Ain't No Land Like Dixieland

I was instructed on rather short notice to get myself a costume for my husbands' work costume party. I am as unwilling as my children to wear cheap plastic that parades as "cloth" as isn't even washable, so I turned to my closet for an answer. Spying my favorite old locket, which was missing a piece, I decided to find said piece, fix it, and be a flapper for Halloween. I used an old asymmetrical jersey skirt from Forever 21 and turned it sideways so that it was shorter in the front and longer in the back. I wore a lace tunic over it as well as a nude-colored tank that I bought forever ago and never wear because it's too tight around my ribcage and too loose around my waist. For the 1920s boyish figure look, I assumed it would work. Lace overlay was pretty popular.
The lace tunic is really A-line, which made me look really bottom heavy when worn over the long skirt. So I tied a length of gold silk charmeuse from my fabric stash around my waist in a looped bow.  Then I recycled my old makeup tubes and got a free lipstick at MAC cosmetics in the closest color I could find to "oxblood red" that looked more or less ok on me.




 For shoes, I bought a cheap pair on sale at Target. Here they are before:



 At 3", they're a little taller than shoes of the time, but close enough. And they aren't pointy-toed either, but I figure since they're almond-shaped that's better than round.


Here's what the lace looked like before I took scissors to it:


Shoes back then always had matching heels and toes, so that's what I decided to cover. It was too tricky to cover the main part with lace, and it didn't look as cool. I basically cut it up and shaped the lace around the shoes, then glued it on with a hot glue gun. I thought about super glue but it took too long to dry, was inaccurate, and kept getting all over my fingers.

 The shoes are a bluish-gray, which is pretty close in color to the stone in my hat. So the shoes sort of match my cream and brown outfit at this point, but since the 1920s were all about perfectly matching, I decided I needed some brown in my shoes. And I really didn't want to cover up the gray entirely. So I settled for covering just the strips on the vamp.






The back of the shoe:


There were no stacked heels in the 1920s either, so I made sure to cover the heel completely:








Whew! Sorry, that was a lot of shoe pictures. But I just really love looking at them from different angles. Not a bad costume for $18, is it?


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