As I mentioned, EJ and I were looking through the craft section at the store the other day for ideas of more affordable costumes and she came across a picture she really liked of a girl dressed in blue as what looks like a nice blue witch or magician, but what EJ calls a female wizard.
IK has to argue the point that a girl wizard is called a witch, but EJ doesn't want to be called a witch because they're scary and apparently always dress in black, so obviously her costume will be way different...anyway, she picked out 2 shades of blue fabric, one light and one dark, and we bought 2 yards of each at $3.74 a piece. We also bought a plain white long sleeved shirt in her size for $4.50.
With the memory of the photo in mind we sat down together at home and drew out what EJ wanted her costume to look like. I didn't grab a picture of the fabrics before we started cutting out the pieces, but here's the top pieces for her hat pinned together and you can see both colors of fabric:
I did my best to cut out all the pieces the night before. I should REALLY find the patience and discipline to start sewing with some actual patterns, because I'm sure my final creations would turn out a whole lot better.
I started with sewing her cape, as that seemed like the easiest part to tackle because it was almost the same process as making
KW's curtains. I finished the cape around 2:00pm, which meant I had a little more than 2 hours left to magically create everything else before her concert that night. Not totally optimistic at my ability to finish everything in that amount of time, I told her if nothing else she would be SUPER EJ!
For the cape I held up the dark blue fabric to her back, roughly measured the length with my tape measure, then ironed all 4 sides and sewed a small edge around every side so it was nice and smooth.
I used white thread to sew with because a) I didn't have time to go searching through my sewing stash to see if I had any blue thread, b) I didn't have time to run back to the store to buy any if I didn't have it, and c) I was just too lazy to change the thread even if I did have it.
EJ didn't care that the thread was white. If I had had more time to get this project done I definitely would have opted for the time to use a darker thread that would blend in much better, but hey, this was speed sewing and I was under a quickly approaching deadline!
Super EJ worked on her math homework while I did my best to turn the light blue fabric into a skirt. For the most part it turned out well, except for the back of the skirt where the fabric rose up several inches shorter in the back. Hmmph...whatever.
Fortunately it was completely hidden by her awesome cape, so I got away with that giant mistake this time. The front looked good, so that's all that mattered.
Next I had EJ try on the shirt we bought at the store and show me where she wanted the dark blue belt area to be on her body (how high up or low down on her waist). I pinned it in place, after carefully ironing over the raw edge of dark blue fabric so it was smooth and sewed the top of the dark blue strip to the shirt.
EJ wanted this costume to be one whole dress, not a shirt and skirt, so next I had to pin and sew on the skirt I made...without sewing shut the loop at the top of the skirt where I had made a section for a drawstring to pull through. Not that I had any problems with that and had to keep my seam ripper VERY handy during this project or anything, ahem! Moving on.
See how great the FRONT of the skirt turned out? Yeah, just don't look at the back, okay?
For the pull strings on the cape and skirt I simply folded a long, thin strip of matching fabric in half, ironed it flat, and sewed it together. Then I attached a safety pin to one side and pushed it through the strip to turn it inside out (or right side in) so the sewing stitches were hidden on the inside.
We found a package of 4 cute little blue bows and I used 3 of them to quickly hand stitch them to the front of the dress.
By the time I finished all of this it was time to race over to EJ's concert, so I told her we would have to go without the hat and finish it later. She was okay with that, since most of the costume was done and she totally loved it! Here she is heading into the gym for the concert:
The teacher told the students they could either dress up in costumes or wear all black. Hmmm, looks like not ALL the students were definitely wearing their costumes as EJ had told me (hence the mad rush to finish hers in time).
Here she is getting her music ready.
First some plucking.
Then some strumming with her bow.
And 30 min. later the concert was over. She looked so great, and I felt like mom of the year for all my scrambling and mad dash efforts to make her a great costume despite my exceedingly remedial sewing skills. Again, I really should use patterns sometime instead of just winging it.
When he got home I went back to work on her hat. I held up the top part of the fabric around her head to measure the size and pinned it in place. Then sewed those 2 pieces together. And then I was faced with a really difficult dilemma on how to make the base circle part of the hat.
I grabbed my Pampered Chef cooking stone I use to make pizzas and cut out a large circle. Then I placed the top part of her hat in the center and measured the circumference with my measuring tape which was almost exactly 7 inches...and by some strange coincidence also happens to be the same width of our cereal bowls! So that's what I used to cut out the center hole for her head. Yeah, I'm clever like that. :o)
Next, I kind of hit a wall with the most difficult part of the project yet. How on earth do I sew on the top to the bottom? I don't want the seams to show, so that means sewing it inside out right? But when I do that the circle shapes on the top and bottom don't line up anymore, instead they're opposite of each other.
That probably makes no sense, but if you ever attempt this you'll know what I mean. It was incredibly tricky and confusing, so at this point I rolled up my sleeves, got really technical, and totally just winged it the best I could!
Hmmm...not bad, not great by any means, but also not bad. Now how do I firm up the hat to keep the round sides up instead of flopping down? My afterthought was that a great big can of spray starch would have been a good idea, but I didn't have any.
So plan B, I bought a package of those flexible pipe cleaner type wires in the fabric section to insert into the trim. This seemed way too complicated to hold still and use my sewing machine to stitch around, so I opted for hand stitching this section.
Okay, that worked pretty well...except it's REALLY important to make sure the pipe cleaner wires overlap because otherwise you'll end up with these frustrating pointy bends that will not stand straight up no matter what and you'll have to open up your stitches to fix it. Grrrr!
Finally, EJ tried on the hat and it fit, and it's good enough! Far from perfect or impressive at all, but it'll do. I still have to sew on the light blue trim she wants on the hat and add the last little blue bow, but I was DONE for the night! I'll add those parts later.
But for now, she has a cute little "female wizard" hat to match her cute little costume and after an incredibly long, hard day of speed sewing, I was completely beat! It felt great adding another knotch to the "my mom is so cool because she totally rocked making me this homemade original costume" to my track record, but in the end I was also completely exhausted.
In the end the costume wasn't all that much less expensive than the store bought costumes, and it was SO much more work! After all that time and effort, and because I have so many other projects I really need to get working on, I've decided the rest of the kids will be getting costumes from the store. The boys already have theirs and I'm taking LA to the store sometime this week.
Maybe if I had a larger stash of sewing and craft materials where I could have saved on the costs of buying fabric, etc. this might have been a more affordable choice, but when your sewing loot isn't very big, you end up buying everything you need and that adds up. Oh well, lesson learned and all that matters is that EJ loves it.
By the time I finished the hat she was already in bed, so I'll have to get a picture of the whole costume on Halloween.
