Costume-making 101: Part the Second – Design

Hello again and welcome back to another instalment of my (loosely called) adventures in the world of costumes.  When we left the (loosely called) action last time I’d come to the realisation that my progress thus far had come to nought as the assembled pieces, although individually fine, didn’t work well enough together to fit my brief.

I needed a new plan to get things back on track in time for May’s deadline, so where to start now?  Looking back over the elements I was already happy with, I went back to the original design to see where natural progression would take me.  Taking a step back, I had the concept of Old West meets Assassin’s Creed, so the natural step was to go back to basics on the iconic clothing of the period.  I had in mind a back story for the costume revolving around the siege of the Alamo in 1836 (I’ll assert my intellectual copyright here – short story is coming soon…), plus I had the duster coat idea that I still felt had some validity to it, I just had to make the two fit together.  I’d previously put together a period (ish) shirt from a Simplicity pattern I had on hand, number 2895 for anyone curious, and I knew that this pattern also included parts for an overcoat.  I had a sort through and liked the look of it but on checking the pieces it turned out I was missing a few crucial pieces and another two had been ripped over the years.

Bugger.  Where was I going to find another copy of an old Simplicity pattern in good time to keep the momentum up?  Well as it happens in a local haberdashery near to my office, and as it happened, they were having a sale – one replacement pattern for £2.60 and no sodding about with postage or waiting for it to arrive!

For my fabric choice I decided to with a really heavyweight calico I had already, my fabric supplier referred to it as “calico canvas,” used for crafts and painting – essentially a much heavier version of the calico I’d used in my original duster attempt.  Learning from a previous mistake I pre-shrunk the fabric, which luckily resulted in less than a 5% shrinkage and no warping that I could see.  Cue a frantic weekend on patterning, cutting, sewing and smoking, plus a few evenings of adjusting, ironing and hemming, we had this:

As far as alterations went this was pretty much a by-the-numbers build direct from the pattern.  The main changes were to make the coat without a lining as I would be wearing it in the summer, plus to add a hood instead of a collar.  The lack of lining was pretty straightforward, though it did entail pressing and over-stitching every seam, a process that took a lot longer than expected.  Still, I think the results were worth it:

Having made several hoods before with varying degrees of success, I decided this time not to work from scratch.  I’d previously designed hoods that sat well but were quite closed, whereas for this design I thought a larger, open hood would sit better.  Up until now, I’d been working from this:

For now I turned to another paper pattern I already owned, this time Simplicity 5840, using the hood pattern from a cloak.  After cutting and tacking together I had to trim the back of the pattern down to sit correctly – you can see the difference between the pattern and the finished hood below  I did this by eye and lucked out getting it right on the first attempt:

So not a huge amount of progress this week in the grand scheme of things, but I am now back on track with a costume piece that I’m happy with and which I for one am very proud of.

In case you’re wondering what happened to the original tunic/coat I’d planned to use, well nothing goes to waste here!  My step-daughter still needed a costume for Comic-Con to fit with a pirate/smuggler theme, so I teamed the tunic with a pirate shirt I’d made years ago and came up with the following:

Lots to do and a hasty blog entry this week, more progress next time but I’ll leave you with a little design I posted on my Facebook page, a project for after Comic-Con to develop my Old West costume further – a neat way of storing your nitro-glycerine grenades/healing potions/miscellaneous glass tubes without them getting in the way.  I’ll make this from veg-tan leather and post a step-by-step when I get around to making it!

Join me next time for more progress, a better written blog and maybe the start of a background/short story – Ubisoft, I’m available for the next Assassin’s Creed game and my rates are very reasonable!

Until next time.