Mexican outfit!

For the past few years my family and I have been taking it in turns with some friends of ours to host a New Year’s Eve dinner party.  In 2019 it was our turn to host, and we had decided earlier in the year that we were going to cook Mexican food.  Our guests enquired if we were going to dress up, and I laughingly said no.  But the seed had been planted.

A few months later, I was idly searching through the ‘Mexican fancy dress outfits’ online, and I came across a hilariously bad ‘Mexican Wrestler’ outfit.  I screenshotted it and sent it to my husband for a laugh, and was rather taken aback when he replied with ‘Order it!’.

Once his costume was delivered in all its polyester glory, I decided I would also make some kind of effort towards a Mexican outfit for myself.  The online options did not appeal to me, so I started dreaming up more of a Frida Kahlo villager-style outfit (sorry for the terribly vague description – Mexican historical costume is not my speciality).  It all had to start with a skirt, and I was imagining a three-tiered gathered country-style full length skirt, in black.

I had about 6m of cotton/poly mix drill or twill or something in my stash that would do the job, but no pattern.  But how hard could it be, right?  I just wanted a three-tiered skirt, and an elasticated waistband.  Easy!  I chopped the first tier: one complete width of fabric.  I made a channel at the top and inserted wide elastic for the waistband.  For the second tier, I cut two widths of fabric and joined them together, then gathered the top to make it fit the bottom of the first tier.  Finally, for the bottom tier of the skirt, I cut four widths of fabric, joined them all together, gathered them to fit the two of the middle tier, and then hemmed the skirt.  By the time I’d got to this point, I had a six metre hem!  Obviously I then painstakingly hand-stitched the hem because I’m so zen.  NOT.  Even machine sewing it took too long!!

I tried the skirt on and LOVED it.  So swishy!  But I thought it did need something more to make it just slightly more costume-like, so I added a row of red ricrac and a row of green.  I would have added white as well, but I didn’t have any.  True story.

Next, I looked up some pictures of Frida Kahlo.  I decided against drawing a monobrow on my pasty white face with my grey/blonde hair, and instead decided I’d make myself a red scarf to artfully drape across my shoulders, like Frida has in several pictures.  Problem – I only had 1m of red crepe.  Oh well.  I hemmed it (badly – I blame the machine’s roll hemming foot – although really it was my impatience), and then twisted the fabric over once before French-seaming the ends together, to create a kind of triangley shaped ‘thing’.  It was not brilliant, but it worked ok.

I had neither the fabric nor the time to make a frilly peasant-style blouse, so I went rummaging in a few local charity shops, and picked up this awful lacey off-the-shoulder-mega-frill thing for a couple of quid.  Luckily, it looked just right with the skirt and scarf!  Add a sombrero, some Tequila, and hey presto!  This chica is ready for the fiesta!

I so love the skirt!  I may remove the ricrac and wear it normally.  Success!