Costume Calamity
My head-first plunge into the world of pattern-sewing and costume design
Instead of a Christmas card, my best friend sends out a Halloween card to all her friends & family every year. Each year, she chooses a theme and a costume to go with it. Like all creators, she always has a very specific image in her minds-eye of how she wants the costume/character to be conveyed. She brought me into this process years ago to help make her visions come to life. We started small, just customizing a certain piece or modifying something she already had, but one year we decided to go bigger.
The theme - Hamilton: An American Musical. The character - Alexander Hamilton, himself. The creative challenge - the Revolutionary War coat & vest. She originally started looking online for those particular pieces but just couldn't seem to find anything that would fit what she had in mind. It wasn't long before the creative wheels began to turn... I had a sewing machine, I had scissors, and I had a very basic understanding of how to sew simple things. This quickly escalated into us deciding to take on the whole thing ourselves. We decided to create this coat and vest FROM SCRATCH and we had no idea that we had just bitten off way more than we ever anticipated.
We started by purchasing a basic costume pattern. The picture on the front wasn't quite what my friend had in mind, but I, knowing nothing about using patterns, figured I could just modify & customize things to her liking along the way. We wandered the aisles of the fabric store until we found this beautiful, silky, floral fabric that would give the perfect feminine touch to what would have otherwise been a very plain and masculine design. Of course, that beautiful fabric came with an intimidating price tag - it wasn't necessarily intimidating for budget reasons, more just because the stakes were so much higher if I goofed this up. Thus began the first challenge of figuring out how much of each fabric we needed. I'm no math whiz to begin with and found sewing math to be infinitely more confusing than "normal" math. Plus, what the heck is interfacing? And why did I need it?? The struggle was a sight to behold, I'm sure.
Once we made it over the hurdle of initial fabric purchase, I giddily opened up the cute little pattern envelope and proceeded to unfold an array of what I bitterly deemed "butterfly wing paper", all covered in markings and lines that made zero sense to me. I researched, I Googled, I learned as much as I possibly could before making the first cut into that annoyingly delicate paper. Once I finally thought I understood enough to dive in and took the plunge, I then had to learn how to tape/paste the pattern back together when I realized I had done it all wrong. My living room quickly turned into the scene from A Beautiful Mind when his walls and floors are just covered in papers. I had the cut/relevant pieces clipped onto my blinds so they wouldn't get lost in the mess and I had the waiting pieces strewn about on the floor so I could see what I was working with - it was a complete mess.
Then the real challenge began: pinning the pattern to the fabric and cutting it out. In my head, this seemed like it would have been the most straight-forward step we would have encountered, but as I mentioned before, we had ignorantly chosen silky fabric. Slipping, sliding, infuriatingly uncooperative silky fabric. Yet another drop in the bucket of thinking 'what did I get myself into'. I finally got everything pinned, remembering what I'd learned in my embarrassingly-extensive research on basic sewing terminology and concepts. I started in on the terrifying task of cutting the actual fabric. I didn't even realize a sewing project could be truly stressful until that moment. The stakes were high. My scissors were dull. This was going horribly and felt like it would take no less than 3 years to get all the pieces cut out at my current snail pace. Thank goodness my friend came to the rescue with decent scissors, and I'm proud to say I've since purchased a pair of my own pair of good scissors that live hidden away from the abuse of day-to-day family use in my sewing box. Then the process continued on, baby-step by baby-step.
Once all the pieces were cut out, aside from the pieces I would later discover were done completely wrong & needed to be re-cut, I started trying to make sense of the actual sewing process. Some parts were relatively basic and within my very limited realm of understanding. Then a more difficult section would spring up out of nowhere and I'd be thrown for a loop and find myself entirely out of my depth. I'd study, stitch, realize I did it wrong, seam-rip, and try it again. Over...and over...and over. And do not even get me started on the sleeve cuffs and collar! I swear, I dedicated an entire weekend trying to make sense of those monsters. I still get a reminiscent shiver up my spine when I start a project that involves cuffs of any kind.
The modifications we decided to pursue most likely would have been a walk in the park for someone with really ANY amount of prior pattern-sewing experience, but it was just one shot in the dark after another for me. For example, two of the first things that we pinpointed for modification were the length of the vest and the number of buttons on the front of the coat compared to the costume in the musical. We proceeded onward with a completely unfounded sense of confidence and ended up with a vest that was more of a Revolutionary War crop-top and 2 strips of buttons that could have been mistaken for the control panel of a jet.
After all the toil and trouble, we ended up with something that, to our own surprise, actually resembled a Revolutionary War coat. And to top that off, we had successfully given it the feminine twist we had originally envisioned. We were over the moon with pride seeing what had been accomplished. It was a project that took my sewing knowledge from 0-100 in a matter of days and it had an infinite number of flaws if you looked at it too closely, BUT we loved the finished product, warts and all. And I'm proud to say that the fun didn't stop there. Since then, we've continued to broaden our horizons and take on even more complex and technical projects for her Halloween cards year after year and will hopefully continue to do so for years to come!
"... I'm passionately smashin' every expectation. Every action's an act of creation." -Alexander Hamilton: The Musical
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Love & Acceptance (re: your own art)
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By Jessica Anderson5 years ago in Families
Hind Rajab: A Child the World Heard Too Late
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By Hasbanullah7 days ago in Humans
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