Lolita Blog Carnival: Create a Complete Lolita Coordinate For Under $100

Before I get going with this particular post, I'd like to talk a bit about a new icon you may have noticed in my sidebar! This post will be part of a Blog Carnival that myself and a few other Lolibloggers are currently participating? What is a Blog Carnival you ask? Simply put, it's a group of bloggers who all decide on a common topic to all blog about on the same day and then they follow up their post with a link to all the other blogger's posts about the topic. It's a great way to get involved with other Lolibloggers, get some blogging inspiration, and to promote some great blogs! Since this is the first week of it, we're still ironing out some wrinkles and getting our HQ in order, but we have a nice little FB group for the project that fellow Lolibloggers are welcome to join if they would like to participate in any future Lolita Blog Carnivals.

If you, for some reason, are not a part of the FB group, you're still more than welcome to blog about any of the topics or questions that we all blog about, but joining the group lets you in on them before the blog posts go live, and means your posts get linked on participants blogs!

Now that's out of the way, let's get on with the carnival! This week's prompt was to create a complete Lolita coordinate for under $100, and it was a bit of a challenge! It's not hard to find a complete outfit on the secondhand sales for under $100 with some shopping around, especially if you can rely on offbrand clothes you already happen to have, and maybe some haggling, but the idea behind this prompt was that people could easily purchase the outfit if they wanted to. I chose to actually put together 3 different outfits, one for Sweet, one for Gothic, and one for Classic, and I found a few things that were difficult, and a few that were really easy for each style! However, I did cheat a little bit and didn't include shipping prices in with these prices!

Dress & Headbow ☆ OTK Socks ☆ Shoes ☆ "Wrist Cuffs" ☆ Total: $94

First up is a Sweet Lolita outfit, which was, by far, the easiest one on the list! Most budget Lolita shops cater heavily to the Sweet Lolita, which means there were a lot of options to pick from, including a lot of cute original prints! Bodyline is definitely a boon for any Sweet Lolita on a budget.This coordinate features a cute print OP from Bodyline that, luckily, comes with a matching headbow. The cute shoes were, surprisingly, the same price as the dress. Oddly enough, a cute pair of Lolita shoes is probably going to be the most expensive single part of a budget Sweet Lolita outfit. A pair of socks and cute wristcuffs from, believe it or not, the sock section on Bodyline complete the coordinate. The hardest part of designing a Sweet Lolita outfit for under $100 was the fact that Sweet Lolitas trend towards accessory overload, which can really add up quickly! So this coordinate is a bit on the simple side compared to most Sweet Lolitas you see nowadays!

Bodyline skirt ♠  Ruffle blouse ♠ Lacy tights ♠ Fancy heels ♠ Total: $100

Up next is the Gothic Lolita coordinate, which was moderately easy to put together. The best thing about Gothic Lolita is that it can rely on a lot of more mainstream places to pick up black offbrand pieces to compliment the outfit. Ruffly black blouses are pretty much a staple of any cute-yet-formal look and can easily be found in most clothing stores. For this coordinate I sort of splurged on the extra-fancy fancy skirt, to add an extra bit of decadence to the outfit. A pair of lacy tights and black heels give the outfit a mature, Gothy styling to it. Wear your hair in an updo of some sort and spend the last couple bucks of the hundred dollars on a fake flower to tuck into your hair!

Infanta OP ♕ Ankle socks ♕ F21 shoes ♕ Total: $96

Finally we have the Classic Lolita coordinate, and the one that was the most difficult for me to put together! You could make this as easy to put together as the Gothic Lolita coordinate if you come across a reasonably priced floral skirt and pair it with an offwhite version of the easy-to-find offbrand ruffly blouse and some offwhite legwear and matching shoes, but I really wanted to use this dress because it's such a good deal for such a cute dress! Pick up an affordable pair of cute ruffly socks for a sweet Country Lolita-esque look and a pair of shoes on sale, I chose them in burgundy to match the burgundy details in the dress, ideally I would have liked to go with brown, but shopping on a budget sometimes means you don't always get what you want. The one real "catch" to this outfit is you have to make the straw bonnet yourself! Don't worry, because straw bonnets are actually pretty cheap and easy to make! If you shop around, materials can cost under $10, as you can often pick up straw hats in craft stores for about $4 and ribbon and a fake flower can be found for a couple bucks a pop. Once you have assembled your very cheap materials, you have 3 different options for how you can make your bonnet:

•  The hard way- repurposing the straw braid and construct the bonnet entirely on your own. Check out a tutorial on that here!
• The moderately easy way- this basically involves chopping a section out of the back of the straw hat and wearing it vertically. You can see hats made with this style on my crafty blog, and on Miss Lumpy's blog. There aren't any real tutorials on how to do exactly this online (I don't think!), but it's basically the first step in this straw-based bonnet tutorial. Instead of covering it with fabric, keep it bare and just cover the edges (either all of them or just the raw edge!) with some ribbon or bias tape. Either sewing or hot glue works just fine!
• The super easy way- this pretty much just involves ribbon around the hat brim that is tied down under your chin, forcing the brim to frame your face like a bonnet. For a better example of what this looks like, check out the examples in the first picture on this Jane Austen fan blog.

When working with straw, keep a steamer or an iron set to steam on hand because you can force the straw into much softer shapes by steaming it and then holding it in position until it cools down. It's how you make straw bonnets look less like straw halos!

If you haven't noticed, I wasn't the only one who's blogged about this particular subject! Check out all these other blogs who joined in! If a post isn't showing up, it just means their post hasn't gone live yet!

A Lace Jail
Darkly Darling
Her Curious Elegance 
Magic a la Mode
Miss Lumpy
Parfait Doll
Puppenschloss 
Ramble Rori 
Starry Dreams
Sweet and Simple

Check them out an see what sort coordinates everyone else created!