Happy Thanksgiving break friends, and welcome to a DIY fandom tutorial! I was super excited for the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes movie, and it did indeed live up to the hype. It was incredible!! In the weeks leading up to the movie release, I created a skirt inspired by Lucy Gray Baird’s reaping dress. I’m pretty proud of the result, so I thought you might benefit from a tutorial/detailed process. Hope you enjoy!
Step One: purchase skirt
In the first pages of The Ballad of songbirds and Snakes, Lucy Gray’s skirt is described as being once magnificent, now faded. Snow describes it both as “A rainbow of ruffles” and “rows of raspberry pink, daffodil yellow, and royal blue” fabric. The movie version takes these colors in a much darker and more muted direction, which matches the overall aesthetic and the story they were telling, but since I like brighter and richer colors in real life, I decided to base my skirt on the book’s version. I searched around on Amazon for a while and ended up with this one, which has nine layers of white tulle ripe for the painting. Two days later, and we’re ready to start painting!
Step Two: mix paints!
One of the most challenging parts of this process for me was figuring out how to color the white skirt. Should I try to dye it, spray paint, or color with fabric paint? I ended up on this new-to-me technique of mixing any acrylic paint with a magical substance called Textile Medium. It’s so cool, you can take literally any acrylic paint and add this stuff to it in a 2:1 ratio (two parts paint, one part textile medium) and it turns it into fabric paint! I will most definitely be using this technique on future projects. You can find the Textile Medium I used at Hobby Lobby or a comparable product on Amazon.
Since my skirt hadn’t arrived yet at the point that I did this, I mixed my paint colors in resealable storage cups. It was so fun to experiment with the effect that adding different shades of color had on the overall hue! Here’s what my colors ended up looking like!
Step Three: Paint!
The next step in our DIY Lucy Gray Baird skirt tutorial is to paint all. the. layers. using the colors we just mixed. I decided to make two of the primary colors that were mentioned by name (raspberry pink, daffodil yellow, and royal blue) with one layer of the secondary colors in between. As it turns out, the movie version went in the opposite direction, with purple at the top and red at the bottom, but the way I chose made the most sense to me.
I put my left hand under the tulle to keep it from leaking onto the layer underneath while using my right hand to paint. It took about an hour to an hour and a half to paint each layer! I also discovered that it’s important to clip the layers above the current layer up out of the way to keep them from getting odd-colored fingerprints on them later on. Learn from my mistake: clip the layers BEFORE starting the next one! 😹
I also took care during this process to make sure that there weren’t any globs of color in the holes of the tulle surface. It just doesn’t look good to me, and it tended to leak through to the next layer. To prevent there being too much paint in a particular area, I used just a little bit of paint at a time on the end of my paintbrush.
Another mistake I made was neglecting to make MORE THAN ENOUGH BLUE PAINT, as I ran out halfway through painting these layers. It was an easy enough fix, but still! If you decide to make your own Lucy Gray Baird-inspired skirt, make sure you have plenty of paint!
Here’s a look at each stenbbbbbbb (Tigris says hi lol) of the painting process and how it looked at the end of this phase:
As an artsy type, I thought having my hand turn a different color was a fun part of the experience. 0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0 (Tigris says hi again lol) If you’re less keen on getting messy, you can always use gloves (although you’ll probably want to use a different pair for every color).
I’m guessing you’re a fan of TBOAS if you’ve made it this far 😎 Want more related content? You’ll 🌹🐍🪽 these posts!
- TBOSAS – Pure as the Driven Snow
- THG – Only hope is stronger than fear
- THG – Dark Days, love will see us through
Step Four: Cut and sew fabric
You could very easily stop at the previous step and have a nice, pretty painted skirt that gives a nod to Lucy Gray’s aesthetic. I however, have been known to be *extra* when it comes to projects like this, so I decided to cut and sew in little tucks of satiny fabric to add some different texture to the design. I purchased about a quarter to a half yard of a few different colors from Hobby Lobby so that there are two of the primary colors and one of the secondary colors. I might even come back and add in some more later!
A more professional person would have sewn a hem around each individual piece of fabric before adding it into the skirt, but as I started this step the Saturday before we went to see the movie, I simply didn’t have time for that. I would recommend cutting your fabric with actual fabric scissors, though!
I cut each piece of fabric so that it was roughly the length of the tulle layer, then attempted to pin the pieces onto the skirt in an approximately-evenly-spaced pattern. Then I spent around 9-10 HOURS sewing all these pieces onto the skirt in ruffles. There’s probably a much better/easier way of doing this, but I went with the making-it-up-as-I-go-along way, which was:
- One: Sew the end of the fabric piece farthest from my body onto the tulle with three simple stitches
- Two: With my left hand under the tulle, gradually fold then sew little pieces of the fabric onto the tulle (it’s hard to explain in words, but if you try it yourself you’ll probably be able to figure it out)
- Three: Sew back across the piece with simple stitches and tie off at the end I started on
This step took SO LONG to do, and I stayed up past my bedtime several nights in a row to do it, but it was WORTH IT!! I love the way it looks with the different colors and textures.
Step Five: Ta-Daaaa!!
To go to the movie, I paired this DIY Lucy Gray Baird skirt with a coral-pink blouse and a lacy sweater for the cold weather. I also enjoyed the effect that the long sleeves on this particular sweater had, giving me the look/feel of having Mockingjay wings. And the kids I work with at my day job loved it too! I’m looking forward to wearing this skirt many times in the future.
Conclusion: DIY Lucy Gray Baird skirt tutorial
I hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about this subtle-cosplay outfit process and the DIY Lucy Gray Baird skirt tutorial. Have you seen the new movie yet?! What did you think?? And would you consider making a skirt like this?
Happy fangirling!
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