How to Become a Leafy Sea Dragon
If you were asked to choose an animal to perform as for an online dance show what would you pick? Maybe your favorite animal, or something snazzy that a lot of people will connect with and recognize. Well this dancer with a zoology degree decided to get a little obscure… I was asked to submit two animals in my performance application, so I submitted honey bees because I used to study them, and leafy sea dragons because they're freaking COOL. Lisa accepted my application to The Dance Menagerie and asked me to bring my leafy sea dragon idea to life for the show!
Originally I had thought to combine this idea with a Pokémon gijinka, but the color pallets weren't close enough for my liking so I stuck with making a fantasy dance costume. I tried to sketch out a couple of ideas, but was really struggling to come up with something I liked enough, so I turned to Pinterest and made an idea board to inspire me. A few ideas in particular stuck out to me:
a halter top that split in the middle and had a decorative collar.
the wispy curly skirts that I see advertised on a lot of dance costuming websites.
Sarong styled skirts with the cute ruching in the front
These AMAZING dance arm cuff sleeve these with the most beautifully draped fabric!
I started with a sketch that I VERY quickly strayed from. I had trouble visualizing this concept at first, leafy sea dragons are delicate slender creatures, with many trailing appendages that float off of their bodies. They're excellent at mimicking the kelp forests that they live in. This led to a…"trust the process" type of project; as I started putting the pieces together the idea came to life little by little. My Pinterest mood board ended up being more helpful than my initial sketch! (take a peek here!)
I started with the pieces I was most sure of, the base garment of the outfit. I wanted it to be a short two piece look. I was very inspired by a particular top I had seen on Pinterest, it was a halter top with a long stretch of fabric that draped around the back and connect together in the middle at the front, just below the neckline. This exposed any top (or not) underneath. My idea was to put a contrasting colored sports bra under it, so it would peek out from under the top. I also worked on the skirt, which was loosely inspired by the look of sarongs. I wanted it to be short and ruched in the front, but still a little flowy in the back. It was sometime during the patterning of these two pieces that I decided that I was going to make this costuming using only rectangle shaped fabric, because I wasn't struggling enough already so I needed to give myself an extra challenge (world's biggest eye roll at myself). I started with a green fabric I had gotten off of facebook marketplace. Because it was already cut into two pieces, I had always planned to make a two piece outfit with it. It's a pretty olive-y green fabric that I suspect is a natural fiber (I haven't done a burn test on it). I also had a lot of leftover of a dark green rayon fabric I had use for another cosplay I made for C2E2 (the blog on that is in progress I promise!). So I used that as accents on the top and skirt.
Using the smaller pieces of olive fabric, I started with draping the top on my dress form. It didn't take me long to determine a rectangle might not work for this particular part of the top, because it bunched in a really unflattering way in the back. I draped the fabric on myself and marked what lengths I needed the for top and bottom of the long edges of the fabric. The top edge needed to be shorter than the bottom (making a more trapezoid shape) so that the shirt would hang flat against my back rather than bunching up. Once those were cut, I did a double fold hem on the long edges. I decided to use a decorative flower stitch because it looked a little like sea weed (if you squinted), which ended up giving me an almost eyelet effect! This became a detail I used on the rest of the costume. The short edges I pleated down to be approximately 6 inches and pinned it to my dress form to deal with later.
For the skirt, I grabbed a sarong from upstairs and started playing with how it tied and draped. I took my waist measurement and added about 12 inches to that. Then I took the larger piece of olive fabric and cut it to size. The length of the skirt really didn't matter too much to me, the fabric had a weird corner piece cut out of it, so I just cut it in such a way that I got two nice sized rectangles. I added an elastic waistband to the skirt (so that there were 6 in of extra length of the olive green fabric on either end of the waist band, wrapped the skirt around my dress form and started playing with ruching at the front of the skirt. Once I got some pleats that I liked I basted them in place and then sewed them down with a straight stitch. I did not plan this part particularly well… because I still needed to hem the fabric… But I made do with my mistake and stubbornly and handstitched the double folded hem with a chain stitch, but I used the eyelet flower machine stitch for the long hem at the bottom of the skirt. I planned to use a button or snap to close the skirt, but chose to deal with that later.
I switched to the darker green rayon fabric to give myself a little change of pace. I wanted to add more texture to the look, so I cut multiple long thin rectangles out of the rayon and stitched those into flat tubes. I added decorative stitching to help them keep their flat shape, and make them more interesting looking (and to keep playing with the decorative stitching…). I made three that were 2in wide, and three that were 1in wide. Then I braided each set together. The 2in braid became the belt and the 1in braid became the neckline. I had to hand stitch all of the overlapping areas together so that the braid didn't shift or fold weird while I was wearing it. Again… I didn't plan ahead for this so both of these braids had to be hand stitched to the top and the skirt. I also didn't bother to baste the top's pleats before attaching the neckline… I got very good at dodging pins when I sewed the top together!
Let’s just pretend I got a picture while making it…
I really wanted to have tendrils hanging off of my back, and I still had a piece of that olive fabric. I decided to make a back drape that would connect to my top at the base of my neck, as well as my upper arms. I took the fabric and cut 2-3 inch strips into it, leaving the top two inches of it uncut. Then I overlocked every edge of the approximately 25 strips, and finally did a long basting stich along one edge of each strip. I used the basting stitch to ruffle one side of the strip so that it would hang down in a curl.
On the topic of tendrils, I wanted to have lots of little flowy wisps of fabric hanging off of me to give the costume that delicate sea dragon look. I had a length of white mesh fabric that I got off of facebook marketplace. I have used it in the past and learned that it dyed really well! Leafy Sea Dragons have a little bit of color gradient on a few of their appendages. I wanted to have a green and pink wispies, so I pulled out my dye pots and my green and pink dye and dyed my mesh! I dipped about 6-8 inches of the mesh into the pink dye for about a minute to make it very bright, then I rinsed it out. For the green I quickly dipped the fabric into the green, all the way to where the pink ends, and then slowly pulled it out to get a gradient. I wanted it to be a darker green at the ends. Once the ends were as dark as I wanted them I rinsed that as well and threw all of the dyed fabric into the wash.
Once it had finished hanging to dry, I cut all of the dyed mesh into 2in wide strips. Then, much like I did with the back drape, I stitched up one side of the mesh and ruffed them as well so that they would curl. I used the shortest wispies for leg wraps, but after putting those on I hated how they looked and ended up attaching them to my hips instead. The 6 prettiest ones I set aside to use for my head piece. The rest I divided into 2 sets of 9 and attached them to arm cuffs I made out of the dark green rayon. This created something similar to the beautiful arm drapes I had seen on Pinterest!
The final part of the costume was the head piece and beadwork! Beadwork is one of my favorite parts to add to a costume or cosplay. I decided to make a leafy body chain out of second hand beads that had been sitting in my stash for a couple of years. I used a pretty leaf medallion as the centerpiece. I added a gold chain with green drop beads for the neck portion, and I beaded the belly drape portion on a wax thread I… don't remember where I got it from… But it worked well for the drape. For the head piece I used a green headband I had already decorated for a mermaid costume I made last year. I added some extra beaded drapes to the sides of it using left over beads from the body chain and the 6 extra wispies.
On the day of the performance, I looked up pictures of leafy sea dragons and painted similar markings on my body. Then Z and I decorated the basement to look like a kelp forest for me to dance in! I used paper garland that I twisted together. I also hung lots of free strands of extra fabric and garland to the ceiling to add to the underwater look.
Finally we filmed the dance about 5 times. Twice from the front, once close up from the front, and once from either side. I spliced together my favorite dance moments from all of those takes and that was the final performance!
I added a link to the final performance below. Let me know what you think!
