I've uploaded a picture + Dicey's Robes

[Dicentra spectabilis]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, Laura Ingalls Huntley
<lhuntley at f...> wrote:
 
> Dicentra - I thought your costume was amazing.  Did you sew it 
> yourself, or did you buy it somewhere?  

A neighbor with a surge machine sewed it for me.  It's from the
McCall's 3789 pattern, and the material is a very low-pile velour-type
thing -- very heavy so it drapes nicely.  I bought the full 11 1/4
yards and had the neighbor make the largest size, but I still had
scads of material left over, plus I had to hem it up about 8 inches. 
Cost me about $70 in materials.  (The woman at the fabric store said
she hoped I'd be wearing it more than once at that price; she needn't
worry!)

I got the clasp and Hogwarts patches off the Internet, the Dicentra
patch I stitched myself (from a bookmark pattern), the spotted owl I
bought in Estes Park CO, long before HP was published, and the
mahogany/maple wand I got at Nimbus (Alivans.com).

If you Google the words "cloak clasp," or look for them on eBay, you
can find places on the Internet that sell robes and other stuff for
RenFest-type activities.  Enough of it overlaps into our niche to be
useful, especially if you want to be an ordinary witch/wizard and not
a Hogwarts student.

> And the flowers are very nice ^_~.  The sort of look like Bleeding 
> Hearts to me -- are they actually the same thing, or just related?

Dicentra spectabilis is the botanical name for the common bleeding
heart in the photo.  There's also a "bleeding heart" vine,
Clerodendrum thomsoniae, which is not related.

--Dicey