Star Trek Costumes and Dragon*Con progress!

I haven't posted in a while because I've been stuck in this awkward phase wherein I have a lot of projects in progress but very few actually completed.  My latest "completed" project was the two Star Trek costumes I made for husband and myself for the movie premiere of Star Trek Beyond the last week in July.  And wow, what a headache these two costumes turned out to be.

He was on board with the idea until I told him he had to wear it in public

You all may remember my fabric dyeing woes from June.  I had the absolute worst time selecting fabric for these costumes.  Aside from the fact that the colors used in the official costumes were kind of a strange, dark teal rather than true blue, the shiny pattern on the fabric was impossible to replicate.  So I gave in, decided that if one of us had a red costume and the other one had a blue costume we would at least look like Star Trek, even if they weren't the official colors.  So we did that.  I ordered the same kind of adamantium god-awful fabric in true blue and true red, and they look fine.  Really, fine.  I was no longer Carol Marcus, but I could be generic Red Shirt Lady #3.

The second problems came from the sewing patterns.  They were both "Learn to Sew" easy things, yet somehow the sizing was completely off.  I used this pattern for husband's shirt, and I guess because it was supposed to be for pajamas or gorillas his shirt came out easily 3x too big.  I spent most of my first evening of sewing cutting down the sleeves and then having poor husband try it on again.  I used this pattern for my dress, and even though I measured myself pretty carefully I also ended up taking in about six inches of excess fabric on the side!  I suppose I should be happy I didn't accidentally make it too small, but geez.

The Fabric from Hell, not to be undone, also did its best to be unhelpful in the utmost.  Since it's incredibly stretchy, anything other than sewing it to itself became a problem.  When I went to sew on the metallic ribbon, the fabric stretched out horribly as it attached to the ribbon, creating weird waves.  The same problem happened when I tried to finish the neckline with bias tape on both costumes.  You can see it especially well on my costume in the picture above.  Having researched the problem, I believe I need an even feed sewing machine foot, or a "walking foot" that keeps the fabric from stretching unevenly as you sew.  Next time... next time...

Hahaha then there was that time I tried to make a turtleneck without a pattern and I realized that no matter what you do, the thread it requires to sew a seam around your neck and lie flat will always be too small for your head.  Duh.  So I remain mystified as to how turtlenecks can stretch over your head and then lie snug against your neck.  I suspect magic, or elastic thread, if that's such a thing.  I ended up buying the cheapest black turtlenecks available on Amazon and then cutting off the sleeves.  So as my husband says, "Redneck Steve Jobs".

In the mean time, I am trying to spruce these costumes up for Dragon*Con, which is only a little more than a week away!  I'm removing the bias tape from the neckline and just putting in a simple band of the same fabric.  Hopefully that will work.

Stay tuned for my Rey costume progress!

Yes, I've actually gotten farther along than this

I'm Dyeing Over Here

My latest costuming adventure has turned into something of a headache, and not only because chemistry was involved.

Testing the dye.  Turns out the wine was mandatory.

So since my last post I have a spent some time plotting out my next costumes because there is a finite amount of time between now (first week of July) and Dragon*Con (first week of September) and realistically this signals the end of the costuming season.  True, if I wanted to start another costume after that point I could use it for Halloween, but since there are no predictable events requiring a costume between November 2016 and September 2017, I can foresee a lull in the costume-making business.  I mean, I could try to plan ahead for next Dragon*Con but a) I don't know what will be relevant next year (after all - they already changed the stupid Star Trek uniforms yet again!) and b) maybe I'll be a different (hopefully smaller) size by then.  So really not useful to plan ahead too far.

With that in mind and given my erratic costume making schedule, I budgeted out two more costumes I could make in time for the convention, which gives them each one month to make.  I decided to try to make a Star Trek costume first because I could wear it to Dragon*Con as well as the premiere of the new movie on July 22nd.  There was also this amazing moment about two weeks ago when I was browsing McCall's patterns online and found out that they not only had a Rey costume pattern from Star Wars, but that the entire site was having a $2 pattern sale.  Um, sounds like destiny to me.  As a bonus, I could wear that costume to the next Star Wars movie premiere if we end up going.

Awesome, so first up is the Star Trek costume that will hopefully be ready by July 23rd.