If it wasn't for the nights

SURPRISE!  Guess who's been working on more ABBA doll costumes?? 

It's been a good while since I last made an ABBA costume, that being earlier this year, in February.  Making ABBA costumes definitely take a lot of time, research, and effort, and while I love recreating ABBA's costumes in miniature and hope to someday make every single one of their costumes (wow), it's still quite a hard task and I don't necessarily have the time to work on this strange hobby of mine all the time. 

For those of you who don't know, I've been hoarding a thing of black satin for quite a few years now.  A long time ago, my local Walmart sold a few yards of satin, and I'd use that satin for a lot of the various ABBA costumes I've made over the years.  Once they had black satin, and I knew that I needed it to make ABBA's outfits from 1978.  While the outfits were used very briefly, only seen towards the end of 1978 and a little bit in early 1979, they've been among my favorite costumes ever and when I was a kid who barely knew how to sew and thought that gluing sequins onto fabric was the best thing in the world, I tried to make the outfits.  And let's just say, they were bad.

Everything was made out of cotton (which doesn't stretch at all - I'd spend hours trying to squeeze my dolls' oddly shaped feet through the tiny leg holes and well... Agnetha's had a nice, new hole in her foot ever since...), the sequins were huge and would constantly fall off because... well, fabric glue isn't the greatest thing in the world.

Now I bet you didn't know this, but I had tried to make this outfits once before, when I was even younger and just starting out sewing.  At the time, I had found some of my mom's kinda satin-like fabric with sparkly silver glitter on it and thought "This will make the perfect fabric for ABBA's black 1978 costumes!!"  So I used that to make a jacket for each ABBA member, and I wish I didn't because the fabric is nothing like ABBA's original jackets, and the fabric is so beautiful and I shouldn't have wasted it all with my bad sewing.  Then I happened to have a stretchy fabric to use for the jumpsuit, just it was blue, but I was like, it's close enough.  And it wasn't close enough but whatever, young me was weird.   And then I accidentally cut the collar of the blue stretchy jumpsuit too low, so I thought it'd be fun if I add in a pink fabric to cover it to make it look "pretty", and that was weird as well.  Also I might add, I cut the collar out in the wrong direction as well.

The only photo evidence of the OG 1978

Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the jumpsuit itself, but I do have a drawing I did of my Agnetha doll in that outfit.  Now you can see how bad it was. :P

As I mentioned, I've had the black satin that I got particularly for making ABBA's black outfits again for quite some time.  I was recently given a huge amount of shiny, stretchy, black fabric that's perfect for the jumpsuit parts of the outfits, so I decided that now was the time to start on these costumes.

FYI, I started making all of the costumes around the same time, but Agnetha's ended up getting finished first because I had all the supplies needed, which is why I'm posting about her first.  It's not because I'm a favortist - I'm not and I love all the ABBA members equally. <3

And now on to the completed outfit:

 There aren't a lot of high quality pictures of Agnetha's outfit, and as there are a lot of details, I had to make sure I got all of them right. So I spent a good amount of time taking snapshots from videos and trying to figure out all the little details and stuff, and I think I got it just about right.  For the embroidery all over her outfit, I used a combination of glass beads, silver threat, and sequins (that I sewed on instead of glued. :) )  I'm not all that great at embroidery, but I did my best and was very patient, took breaks when I needed, and worked slowly instead of rushing myself.  I think I did a good job. :)

 Close ups of the beading/embroidery:

and here's the outfit without the jacket.

I'm honestly so happy with the way this outfit turned out, and I'm glad I waited all these years to finally make a version of this outfit that I'm satisfied with.  I definitely needed all these years to grow and get better at my sewing skills, and I'm really happy with this.  Hopefully soon I'll have Frida, Bjorn, and Benny's outfits all done and you'll be able to see them. 

Until then, I hope you enjoyed this post and seeing Agnetha's new and improved black 1978 outfit!