Making a Parasol for Draculaura

Last week I saw fellow Dollector ori’s outdoor photoshoot with Cleo, and I thought it looked like so much fun, I wanted to do one myself! But my dear little Draculaura is, of course, a bit sensitive to sunlight. While some Draculaura dolls come with a parasol, Day Out Draculaura (perhaps a bit ironically) doesn’t, so I figured I’d make one myself.

Now, I want to make something very clear. This is not a tutorial. One could hypothetically learn things from this post, sure, but this is less of a “how to do it” and more of a… story. A story of me going “yeah I could probably do it like this” and then “oh god why did I do it like that”. Still, I hope it’ll be of interest to some of you.

The first thing I did was choose a fabric, and cut out the canopy of the parasol. I decided to use toothpicks to make the frame, so I used a compass to make a circle with a diameter that’s twice the length of the toothpicks.

Next, I painted on some bats flying around the moon and stars. As is standard practice for me, I mixed glitter into both colors, as well as some glow-in-the-dark paint with the white (hence why the moon and stars look a bit translucent).

I decided to add some details, attaching a black net ruffle to the underside of the umbrella, and some white lace to tie it together on top. I could have stitched them on, but I recently spent a hot minute putting together an almost entirely handmade Castlevania-themed EGL coord and was feeling a bit sewed out, so I decided to use hot glue instead. This will be… a running theme in this story.

Next came attaching the ribs of the umbrella. Now, if I were smarter than I actually am I would have bit the bullet and just stitched on some boning channels, which wouldn’t have even taken that long, but no. No, I decided to do it with, you guessed it, hot glue.

Anyone who’s ever used hot glue can probably guess why hot glue, fabric, and intended-to-be-moving parts are not a great mix. But by this point, I was in too deep. Did I, again, do the sensible thing and sew boning channels? No! I said to myself “It’s ok, I’ll just glue on some fabric over it.” and “I can’t find the fabric glue, but it’s ok, I’ll just water down some tacky glue.” It’s about at this point that I started giving up on any hope of this thing ever being collapsible.

As you can imagine, it ended up with a texture that I could only describe as… crunchy.

Finally, the last remaining piece of this trainwreck was the handle. I used a bamboo skewer for the main body, and wrapped it with wire to make what I hoped would be a functional handle for Draculaura, but made the foolish mistake of putting it at the very end of the handle instead of on the body, so it didn’t work out too well in the end…

In any case, I used more hot glue, in the only actual reasonable usage of hot glue here, to give the handle an eerie, gnarled texture. I then painted the whole thing black.

After attaching it to the parasol, the whole mess was, at last, complete. The hand loop didn’t work, but I was able to… sort of get her to hold it by bending it upwards, though it left some black paint on her hand… Please excuse the background, but here’s the final end result.

Despite everything, I was actually able to get some nice outdoor photos, which I’ll upload later. 🙂

The final takeaway, I think, should be this: Our friend the hot glue gun can be wonderful for many things, especially when it comes to adding goopy or lumpy textures to a surface. However, if you’re thinking of making something and you know of literally any other way to do it, and have the capability of doing so, and think to yourself “Eh, I can just glue it,” that’s the devil speaking and you should not do that. Sometimes we all (me) need to learn this lesson the hard way.