The Vampire Bat

I never got around to blogging the costumes I made last year, and with Halloween almost upon us again it seems like the perfect time to catch up.

Last Halloween my daughter wanted to be a vampire bat, as you do...

Here she is, pointing backwards at a rose bush (yes, awkward pose but I didn't manage to get many photos before she and her friends were off door knocking):

This costume was heavily improvised.  There was a costume online that my daughter wanted, but it was (a) expensive, (b) trashy and (c) too warm for our climate. Oh and it was shipping from America, so probably wouldn't have got to us in time.

So we discussed the key elements (stretchy black dress, silky wings, furry hood with ears, holey stockings) and I sketched out the costume to check we were on the same page (yes!), then whipped up a very quick long-sleeved t-shirt dress using a t-shirt pattern that I knew fit well, Burda 9439:

This is a short-sleeved t-shirt pattern, but with a couple of length measurements it's very easily turned into a long-sleeved t-shirt dress.  Anyway, the fit was good, but the grey/black jersey I'd used looked vaguely trendy instead of spooky, so we called version 1 a new dress... and dug out a second piece of stash fabric, a remnant of black jersey (not quite enough for the dress, hence the seam at hip level).

This time around I paused after sewing the shoulder seam and attaching the sleeves (in the flat) so I could make some wings to sew into the side seams of the dress.  The only fabric I could find in my stash that looked and felt right for wings was a length of beautiful silk jersey I'd picked up a Tessuti remnant sale a long time ago.  In the interests of reusability (I want that fabric back one day!!) I decided to simply cut it in half, so that each wing is simply a long rectangle, long enough to stretch from skirt hemline to wrist.

I hope the next photo explains that a bit better:

Not hemmed, not ironed but perfectly acceptable for a kid's costume!

This "design" means there is a lot of scope for arm movement and bat-like fluttering - and my daughter can extend her arms above her head without the wings moving the dress up. The luscious wing fabric makes the costume very popular, and the outfit has had a lot of wears over the past year. It went to a Halloween disco on Friday night and is going out again on Monday evening, and now fits a lot better than it did last year, so I guess it's been a successful costume...

Oh I nearly forgot - the hood! I actually love the hood, because it reminds me of the movie version of Where the Wild Things Are - I kind of want a giant furry hoodie for myself :).

For this part of the outfit I started with Butterick 6695, a little kids animal onesie pattern I used years ago for my son (not blogged). I didn't want the hood to come all the way around the neck the way the hood in the animal onesie does, so I studied a couple of Simplicity costumes (5512 and 5840) to confirm the shape for a simpler hoodie.

 

And none of the standard ear shapes on Butterick 6695 looked particularly bat like, so I drew up my own ear pattern: a smaller inner piece with a fold in the middle, and a larger enfolding outer piece (much easier to do than that probably sounds). Here's the hood in close-up - the ear details get lost in all that fur though:

You can probably see in the above that the fur is just on the outside of the hood - the "lining" is matt black technical fabric left over from a dress I made ages ago. (The fake fur is left over from a mouse costume made for my son when he was in childcare). The hood "lining" is sewn to the neckline of the dress because I thought the weight of the fake fur and ears would make the outer fake fur hang fall nicely over the neckline, but in fact it all tends to tip forwards. Which is not a problem, because it's comfortable on, and my daughter loves it.

Here's a back view of the hood taken last year - this year I'm afraid the fake fur is tipped further forward as it accounts for a bit more growth...

And since I was sewing a costume and playing around with all the black remnants, my son got a "test" hoodie to wear with his costume cape and staff.  This one is a very simple pointy hood, and my recollection is that I made it just by sewing up 2 adjoining sides of a rectangle, then sewing a deep hem around the face.  

This year the vampire bat is being resurrected, but my son is going to be a dead person, complete with fake knife wound - very gory but no sewing is required. 

I'll leave you with one more photo of the vampire bat's fluttering wings:

 And will try to be back soon with more sewing!


See you soon

- Gabrielle xx

Princess Aurora

It was book week again recently (is it really only once a year??) and with nearly a week's warning, my daughter decided to dress up as Aurora (otherwise known as Sleeping Beauty). Her shop-bought costume from a few years ago was getting too small, so the order went in for a new costume - one that matched the dress in the book, and one that didn't have any scratchy bits. Here's what she ended up with:

 
And here's the "pattern" (really more of a design, isn't it?) I was asked to work from:

Surprisingly, my ridiculously large pattern stash didn't include anything that exactly matched this design... so this piece of sewing turned out to be an interesting little exercise in pattern modification and drafting:

Speaking of which, I REALLY need to have a giveaway soon - to pass some of my stash on! More on that later :)

We started by making a muslin using Burda 9534, the closest thing I had to the desired dress shape, to which I added a zig-zaggy peplum. This gave the Princess confidence that her slave mum knew what she was doing, so the Princess decorated her muslin and decreed it appropriate for Cinderella* dress-ups:

* that's Cinderella the drudge, not Cinderella at the ball

I love the decorations... wish I was brave enough to do this to my clothes!

Here's the tech drawing from the Burda pattern - which gave me a bodice, long skirt and long sleeves to play with:

I took a day of annual leave from work. Fabrics were hunted and gathered from Spotlight (I couldn't get quite the right shades of pink), and then the modifications to the muslin began:

• changed the neckline from round to V-shaped
• drafted a self-lined collar to extend to the width of the shoulders and sit a little above the dress (which meant a different shoulder seam shape)
• lengthened the bodice for a lower waistline

• re-cut the waistline from a horizontal to a V-shape, echoing the new neckline
• modified my initial peplum to match the shape of the downwards pointing waistline and to include a self-lining

 

It worked so well from the Princess' perspective that I'm encouraged to start drafting a few little details for my own sewing projects!

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Now, if you've read this far, thanks for your attention - how about advance notice of a giveaway? I'm coming up to my 200th post and 3rd blog anniversary, so I want to hold a "shop my stash" giveaway to celebrate within my next few posts.  I'll either post photos here or on Pinterest of what's up for grabs - which may be fabric, sewing books or patterns - and you can comment to let me know what you want.

Book Week Costumes

Our school chickened out on holding the Book Parade in Book Week - someone was worried it would rain. My son and one of his best friends were both going as Leif from Deltora Quest, so we two mums decided to save time by splitting the costume prep work.  I hemmed the capes and made head bands, while she made papier-mâché brooches (doesn't the brooch look amazing!) and bejewelled belts.

I'm pretty sure I got the easy jobs, but in any event our costumes were ready weeks ago, put aside to wait for today's belated book week parade.





In the playground this morning there were "sooooo many" Harry Potters and "heaps" of Zac Powers, masses of ballerinas and princesses, many striking looking Wallys, one Shawn the Sheep, and three Leifs from Deltora Quest.

Two of the Leifs were of course pretty much identical!  Here's mine before we went to school this morning: 

The costumes are a bit of a rough and ready interpretation of the cartoon Leif, but the boys were happy with them. My son especially loved his belt - the gemstones were even in the proper order, and his friend especially loved the headband. 

Knight Time

So... I finished that knight's costume last night, and didn't get a chance to show my son till this evening, just before bed. He LOVES it, hooray! Here are some photos showing what knights do (apparently):

 

I like the costume overall, and it turns out we have a great need for a knight in our home. I wish I hadn't made the centre seams and stitching so puckered - my bobbin case was misaligned grrrr!  I won't be redoing the affected parts - I have two other projects due by Wednesday evening or before.

Details:
Pattern: Mc Call's 5907, View C (knight). View A is a costume for a king, and view B is for a forest man.

Review:
This is a straightforward pattern, and one that will be very adaptable for other boy's costumes (tunic, hood...). It comes together well and as it's intended to not be too close-fitting, you don't have to be too too careful with the sizing imho. Not much more I can say really....just that I have one happy knight in the house!

My favourite part of the costume was the part I was dreading - the cut out and iron on insignia.  I used double sided iron on stuff (I forget what it's called, I just had some lying about - as you do) and ironed it onto a square piece of black felt, then pinned the pattern piece on and cut out the shape before ironing the shape onto the tunic. You're supposed to make two insignias and iron one inside the other, but I thought it would get too thick and hard to align.





One of my two projects on a deadline is a costume request - my son wants to dress up as Leif from Deltora Quest for the book parade at school next week. I'm thinking just a blue hood/cape, and the special belt as a separate craft activity...

Here's what Leif looks like in the Japanese Anime version of the books:

hopefully I can turn this into a not much sewing project.  I've still got that coat looming, and I've also cut out Vogue 1915 skirt (OOP) in a test fabric...