The Merida Cosplay part 1

For my first Cosplay to be told of on this page, I am doing Merida from Brave for the first swedish Comic Con. Follow me on this journey!

Part 1 - preparations.

Step 1 - Am I green or blue? 

I have watched Brave three times and when I went to the fabric store I was 100% sure that her dress is green. A dark green with blueish tints. So that's the color I bought. Later, I found this angry cosplayer who rages against green Meridas. Apparently, her dress is, officially and according to Disney, navy blue.

I have unknowingly joined the noobish green Meridas, it seems. But here is why I can stand up for it:

a) In the entire movie, Meridas dress appear blue on very few occations. Mostly, it looks like a dark grey with green or blue tints. Nowhere in the entire movie is it clearly navy blue and many people walk away from the movie convinced the dress is green. If you go for the feeling of Merida, green is a fully acceptable choice.

b) When we catch up with Merida in the movie, she uses her everyday dress for riding, archery, mountainclimbing and mucking the stables. Regardless of which color it was originally, it is now (I promise you) a discolored greenish/greyish story with only tints remaining of its original blue glory. Merida is not a princess who is fresh out of the box. This is her everyday dress and it is well-worn and rougly treated. If you make it a bright navy blue, you would need to weather it severely to get it to look right. Grass stains hide in green but show up on blue, and my guess is that Merida has loads.

I went for the color I see on the picture above. It is a lovely deep green with some blueish tints. Green goes great with red hair, and it's a more suitable color if I want to reuse the dress for mideival faires.

That is settled. I am making a green Merida. Deal with it. And if you want to go green or dark grey - do it. Don't listen to the whiners, who look like they are fresh out of a barbie box with their precious blue. 

Step 2 - Fabric Choice

Merida's dress is clearly made of wool. It moves like wool, it is sturdy, and it can take a fair amount of abuse in cold in rainy weather. That is wool. The upside is that wool is fantastic to work with. It is a good fabric that is easy to sew since it doesn't pull away, you can sew it on any cheap machine or even by hand, the fabric has no right/wrong side, you don't need to care about the direction of the grain, you don't need to zigzag the edges and the fabric basically cleans itself if you just brush it off and hang it out to breathe. The drawbacks of wool are two - wool is hot and wool itches. For me, the warm quality of wool is not a drawback at all since I live in viking land. My regular fall/winter coat is actually wool and it keeps me toasty warm down to about -20 celcius. As for the itchy part, you will need an underdress if you go wool. If you are cosplaying in a very hot place, you might want to go for linen instead - it's still accurate to the time period, but be aware that linen wrinkles and does not give you the heavy fullness of a true Merida outfit.

Stay away from silks and all light and swishy materials! It it totally wrong, and if you look at the movie, take note of what happends to the light blue silky dress. It gets busted to shreds as soon as Merida tries to move in it, she detests it with a passion and it is destroyed after a rough horseride. Merida is a tough cat, she does not put up with that swishy shit and neither should you. If you want to swish around in silks, do Belle or Cinderella or something.

I shop at Korps Ravencraft in Söderköping, Sweden. I am lucky enough to live nearby, but they also have an excellent online shop. The prices are good and the staff will give you great advice - they really know their historical fabric and the give accurate advice on how much you will need.

This is the fabric I used. Dark green thin homespun wool.

Step 3 - Pattern

I used this pattern for a mideival dress with bell sleeve, obviously without the bell sleeve.  However, these dresses are very easy to pattern and you can find a ton of free patterns online. This very talented cosplayer demonstrates how she made a Merida outfit by measuring and draping on herself.

Some Merida outfits hade the underfabric attached to the overdress, but I cannot recommend this method. You will need to wear something underneath it anyway, and it will look so much better if that something is an actual underdress. If you check the movie, Merida's overdress frequently swished to the side, revealing the white underdress she has on beneath. Also, you will really not save that much time by leaving out the underskirt. Without it, you will need to add fabric in the sleeve holes, in the sleeve gaps, around the neckline, and to cover any back- och sidelacing you use to actually get into the dress. It's possibly more work to fill in these gaps than to make an underdress. For the underdress, there are also tons of free and very simple patterns online and you can use an old white sheet if you want to keep it on a low budget. I have not gotten to the underdress part yet. I'll deal with it when I have a finished overdress.

When you have decided on the style, the fabric and the pattern - it's time to go for it!