Hayden Christensen, eat your heart out

At last....*drumroll please*...Ben's surprise Halloween costume!

He's a huge Star Wars fan, so I made him an Anakin Skywalker costume, from Episode III. After a month and a half of work, three restarts on the outer tunic, almost every bolt of brown fabric Joann's has, and no opportunity to try it on a real person, I *finally* gave it to him this past weekend. It fit (mostly...needs a few tweaks)! And even more importantly, he loved it!

The cloak is made of a synthetic material that is dark brown on one side and black on the other. All the seams are french seams, so it is very tidy on the inside.

The tabards are synthetic leather, but they look and feel quite real. The inner and outer tunics and pants are all cotton. The large part of the belt is flannel.

And a closeup. I may be a bit biased, but I think he's the best looking Jedi this side of the Universe. :-D

This is the image I was working from. Overall, I think I put together a very believeable replica.

I used a pattern for the cloak, tabards, and inner tunic, but made up my own outer tunic and pants patterns. The boots and thin outer belt were purchased, but everything else was made. Oh, and the lightsaber came from his personal collection. ;)

Let me know what you think!

A model I am not.

...so ignore me, and focus on the dress.

"Run away! Run away!"

I made a dress for the Renaissance Faire on Saturday. I started it Monday. (I’m insane, I know.) The outside is green brocade home decor fabric, and the sleeve lining is an antique gold gathered taffeta -- also home dec. Unfortunately, all I have right now is a pic from my camera phone, but this whole post will make more sense once I take decent pics tomorrow.

Here I am with King Arthur, Patsy and a random stranger.

Funny story about the green fabric...the girl who cut it for me rang me up incorrectly. It was on sale for $4.50/ yd [regularly $19.99/yd], and I got 6 ¼ yards. Somehow (and I realized this way later), she only charged me for ¼ yard. So I got allll that fabric...for $1.12. It’s kind of sad that I bought so much other fabric and stuff that I didn’t notice a $27 gap!

I fell in love with the beaded trim, but of course JoAnn’s didn’t have enough to do the neckline *and* the sleeves. I had to make do with another trim for the sleeves.

After my unintentional savings, I splurged a little on the gold fabric and got 3 yards @ $6.50 apiece [regularly $12.99/yd]. The red trim was 1 ½ yds @ $5.59 apiece, and the beaded trim ended up being 2 yds @ $5.39 apiece [regularly $8.99/yd]. All in all, this will cost me around $40. Not bad, considering how much the Halloween costumes are costing me.

I put all the main pieces together and tried it on. WELL. Apparently Butterick’s loose, flowy dress pattern is a body-hugging (and not in an entirely bad way) column dress. Whaaa? I know I’m no stick, but I am definitely not so large as to warrant the tightness of this dress. [It makes my ass look fantastic, though...maybe I’ll make one of these in the future.] So, I went back to the pattern, bought another 2 yards of fabric, and added the godets for view A of the pattern. Once I put them in, I got the effect I was going for in the first place. It was a big pain in my ass, though. I was really nervous that I wouldn’t be able to finish it in time.

I took some pictures of myself in the dress before I started putting the godets in, and I’m going to send it to Butterick to complain. There is *no way* that the dress shown on the envelope came from the pattern. Warning: the following is not a pretty picture.


Also, I helped my mom with a 'secret' pirate costume for my dad. I made a very manly ruffly shirt. Aaar, matey! I'll try to get some pics of that, too.

On the Halloween front:
The whole point of making elaborate costumes was to wear them into Hersheypark during one of their Halloween weekends. A wrench in the gears: Hersheypark apparently doesn’t allow adults to dress up. Something about frightening the kids. Personally, I think that’s crap. Plenty of other parks have ‘kid-friendly’ hours during the day and scarier stuff going on at night. And our costumes won’t even be remotely scary! So*now we need to find something else to do. I mean, we’ll still go into the park (dressed like normal people), but I have put way too much time and effort and money into these costumes to not wear them *somewhere*. Any ideas? Damnit, someone throw a Halloween party so my creations won’t go to waste!