Kitchen Costuming

How much could it cost if I were to try to make a costume from home?

How much a costume you make at home could cost quite a bit depending on what your costume is and whether you choose to take advantage of cost saving methods in building your costume. 

Fabric can probably be one of the biggest expenses you might have towards the garment, but it doesn’t have to be. Look for fabric remnant stores, shop the internet, and use coupons and sales at local retail stores.  When JoAnn’s Fabrics is offering forty to fifty percent off coupons weekly through either their stores or online, it is just plain foolish not to use them.  You can have them mailed to your house and emailed to you by signing up at www.joann.com or any JoAnn’s location.  The Sunday’s paper usually has a flyer with coupons for the week (coupons can be used for other things besides fabric). I know other retail stores have these kinds of savings, but in Phoenix we have lost a lot of our competing fabric stores.  Check the stores in your area. I find remnant stores to be a better value than retail because you can buy some fabric by weight instead of per yard.  The down side here is that you may not know what kind of fabric you are buying or how to clean it. Todd (AZspidey) and I bought over 6 yard of 60 inch wide material for about $16.00 for his purple joker coat.  Remnant stores also have sales.  That much fabric at a retail store would have cost us at least $60.00 without a coupon or a sale at JoAnn’s (if we could even find the type of fabric or color we were looking for).

Obviously a costume can cost as much or as little as you want to put into it.  The point here is that a great looking costume does not have to cost a fortune, be smart about buying the materials and do it yourself.  If you just can’t sew or can only make parts of the costume yourself, think about bartering for services when you don’t have the money. Buying clothes from a thrift store is a great way to jump start a project also.

Wow! Where did the last two weeks go?  So much for those daily blogs on Blog Shorts!  Sorry folks, I just got slammed with all kinds of financial and health issues that needed to be taken care of and unfortunately I had to temporarily sacrifice a new blog or two on Kitchen Costuming.  Oh well, life happens…so now I can get back on track.

How do you know when to hand stitch versus sewing with a sewing machine? 

This is an interesting question because it really depends on what resources you have, the look you are going for, and whether it is easier to sew by hand or machine.  Even if you have a sewing machine available to you, it might not be the way to go.  For example: the gloves I made for AZspidey’s joker costume were sewn by hand.  The material was vinyl which is difficult to feed through the sewing machine.  There were also a lot of small turns in the movement of the article as you are sewing which makes neat stitching difficult.  Sewing by hand is always more time consuming, but necessary if you want to have a desired effect.  Some of the newer sewing machines won’t sew through heavy thicknesses of fabric or leather, in which case you may have to sew parts of the piece by hand.

If you are a filmmaker and are making a pirate movie (for example), you wouldn’t want your costumes to look machine sewn.  That doesn’t mean everything has to be sewn by hand, but you might want to do any noticeable stitching that way.  With the introduction of high definition technology, more details will be noticed on film that didn’t used to be.  That includes the making of accurate looking props too (and costumes would be included as props).

Where to start? Part IV  How much could it cost if I were to try to make a costume from home?  Upcoming Post!

The bat-cape from hell

Last year for Halloween, I was working on the Joker from The Dark Knight for Todd while his friend, Ron, set up camp on my living room floor to create his Batman costume out of vinyl and Foamies. Other than supplying materials that Ron didn’t have, I had very little to do with the creation of his costume. 

With Todd adding pieces to his joker on a monthly basis (we started this project in April), I hardly had time to do anything else. Ron found a Batman cape pattern on the internet, bought some velvet at the remnant shop and looked around for another seamstress to do the job for him. This is when my world started to get complicated.

Know who you are hiring

The seamstress was recommended by a friend, which is a good thing. Ron hired her to make his cape, but did not ask enough questions, which was a bad thing. Ron did ask her to call him if she needed him for fittings, which was smart.  But, she never called him and after $75.00 and several weeks later, she presented him with a cape you could wrap an elephant in.  Guess who got to re-size his cape? No it wasn’t her!  It was me (by now I felt sorry for him)! Yeah, technically, she should have fixed it for him which is good customer service, but she now wanted $15.00 more per hour to fix the mistakes.  The error Ron made in the first place was to try and use an untested pattern, but if the seamstress was on her game she would have realized that the pattern was just HUGE before she ever cut out the fabric. She also didn’t piece the panels together correctly, but this woman was hoping Ron wouldn’t notice (She actually admitted that! I really wished we had saved the pictures of her work).  She also threw in some four foot bonus dowel rods to hold the cape out.  Unfortunately, if Ron ever wanted to put his arms down, he would probably have tripped himself or someone else. It didn’t seem as if this lady knew how to sew velvet either.  Okay, so the moral of the story is, make sure your pattern will work, ask lots of questions like how long will this take?  Will you fix it without an added cost if it is not right (providing she is the one who made the mistake)? Have you ever sewn this kind of fabric (in this case velvet)? Can I see some of your work?  And then to make it all legal, GET EVERYTHING YOU AGREED ON IN WRITING!!!! DATED AND SIGNED BY BOTH OF YOU!

Not bad, if I do say so myself

I barely had time to finish Todd’s costume (that will be a separate blog) and Ron’s bat-cape before Halloween, so here it is.  Ron was grateful and I was glad I could help him, but let’s not do this again this year, guys!

In AZspidey’s quest for proper replication of his Ghostbuster costume, I needed to add zippers to his combat boots.  Since the correct color of the zipper appeared to be black with silver metal teeth, a 24 inch heavy jacket zipper was the only one we could find that met that description.  Of course we only needed about a 9.5 inch zipper, but silver metal is not easy to come by in that size.  For those of you who are going to try this yourself and are not so picky, zippers do come in brass in a more appropriate size.

You will also need an awl and waxed thread (made for the awl) that can be purchased at Tandy Leather Factory  www.tandyleatherfactory.com .  I suppose you can use a really heavy needle, but the awl is much easier to handle. A 12-inch ruler, small bottle of white glue, a hot glue gun, chalk (or something else to mark with), a regular needle and thread are other items you will need.

Preparing the boot for the zipper…

To begin, I lined up the zipper on the boot with the edge of the zipper touching edge of the boot seam line (figure 1). 

Figure 1

I measured in 3.5 inches along the top of the boot from the eyelet edge and marked it with chalk.  This measurement could be a little more or less depending on the size of your boot.  With a ruler, draw a line with chalk along the path where the zipper teeth will go, stopping approximately one half inch above the stitches on the boot (figure 2).  Make sure you are marking the inseam not the outside of your boot.  Once you cut on this line, you are now committed to the zipper going there (unless you want to buy a new pair of boots).

Figure 2

After cutting the first line, go back and trim about 1/8 inch on each side.  I just rounded the cut as I got to the bottom (figure 3), but you can cut straight down and the just clip off when you get to the end.

Figure 3

After cutting leather, the edge of the leather may not have absorbed the dye, so I went back and painted the edge of the cut with black acrylic paint (figure 4). 

Figure 4

Figure 5

I just happened to have Ceramcoat paint, but any acrylic paint will do (figure 5).  If your boots are vinyl and not leather, you can probably skip this part.

Sewing in the zipper…

We are almost ready to sew in the zipper.  Since the zipper comes apart at the bottom, I sewed around the teeth creating a stop (this was probably just being overly cautious).  Use the smaller needle that comes with the awl.  Once you have threaded it, only pull the thread out about one inch (figure 6). 

Figure 6

Dip the end of the thread in white glue, wipe off excess and let dry. Now, place the zipper inside the boot (I was able to push the entire end of the zipper underneath the arch pad).  By holding the zipper in place, starting at the bottom of the cut on the side closest to the heel (this is really important that you start on this side first), push the awl through the leather and the zipper.  With the needle still inserted into the hole, grab the end of the thread and pull it out until the length is one and a half times longer than the length you will be sewing. As you are pulling the needle back out (figure 7), a loop will be created on the back part of the stitch (inside boot).

Figure 7

 Put the thread through the loop and pull the needle back out; tightening each stitch as you go (figures 8 and 9).

Figure 8

Figure 9

Sometimes the needle loops on both sides, if the awl comes out and there is not just one thread, you put the back thread through the wrong loop. It looks like you really messed up, but is simple to fix.  Loosen the loop and pull the back thread out of the loop, tighten up the slack on your awl and start again.  I did this several times.  Sometimes it is hard to see which loop to put it in (technically it is the side of the needle that doesn’t have the groove in it).

Move the needle over about 1/16 inch and repeat stitch process all the way up to the top of the boot. The shorter you keep the thread coming from the spool into the stitch, the easier this is (Figure 10).

Figure 10

On the last stitch, with awl still in the hole, pull the thread out to about 4 inches and cut off.  You should now have two threads coming out the back (or inside) of the boot.  Tie these in a knot and dab them with hot glue.

Continue sewing other side of the zipper starting where you left off at the bottom and going across the zipper.  You can use the same hole you started with, just go the opposite way (you will have to make a wide stitch across the zipper teeth).

I did not cut the excess off the zippers until I finished sewing, but you can cut them about 3 inches above the top of the boot if they get in your way.  You will need to create a stop at where you want your zipper to end.  Before you make the zipper ends shorter, figure out which metal tooth will be at the top of your boot by zipping up the zipper. Mark teeth on both sides with a marker pen. Because the zipper is on an angle, one side will be longer than the other. Count down two teeth on the shorter side and sew with needle and thread around and around that tooth until the zipper pull stops.

 Finishing the zipper…

Now that the zipper is sewed in, you will need the hot glue gun.  Put a tiny dab of glue between top of boot and zipper. Squeeze a small amount of glue on zipper next to teeth starting about ¼ inch above top of boot.  Smooth glue out with tip of glue gun until you have covered about an inch down. Do this on back and front of both zipper sides.  You only want a thin layer here, so don’t go crazy with the glue.  You do not want to get this all over the teeth. On the teeth that you marked earlier, squeeze a little blob of glue (a second stop protection). Let cool, then cut zipper ends off flush and angled with the cut of your boot.  If you don’t like the looks of the “glue” stop, you can either paint them black or use a black permanent marker like I did. Woohoo!  Now you’re done!

Finished Boot