Preparing for the Big Day

So the Geek Girls have been hard at work preparing for Awesome Con next weekend. We have a bride, 3 bridesmaids, a wedding photographer, and a groom. Well... parts of a groom.
Megan bravely offered up to be the bride and find a new life for her wedding dress. A walk around the dirty streets of DC, a wrestling match with the dogs, and a dip in a bathtub full of coffee started to bring it a new look (and looks from the people at Union Market):

Who doesn't shop like this?

So at our latest project night was all about going from the decayed bride to bloody bride. First, a dose of liquid courage was in order.

And then a little liquid life (DISCLAIMER: No ex-husbands were harmed in the making of this dress). I watered down some Ben Nye fake blood so it would drip well and use a spoon to start so I could get the top of her dress saturated where I wanted it to start.

Yeah, she likes it.

A very cool thing about this dress is that the layers of fabric let the blood drip in unexpected ways so it followed the creases and made some nice splatters. We wanted the effect of her taking a bloody bite out of someone and the blood dripping down from her mouth. I also took globs of blood soaked rolled cotton and let them ooze down the dress as well. Really, there's probably no wrong way to do it.

Next we decided to add wound drips from a gnarly scar ( the result of an unfortunate body casting incident with "safety" scissors) so we could pretty up the back of the dress too.

I didn't want the blood to be single toned so I mixed up some acrylic paint- red, some brown, a drop of black; and then watered it down a bit before going over some of the splatter spots. This gave it more of an old blood look and because the watered down blood was still wet it soaked and blended really nicely. 

And of course our blushing bride would make a bit of a mess walking through her carnage so we made sure her train got the gory treatment as well. I basically just dipped the edges into my bowl of watery blood and let them seep up the dress.

That is one sexy dress.

And our wedding gown is complete! Megan is now a bride not to be messed with:

But of course, that could be said about the whole Guild: