Easy Tutu Tutorial

So my sister tells me the other day that she wants a fairy costume for Halloween. I am ALL OVER THAT. :) It was a lot of work...so I told her she better be going to a dang cool party on Halloween....she swore she would. :)

The tutu portion wasn't hard. There are tutu tutorials all over the web, and a million ways you can go about it. I fashioned mine after the tutorial over at Make It and Love It (what DON'T I get from there...) To see how I tied my tulle around my elastic, go to the tutorial HERE.

You can either buy tulle by the yard in the fabric section, or (like us) you can get it by the roll in the wedding section. That way you don't have to cut it down...you just cut strips off the roll. But it's up to you. And I suggest using a 40% off coupon at Michaels or Hobby Lobby to buy your roll...because it's WAY more expensive than it needs to be, in my opinion.

Anyway, onto my little tutorial...well, it's more like a picture album because it's pretty self-explanatory.
Like Make It and Love It, I measured the elastic around my sister's waist, then sewed it up so it was in a circle....then put it over the back of a chair, and started tying (more like looping, really...)
Do that all the way around, pushing each loop close together so you can add more tulle and make it really poofy.
She also had this green Tinkerbell-like skirt from a few years ago. We were originally just going to have her wear it under the tutu kind of as a slip, but it looked weird, so we ended up cutting it into strips and tying it on as well...
Then we added little rosebuds and coordinating ribbon. My sister didn't want to look like a "Woodland Fairy," but why ever not? Woodland fairies are cute. :)
Now onto the wings....She already had some that went with the green skirt...but they needed a little oomph. They had this big flannel-looking piece in the back that looked weird, so we added some of the skirt material as ruffles to hide that.
Now for the shirt....in hindsight, if I made this again, I'd start with a shirt with capped sleeves instead of trying to create my own...but we were trying to be resourceful, so we re-vamped an old spaghetti-strapped black shirt of mine. It required taking it in....remodeling the straps....and then creating "sleeves" with tulle. It looks cool...but it took forever. This was seriously my project all weekend.

Certain movie quotes come to mind. Specifically Napoleon Dynamite: "I like your sleeves. They're really big."
But poofy Deb sleeves or not, you can't tell me the whole ensem didn't turn out cute and sassy (if you can't tell, she was on the phone while we were taking pics....hence the one-armed effect):
Now go make tutus for all the little fairy-girls in your life. :) And maybe even make one for yourself. :) Every girl needs a tutu! ;)