Halloween costume!

A bit late to be sharing, but my son wanted to be a Fortnite-inspired Doctor Doom for Halloween, and I spent more or less every waking moment for a week working on that costume in one way or another. First, a concept drawing:

The fabric available in town was olive green so I did the concept in olive and darker green trim, but Indy wanted gold trim, which was going to look terrible with the olive, so I went to Dublin to search for a darker green fabric, and came away satisfied and also with way too much fabric but I figured I was better off over-buying and having enough to screw up with. Instead I have enough to make myself something, so that’s not bad.

The second, and most emotionally difficult thing, that I needed to do was to learn how to fill a bobbin. Part of the reason–possibly most of the reason, aside from everything else–that I sew very little is I’ve never been able to get the bobbin filled on my own, not on the sewing maching I own. I’ve basically not sewn anything since my mother died because I couldn’t fill a bobbin & needed her help. So I braced myself to spend upsetting and taxing hours figuring out how to fill the fucking thing.

…I watched a 30 second youtube video and did it right the first time.

I have no idea what I’d been doing wrong.

Anyway, the sewing itself mostly wasn’t very hard, except the emotional stuff I’ll talk more about in a minute. I put the cloak together:

and had it proclaimed “so good it feels like it should be official Marvel merchandise!”, which was pretty flattering. :)

So I got the basic tunic sewn and pinned a great deal of the trim in place and was feeling pretty pleased with myself, except when I switched to gold thread, I loaded the bobbin into the bobbin holder wrong & didn’t realize something was wrong until I’d sewn quite a bit. Even then I wasn’t SURE something was wrong because the thread and the trim were such a close match I could barely see the thread so maybe I was kind of imagining things. But then it became clear, as I did the opposite sides of the trim, that it was bunching and gathering so SOMETHING was wrong. I couldn’t think of anything I’d done DIFFERENTLY at ANY POINT and I thought for a long time maybe it was just because the trim was, you know, trim, and maybe it didn’t sew as well, but I eventually took another piece of fabric that the thread didn’t blend into and yeah no there was definitely something wrong.

It took me at least half an hour to figure out the problem was the bobbin, not the top tension, and another while to realize I’d not run the bobbin thread through the bobbin holder tension thingy. sigh

Worked just fine once I figured out what I’d done wrong. It just didn’t even occur to me for the longest time that I’d changed bobbins as well as thread. sigh

Anyway, then I had to rip out everything I’d done, about 85% of what’s visible in the below picture, because it was too janky to leave in place, so that was very defeating.

I finished the hems on everything except I fucked up one of the hood hems and dislike it so I had to take it back out, and ended up hand-sewing it to make sure it lay correctly, but in the grand scheme of things that was less frustrating than having to rip it out again.

I did, however, spend the entire time I was doing the hem of the cloak, particularly, but all the hems in general, burdened by the weight of my mother’s judgement, because I didn’t double-hem and left raw edges and hoo boy the judgement of a woman eight years dead is sure weighty, my friends. So I wasn’t at my best then, or indeed through a lot of making this, because my mother was a big proponent of “anything that’s worth doing is worth doing right” and I didn’t do most of this right, honestly. I did it well enough, and I am, have been, trying to embrace “perfect is the enemy of done” in many aspects of my life, but…yeah, a lot of weight and judgement in there, emotional turmoil, the whole nine fun yards.

BUT ANYWAY, I finished it in time for school: