There Be Pirates
Even though I am not a big fan of the Pirate Night dinner or the Pirate party, there are still elements of the Pirate Night on the ships that I love. We both enjoy the Pirate Trivia and make a point of doing this whenever possible on our cruises. I also love all the special character meet and greets and photo opportunities that come with Pirate Night.
Last, but not least, I enjoy dressing up as a pirate. There are not that many occasions when I can dress up. This has turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. Since 2009, I have tried to put together a Pirate costume that I am happy with. This is still work in progress. My main problem is that there really is not a lot commercially available as far as Pirate costumes for women go and what there is seems to be far too revealing for my taste. So I have experimented with various costume ideas.
It all started out easy. My concession to Pirate Night was a pirates themed t-shirt. I tried to supplement this with the bandana we were given at dinner, but this was so small that it would not stay on.
The next stage was a bit more elaborate with a long skirt, peasant blouse, corset, a lace shawl and a bandana.
A variation on this theme.
For the Hawaii cruise, I found a red and black dress that said pirate to me and teamed this up with tricorn and a belly dancing belt with lots of gold coins.
For the last cruise where we had a pirate night, I had a mini tricorn made by a local milliner. Unfortunately the rest of the costume came apart. When I packed for this trip, I could not find the belt anywhere. I figured that this was not a big deal. When I got changed, I realized that I had brought the wrong dress as I have one in burgundy and one in red and this one was missing the ribbon to lace the back up. Fortunately I had brought my burgundy evening for Palo and I just ended up wearing this with my tricorn and my Pirate necklace and called it Pirate Princess. Even though it did not look very piratey at all, this was actually the closest that I came to my vision of a perfect pirate costume.
I had always planned to go back to the Pirate costume that I was wearing on our Hawaiian cruise with the black and red dress and the belt, but with the mini tricorn. Then I came across this beauty while window-shopping online a few days ago. This just screams pirate at me with the boned corset top and the slightly rugged and messy skirt. Initially I was leaning towards crimson and black, but at the moment I am actually thinking that teal and black would be lovely and the red and gold accessories would form a lovely contrast against this. What do you guys think?
I was always going to add something new to the costume. I have worn a variety of jewellery with my pirate costumes, most of which was based on the medallion from Pirates of the Caribbean. However, none of the jewellery ever had the wow factor that I was looking for. A couple of month ago, I spotted a mixed media pendant on the website of my favourite jewellery where she wove some fabric around the wirework. When I first saw this pendant, I thought that this style would make a great pirate necklace. I managed to find this pirate medallion, which is better quality than the ones I had previously. The idea is that this will hang from a simple wire necklace with some fabric and maybe some synthetic suede woven through.
