Princess Zelda Nintendo Character Costume

My daughter had a Zelda kick after the Twilight Princess came out on Nintendo, and she wanted to be Princess Zelda for Halloween.

She is wearing a T-shirt under the costume in the photo because it was cold, but the neckline is where the purple ends. The dress is a layer of cream crepe in a simple, A-line shape with long pointed sleeves. Sorry I didn’t use a pattern so I don’t have any suggestions for that. The purple crepe “vest” portion is a part of the dress, not separate – it is sewn in at the shoulders and arms, but the edges are loose. It splits in front and comes to a point in the back. The dress zips up in back. I added the scroll desing using gold fabric paint and a stencil to the hemline and the sleeve hems. Zelda’s dress is sleeveless and she wears long gloves, but Utah Halloweens get mighty cold, so I opted for long sleeves on the dress instead of gloves (this helped later with attaching the armor!).

The apron is made of layers of different colored cotton cut into the various shapes and glued together with iron-on Wonder-Under. The dark blue is the main part with green, tan, purple and yellow pieces glued to the top. Some of the edges were decorated with gold puff paint. I added small grommets to the corners to hang the apron.

I used a cheap gold-tone jewelry kit to make a lot of the hanging parts. The kit came with chain and some lobster claw closures and jump rings and some earring hardware. The apron hangs from a chain which is strung through some grommets that I put into front of the purple vest. The chain then goes around the waist like a belt and hooks in back. The decorative middle portion between the chain and apron is made of craft foam that I shaped using scissors, painted gold, and assembled using jump rings. The whole thing attaches to the chain using lobster clasps and is removable from the chain. This makes it easy to reposition it to get the right hanging height.

The armor is also craft foam that I cut and shaped using the heat from my kitchen stove-top. Craft foam will warp when hot, so you can mold it and shape it and it will cool in that shape. I heated it over the stove-top until it felt pliable and then wrapped it around a formula can (because the can was about the size of my daughter’s shoulders) until it cooled into the round shape. I also did the crown this way (sorry the lighting is bad – there IS a crown, too!). The pieces were decorated with puff paint for texture and painted gold. I hot-glued some inexpensive plastic craft rhinestones in red and blue to match Zelda’s armor. I hot-glued the “hook” portion of some velcro to parts of the armor and sewed matching “loop” portions of velcro to matching parts of the dress. The armor velcros to the dress and can be removed for washing. The shoulder pieces and center medallion are one piece and velcros to the shoulders. The arm pieces are separate and velcro to the upper sleeves.

The center medallion is attached to the shoulder armor with jump rings, and the dangling blue tear-drop stones are actually chandelier crystals that I found online! I bought five crystals for $5, each crystal was in two pieces: a round with a drop under it (see center medallion crystals). I took 2 left-over crystals apart and used the rounds to make earrings using parts from the jewelry kit! Sorry they aren’t visible in the crummy light.

The sword was part of a dollar store Knight play set. The crown is made by hot-glueing pieces of shaped/painted foam to a plastic headband. I also glued a blue plastic rhinetone to the crown.

This was probably the most fun I’ve ever had maiking a costume and is still my favorite! Everyone loved it, even the boys! If I could re-do it the only thing I would do different is use a better fabric. The crepe frayed very easily and even though the dress has been played with constantly for 9 months now and hasn’t disintegrated – nearly every edge has frayed! I suggest a better fabric for a longer life!

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