Princess Serenity - Sailor Moon Gown Tutorial

As a Sailor Moon fan I have always loved Princess Serenity's design. So I decided to make the Princess Serenity dress for my sister. Serenity's design is very elegant and so to recreate it I decided hand beading was the best option.

I started off by gathering reference photos to get an idea of what kind of pattern was needed for the dress and how I wanted the beading to look. Personally I like elements of the manga version and Sailor Moon Crystal version much more than the 90's anime. because of the level of detail.

                

After going over the images I decided to use the pattern M6030 as the base for the dress. For the base of the dress I got  4 1/2 yards of white satin with some sparkles on it and the over skirt I got 7 yards of shiny white tulle.

To create the scallops I traced the sweetheart bodice pieces from the pattern onto paper and used something circular to draw my scallops. Make sure you account for a 5/8 seam allowance when doing this part. After pinning my pieces to the fabric I took a mark-b-gone pen traced out the shape. However the line I had for my scallops was going to be my stitching line, so if you do it this way cut an inch or so above the scallops. I cut out two bodices from the white satin and one from a white cotton. The cotton layer was for the boning to go onto. The most important part when sewing the scallops is to clip the fabric so that when it is turned right side out the circles will look circular.

For the skirt the only changes I made was that the top portion was much wider. By making the top part of the skirt wider I was able to gather it to the bodice. I cut the tulle out similar to the base skirt so that it would be gathered as well. One of the tulle skirts was cut shorter so that it would look like the reference images. 

Here is how the dress I made looked at this point:

*the inside empire waist seam was not sewn closed at this point to allow for the hand beading*

For the beading I ordered white fake pearls that were: 4mm, 6mm, 8mm, and 10mm. For the ring design on the scallops I ordered 4mm crystal glass faceted beads in gold and silver. In all I spent about $30 ordering the beads on ebay, they came from China so I had to order them ahead of time.

Using the circular item from drafting the bodice I traced out the rings in mark-b-gone. The outer ring was done in gold and the the inner rings were done in silver. Here are some images from the process of beading the rings:

Once the ring were finished I moved onto the pearls. The blue lines shown in the pictures is only part of the design I came up with after looking at reference images. Here are some images that show the progress of the pearls:

I ended up not having enough of the faceted gold beads to do the few lines in between the pearls. So at Hobby Lobby I got gold glass seed beads, which is the beads between the pearls in the photo above.  This is when I hand stitched the open seam on the inside closed. Below is how the beading looked when I was finished:

*Since all of this beading weighs the dress down it is important to have boning inside the dress, as well as a waist stay.*

After the dress was finished I started the arm guard things that she wears. I made these by using some of the white satin from the dress. First I cut out strips of fabric that was three inches wide. The I folded it in half and and stitched it so that it was like a tube.

After stitching one end and up the long side I turned it right side out. Once it was turned I stuffed them with polyester stuffing. Once it was stuffed I rolled it and hand stitched it into place, here is what the back of it looked like:

and the front looked like this:

I made four of these in all, two per arm connected by three short tubes on one side and elastic on the other. The short tubes were in two sizes, the larger being about three inches long. Since I had to hand stitch one end of the small tubes shut I added pearls to make it look nicer.

The final part of this costume was the back bow. For this I got two yards of some iridescent fabric that I found at Walmart. I decided to go with a white iridescent instead of the pink iridescent, but either works.

To make the bow I first figured out the length needed by comparing it to the dress.

I decided to have the bow be as long as my shorter layer of tulle. I started out buy cutting out the two long parts of the bow and doing a rolled hem all the way around it.

Next I cut out a rectangle for the main part of the bow as well as two smaller rectangles that were about 2 inches by three inches. For the smaller rectangles I stitched them together on the two longer sides and turned it right side out. For the larger on I stitched all the way around, but left a few inch gap so that I could turn it right side out.

Using clear thread I hand stitched the opening on closed. Then I folded the large rectangle like this:

Using clear thread again I stitched through the layers of fabric to hold the center together. The I hand stitched to two long pieces to it and covered the center of the bow with the smaller rectangle.

Here is what the bow looked like when it was finished:

To attatch it to the dress I added a snap to the bow and the dress. The snap on the bow was placed in the middle of the stitching on the smaller rectangle. The other half of the snap was put on the waist line at the back of the dress. I used a snap to attach the bow so that if I make my sister the Super Sailor Moon fuku I can use the same bow :)

Here is how the dress looked with the bow on the back ( sadly my sister was not home to put it on):

Well I hope that this tutorial helps. If you haven't checked out my Facebook page here is a link to it: https://www.facebook.com/Tacostreasures/ . I post updates of all of my projects on there as well as sell some costumes and other things I have made.