
Worn at Desucon 2010, Oslo, Norway, 26th. June.

Only inspired by Regency fashion. Figured it'd be less to bother with, and besides are very few otaku able to tell the difference between this and something period. Nobody even knew what I was - the best guess was a ghost! (Must have been the blood, I think - which by the way made a man on Karl Johan run up to me and ask, in very broken English, whether he should call me an ambulance. Naww.)

There are a ton of things I would have done differently, but for a first proper dress, it works. Let's not talk about the first "dress" I made... seven years ago -_-'

Gasp, say the period sewers:
-- It's made of light linen, not muslin.
-- No, I don't have the proper underpinnings.
-- The waistline is too low. (I miscalculated and had no time to fix it T_T)
-- Hair is falling down from the top, but that's in fact intentional. YOU try to keep your hair perfect while zombies are trying to eat your brains.
-- Shoes (not shown here) weren't period either.

Made from a modified version of this pattern: http://www.burdastyle.com/patterns/danielle
Inspiration: http://www.songsmyth.com/patterns/simplicity4055.jpg

Each dress took me about 20 hours of work, mainly because there was a lot of hand-sewing involved. Blood was shed making this, I tell you. Took weeks for my pricked fingers to heal! (Speaking of shedding - my black and white cat has superpowers, only leaving black hair on the white dress and vice versa on the other.)

The reticule is embroidered with small flowers (first-time embroidery, done free hand, resulting in mostly fail), and made from my own pattern. (That meaning, "I'll just make this up as I go along.")

I'd also planned for an adorable blood spattered fan, but there was no time to modify the one colourful I had lying around and the ones I could have bought were all lacy and didn't fit the dress at all. (Speaking of things that didn't fit my dress, the katana had a purple... thing on the sheath. I'm holding a gloved hand over it on the pic. The look on the face of the salesman when I worried about whether it would go well to my dress...)