Part One; Planning, Prep and Pixie Dust

Ahoy, there friends! It’s very exciting to share with you a bit of a special Vintage Sewing Adventure with a Disneybound theme just intime for my first ever Disney Cruise. Well, it’s my first ever cruise to be honest which makes me nervous because I have no idea what a Disney Cruise would even be like, oh, and of course there goes the question, what do I wear all week? As I’m always up for a noble sewing quest, or the desperate need to escape reality by locking myself in my enrichment enclosure/sewing room. Well, this new travel adventure has sparked a brand new limited sewing series where I sew 6 unique Disney themed outfits as well as try to curate the cutest DIY Disneybound Cruiseline Sewing Spectacular!

Oh and did I mention that this all came to fruition 3 weeks before leaving for the cruise plus with a whole whirlwind of issues, set backs, re-writes, meltdown, ER trips and much more! Oh boy, this is quite the sewing adventure my friends. In order to share this momentous sewing quest properly, I will be dividing the makes into two parts; Part one looking at a Donald Duck Sailor Dress, an Orange Bird/Nemo Inspired Dress and a Tangled cottage core fantasy, and Part Two which involves the creation of a Tinkerbelle 60s mod dress, a simple Magicians Apprentice Mickey Moment, and the cutest Oyster Pyjamas you ever did see. Even though it’s not my own sewing, I wanted to add on a Part Three which is everything else I wore for the cruise as I have a few special moments to share such as my Disney Cruise New Years Eve outfit. There is a bare hope that I’ll find time in my life soon to also try and put together a video of my sewing and outfits for my Youtube channel because I really want to return to that sphere but just feel a bit overwhelmed at the moment. So as it stands, we are locked in for 3 epic episodes of Disney sewing mayhem. They will be coming out soon after each other but some blog release dates may be a bit too locked in.

Part One:

Be Prepared: Prep, Planning and Trying to Commit to just one idea
Having been lucky enough to have gone to Disneyland in California and Hong Kong before, one of my favourite parts of the day was deciding what my outfits were going to be weeks prior. It may be me being “just a silly girl” but planning a cute outfit really helps me feel more mentally prepared for social outings. I really wanted to fully enjoy my time on the cruise and dressing up a little really boosts my mental health so I knew I had to commit to the Disneybound theme. Planning and prep went through so many stages I don’t think I can actually write them all down and at one stage I had so many ideas that I could have gotten changed 3 times a day and been on the ship for a month and survived. I wanted to be super mindful of weight limits as I had to fly to Sydney to board the cruise, and I wanted to leave space for shopping in case I picked up any goodies along the way. One other thing I needed to remember is that my luggage also had to carry some more casual outfits for around Sydney, my travel clothes and of course toiletries, shoes and accessories. These limitations were kind of helpful when planning because I tried to keep certain clothing pieces ambiguous enough so I could use them for different outfits. I also wanted to make sure that my outfits included a wide range of Disney including Marvel and Star Wars. There was of course a budget and an attempt to try and shop my stash as much as possible.

My original brainstorm for this Disney cruise sewing adventure was ridiculous and there’s no way I can explain every idea I had in detail as there’s just too much to talk about. It goes without saying I’m glad I don’t live too close to a Disney Park because my wardrobe wouldn’t handle it. In order to make the best sewing plan, I mapped out my cruise, knowing I needed enough outfits to cover 5 days (2 of those days were on land in Eden and Hobart) as well as one pirate night outfit, one New Years Eve outfit, one fancy dinner outfit and some pyjamas. This was more than enough to do and when I eventually narrowed down my list I was left with the following sewing list;

-Alice in Wonderland Oyster Pyjamas
-Star Wars Day Dress
-Donald’s Sailor Dress
-Cubed Mickey Mouse Dress
-Magician’s Apprentice Dress
-Tinkerbelle Mod Dress
-Orange Bird Day Dress
-Tangled Disneybound Dress
-Evening Gown: too many factors to choose but more on this later

As this was a huge undertaking for little old me, I ended up not even completing the list due to several complications but we will get to that later. For now, I had my list, my plan and it was time to source my materials.

Sourcing Materials:
As the cruise is certainly not cheap, I already had basically no budget to begin with when it came to sourcing the materials needed. As my stash has most colours I needed, I figured it would be best to only buy fabrics I really can’t find anywhere local. Within my personal style, I tend not to wear a lot of character or licensed character imagery on my clothing. It wasn’t until this cruise came up that I realised the only piece of Disney clothing I had in my wardrobe were two pairs of winter pyjamas my Mother-in-Law bought me (they’re super cute and I love them!). When choosing fabrics for my Disneybound projects, I wanted to pick fabrics that I would actually wear again instead of just sitting in my wardrobe forever.

Now Disney fabric is everywhere but I am super picky when it comes to which ones I wanted to buy. Personally, I didn’t want a huge print unless it was a bed sheet or something and since I had no time to thrift, large prints were avoided. I also don’t like a pattern that’s too full, busy or cluttered, or colours that are really jarring or obnoxious together. I wanted there to be a little maturity behind the fabric design but I’m always happy to fall in love with whatever I see when I see it. Right, so not too many requests this should be easy yeah?

Turns out I am a lot more picky than I thought and soon eliminated sites such as Amazon and most local and national fabric stores as the range was repetitive and limited. As I was working with a budget, that also included shipping costs and keeping in mind shipping times. This eliminated most other stores and I was starting to get desperate so I turned to AliExpress which in times of need, can sometimes help ya out a bit. This turned out to be both good and bad as we shall discover later down the story.

AliExpress was a plethora of Disney fabric with most of it looking pretty legitimate with close up of salvages that seemed to show original designers and even the year it came out. Of course, like most of these places, there will be fakes and dupes so I tried my best to avoid the sellers who looked dodgy and paid close attention to reviews and site data. Well you can never be too sure as we later learnt but lets see what we found.

My plan was to buy the following:
-Magician’s Apprentice Dress:
4 Meters of this cotton
Butterick 6556 / Simplicity 9294

-Alice in Wonderland Oyster Pyjamas:
3 meters of this cotton
Butterick 6296

-Star Wars Dress
4 meters of this cotton
Vogue 9100 to be worn as a pinafore

Cubed Mickey Day Dress
4 meters of this cotton
Butterick 6556 / Simplicity 9294

As I was also making other dresses, I ended up using fabric that was already in my stash for the orange bird dress, my Tangled dress, my sailor dress and the Tinkerbelle dress. All these were to be made out of plain coloured cotton fabrics that I already had in my stash most likely bought from Homecraft Textiles.

All fabrics that I needed to purchase were done so well over a month before the cruise so they were all scheduled to arrive well before we left, all except the cubed Mickey fabric and the Star Wars fabric which were due a week before we left, but there was enough to do as to not waste time before. During this time I was also planning a few other things for around the house, projects to finish before the end of the year, getting through the holidays and a plethora of Endo-related issues. Moreover, I made sure to have all the necessary Mickey Ear headbands and other little details planned. Even though the planning stage was a bit stressful, once I started sewing, it all came together and heaps of ideas and original plans changed.

The Ideas that Never Made It to Production:
–Aristocat Marie and Miss Bianca: In order to save on luggage weight and space, I wanted to sew a plain white dress which I could accessorise with pink (cardigan, hair bow, bag and shoes) for a Marie inspired Disneybound. Or I could accessorise with purple (cardigan, beret, handbag and shoes) for a Miss Bianca from the Rescuers-inspired disneybound. This idea never eventuated because I didn’t have time for all the ideas.

–Food for Thought: Disney parks are pretty well known for their iconic food so I really wanted to sew up an outfit inspired by Disney food. I actually found heaps of suitable fabrics online (no seriously, there are so many) but I had to nuke this idea as I didn’t think I’d get much wear out of this dress once the cruise is done.

–Princess Tiana inspired Evening gown: This was going to be my big princess moment as I created a vintage 50s prom-inspired petaled Princess Tiana look that was so sparkly and covered in lilies it just melted your eyeballs. I wanted to incorporate a petal bust bodice and use stunning satins and tulles however, given my time frame, this was the hardest idea to leave behind and I opted to wear something I already had for the fancy dinner night.

–Cinderella’s Pink Dress Prom: Much like above, I wanted to make a 50’s prom inspired dress using the stylings and colours of Cinderella’s original pink dress from the animated 1950s film. I’ve always loved this dress and although I have already sewn up a version (it was horrible and we shall not speak of it), I wanted this to be a stunner of a dress and very romantic. Once again, too many ideas so I had to simplify.

–The Live Action Cinderella Wedding Dress but make it 50s: Do you see why narrowing it down got so difficult? This dress was going to be made out of a cream satin and sewn/cut to look like the wedding dress from the live action of Cinderella. I was then going to paint and dye lace floral embroidery and attach it to mimic the flowers from the original dress. At one point I was trying to thrift or find a dress I could cut up and repurpose or even buying something cheap and cutting that up but in the end it was getting too stressful deciding what to do and I had to keep budget and costs down.

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