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).

Here's my daughter's costume that we picked up at our local thrift store for $10.

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My son isn't a big fan of photographs, so I was unable to get any really good photos of him.

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.

As you can see in the above image, my daughter was really into the pirate cosplay. She even had a fierce facial expression to scare off any landlubbers trying to get close to our loot!

Needless to say, the costume was a big hit! 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.

To give you an idea of how much of a positive difference a quality corset can make, check out these side-by-side pictures. A high-quality corset, like those from Orchard Corset, can literally change an entire outfit and transform the way your body looks.

In the first image, you can clearly see how sloppy it looks. It's missing the perfect piece to tie it all together — which is a corset! But not just any corset, as you can tell in the second image. The second image is of me wearing a cheap $15 corset that I picked up on eBay. It doesn't bring in the waist and the shoulder straps are too big. In the final picture, however, I'm wearing Orchard Corset's CS-345. You can see how the waist is pulled in, the bust is lifted, and how it accentuates the hips. This one was the clear winner!

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!

As per usual, 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!
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The slide was also a blast!



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...

 And swords...

Princess hats...

 All-natural essential oil perfumes...

 And fairy wings! My daughter had to have them!



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 — maybe I'll be a witch and scare all of the faire-goers!