Our Adventures at the Ohio Renaissance Festival

On September 16, my family and I attended the Ohio Renaissance Festival during Pirate Weekend. As usual, we had a phenomenal time! It was our very first time dressing up together. My daughter went as a self-proclaimed "Pirate Princess," my son as Connor from Assassin's Creed, my husband as a traditional pirate (meaning, you wear what you've got or what you salvage at sea), and I went as a "Pirate Queen" (according to my daughter).

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As per usual, upon our arrival, we immediately went to The Castle Maze, which is my son's favorite part of the festival. He gets lost inside every year but once he finds his way out, he's rewarded with a trip down the castle slide!

After the maze, we went to have lunch at Da Vinci's Pizza. For you Ohio Renaissance Festival goers who don't know what to eat, Da Vinci's Pizza has a medium pizza for $12 which fed our four-person family (two slices each)! That's an incredible deal to feed four people at the Renaissance Festival!

Da Vinci's Pizza was right next to a covered eating area where we sat down to enjoy our meal. As it turns out, there was a show at the time. Friar Finnegan was cracking jokes and singing songs — he gave us quite the laugh!

After we finished eating our grub (which was delicious, by the way), we walked along the medieval city and saw a dragon!

But that wasn't the only dragon we saw! There was a bi-pedal dragon as well and he was awfully close to the camels! Terrifying!

Once we were sure we had lost the dragons, we moved on to the rides. My children loved the Roundabout which is a human-powered carousel. All of the rides at the Ohio Renaissance Festival are powered by humans!

Their absolute favorite part of our day was when we visited the Carrasello, however. They rode it three times together!

Before we went home, we decided to do a little medieval shopping. We saw masks, swords, princess hats, all-natural essential oil perfumes, and fairy wings.

As always, we really enjoyed ourselves. We stayed at the Ohio Renaissance Festival for a full five hours and I was pretty comfortable the entire time, even in my full garb with a corset! I seriously cannot wait to attend again next year!

My Ohio Renaissance Festival DIY Pirate Costume

If you remember my last post about my pirate cosplay, you know that thrift store finds made up the base of the outfit but the corset brought everything together. I cannot stress enough the importance of choosing a quality corset for your fashion, waist-training, and cosplay needs.

My costume was a DIY pirate costume, featuring the Orchard Corset CS-345 style in black brocade. I spent a good week or so wearing my corset around the house to break it in and get a feel of what to expect while walking around the Ohio Renaissance Festival all day. It was a high of 84 degrees with a heat index of 90 degrees, so it was a bit warm. I think that wearing the corset around really helped me get used to it before the event, so I'm extremely glad that I broke it in first.

I received so many compliments on my attire. As soon as we approached the ticket line, a woman told me how beautiful that I looked. Later on, a man told me that he could tell I had put a lot of time and effort into my costume — the corset was the best part, he said.

Needless to say, the costume was a big hit!

And because I broke it in before the festival, I was very comfortable throughout the duration of the event and we had a wonderful time!