Pinkie Pie's Gala Dress Candy Corn

With Naka-Kon 2013 coming up, I've been working on a couple of cosplays. The one I'm putting most of my effort into completing is Pinkie Pie's gala dress, humanized. I can't find my original sketch of what I'm doing, so allow me to explain some details with the help of an image of the pony herself.

I've actually broken the project down into smaller parts. The top is short-sleeved and Pinkie's skin tone. The blue and white stripes will be a vest, with a pink bow holding it at the top and a lace neckline. The top set of ruffles will be attached to the skin-tone shirt, as will the dark pink set of ruffles in a tier. The white ruffles I've turned into a sort of apron.

Today, however, I'm working on one specific part of Pinkie's outfit: the candy corn on on the apron. I'm actually hand-embroidering them, first onto some scrap fabric, which will then be ironed to some facing, and finally sewn to the apron.

Here is the whole project, set out. You can see that I've already finished one candy corn, plus all of my supplies.

This is the scrap fabric I was talking about. I actually have about a yard of this and it's mostly for experimenting with different things so I don't use more expensive cuts of fabric on mistakes. I purchased it at a thrift store for 39 cents.

 What I did first was trace the candy corn shape I wanted onto a piece of card stock. I used some packaging from a bobbin case for that, no need to go out and buy a whole piece of card stock! Unless you happen to have some on hand anyway. I used a blue fabric pencil.

Next, I started embroidering with a simple hatch-line stitch. If you've heard of cross-hatching, this is basically eliminating the cross, leaving just one line. You can faintly see in this image the blue lines I'm using as a guide for the three colors. Usually in embroidery you use several to gain a "3D" sort of look, but I don't need that.

And here is a close-up of the completed candy corn.

It does take some time to do it right, but I enjoy doing my own embroidery, rather than allowing a machine to do all the work. Sure, the stitches aren't all even and there are a lot of places where the cheap fabric shows through, but that's okay. That's what makes it hand-stitched.