Ness

This is 'Shulk', a character from a video game that my older son just insisted he had to be:

I am SOOOOO glad we managed to cajole him into something achievable.  Say hello to 'Ness':

This one should be no big problem.  Red shoes?  Check.  White socks?  Check.  Backpack?  Got it.  Red hat?  Yup, although we have to do something about the bill.  Blue denim shorts?  Easy.  Blue and yellow shirt?  Uh, surprisingly difficult to locate, so I have to make one.  Well, the sewing machine is out so I guess it's gonna get used.

After a little bit of thought, I decided that my best bet was to take a yellow shirt and a blue shirt, and cut one of them into stripes to be sewn over the other.  For the most part this means we wound up with rings that could be slid over, pinned in place and stitched:

The overall effect should be pretty good

Detail of the lowest ring pinned into place

I figured it was best to pin and sew one ring at a time, working up from the bottom.  This gave me a well-defined hem on both pieces to line up, and I need all the help I can get keeping things straight.

So far, so good.  Let's try a couple more stripes:

Yeah, I kinda like that.

So we wrapped up the stripes, for now, although I am considering some partial ones at the tops of the sleeves.

My wife did the hat, and the boy made that button he's wearing, along with the bat, yoyo and food that don't show in the picture.  Here' the overall effect:

Bardock

For Halloween 2016 my younger son wants to be 'Bardock' from Dragonball Z.

Here's the character:

+-6

The good news is that I ought to be able to reuse the pants from his Gohan costume, seen here:

Admittedly the color is a bit light, but I think we can make do.  The pants actually fit him better than they did a couple of years back, so the effect should be OK.

The upper body is supposed to be armor, so I think I'm going to try to sandwich some batting between two layers of cloth for that, then add some white piping to complete the effect.  The green armored bits would like to be something relatively stiff, like plastic or cardboard I guess.  Sadly, I've got three weeks with limited free time, and this is by far the simpler of the two costumes I need to make.  I really hope I get them done on time, and don't expect much sleep between now and Halloween.

As of October 4th, I've come up with a planned design, acquired (most of) the materials I need, and have begun assembly of the costume.  In an unfortunate turn of events I have not been feeling terribly well the last few days and it shows in my lack of progress.  More than half of the stitchwork I've done has been torn out, as has a fair amount of my hair.

I began by cutting out a piece of foam to act as the core for the armor, as seen here:

I also cut out cloth to sandwich it:

And then added some trim pieces:

Combined with the white piping, I think it gives a pretty good effect when assembled.  However, that assembly is turning out to be a bit of a challenge for me.  I am simply not doing a good job.  I managed to attach the back piece without piping and had to redo it.  Several pieces were attached backwards and I had to redo them as well.  To whomever invented the stitch picker:  Bless you, sir or madam, you have saved me.

All hail the most important tools in my arsenal.  Emphasis on 'arse'.

I woke up on Tuesday morning feeling quite a bit better than I did on Monday evening.  I don't know how that will work for the rest of the day (my wife was ill for two weeks recently and I fear I may have caught the same bug) but for the morning I can at least plan out a bit more work on the piece.  I will have to do paid work a little later in the day, but that's from home so I don't have much of a commute.

That being said, I only have a short time and I don't have my mannequin...  err, I mean son here to test-fit, so I don't want to do too much cutting or stitching right now.  So I'm just pinning the thing together and dealing with the really obvious.  Here's what it looks like in its current state:

The back is nearly complete, really.  Just need to add some black stripes to the green part and lay in a bit of piping

The front, with the green belly armor just laid out on top

Once I had gotten the front partially closed up I realized that I had miscalculated a bit.  The boy is quite slender, but the outfit was still too tight.  I'm thinking it's the foam that is largely responsible.  Well, the foam and my nearly complete ignorance of how to go about all of this anyway.  So I had to take things apart and regroup.  Enter the stitch picker again.

What I wound up doing was making my life a bit easier by working in sections, which will be stitched together.  The back didn't need much more than trimming and stitching, and as I write this it is sitting there complete.  The shoulder straps are stuffed with their own foam and are ready to attach.  So now I'm working on the bit people will actually notice.

I sewed some trim onto the green belly armor, noticed it's a bit asymmetrical and decided I don't really even care.  Then I attached it to the main front piece.  The rest of the front was now a blank canvas onto which I could sew the rest of the white trim.

With a bit more work I wound up with something that reasonably approximates what I was looking for.  I suppose I should learn a bit more about costume design, and sewing, and life in general really.    By Tuesday the 25th I had the chest piece basically finished except for one seam and the mechanism to close it (zippper?  Velcro?)  Now I just needed to make the leg armor pieces, attach them to the chest piece, and figure out the tail/belt.  I guess that's progress.

Since I was at a pretty good stopping point here, I decided to take a day or two off and work on the older guy's Ness costume.  Once I convinced him that Shulk wasn't happening he agreed to Ness and even made some of the props himself.

Eventually I got back to the Bardock costume, and it was time for some hand-stitching.  The machine is faster and better at most tasks, but closing this thing up is not one of them, I think.  First I cut some foam 'pecs' out and stuck them into the chest area.  I added some stitchies just to keep them from falling down into the belly area.  Then (after verifying the fit) I closed the loop by sewing up the adjoining sides.  It works as armor, and it works as a seat-back pad as well.

The last two bits needed are the leg armor and the tail.  The tail sounds simple enough, just a brown fuzzy piece long enough to wrap around the waist and maybe tuck into itself.  The leg armor consists of a couple of shields that attach to the sides of the shirt and cover much of the outer thighs.  I tackled the armor first.

I cut two pieces of foam into matching shapes first, after having used Illustrator to draft and print up the shape of them.

I also rolled up the foam and held the rolls in place with rubber bands, to try and get it to set into a curved shape to cover the thighs.

Then I laid them out on the green cloth to cut two pieces (inner and outer) for each leg.  Those were sewn together inside out along the front and back edges, creating a pocket for the armor.  I jointed the armor pieces, using a rectangular piece of foam above the curved one, just to try and achieve comfort and ease of movement.  Last year's 'Emmet' costume taught me a lesson in ergonomics.

These pieces were hand-sewn to the main shirt body, a tedious task at best.  I was able to get my wife to help me with this as I continued to work on the Ness costume.  Once everything was attached, the only work needed on this piece was the black lines that are a common feature on Saiyan armor.  As of this writing that is not done, but I'm guessing a ruler and Sharpie marker are all that will be needed.  However, we're going to do a test on a leftover piece of the green cloth to make sure we don't have problems with bleeding.

Last step before adding the lines:

And the final result makes me pretty pleased:

Thomas the Tank Engine

One year it's Cranky the Crane, another it's Thomas the Tank Engine.  This familiar character is well loved by many children, and mine were certainly no exception.

It took a little while to think up the concept, but eventually I hit upon treating the train as a vehicle, and dressing the boy up as an engineer.  We did, however, print out a gray scale version of his face to use on the front of the engine, and made it number '10' for family reasons.

This costume was crafted primarily from cardboard, and was challenging more for the sheer size of it than anything else.  Rather than paint, we used craft foam to give it the color, and I was really very pleased with the overall results.

The proud engineer about to get on board

We used a plastic garbage bag crumpled up to simulate coal.

The best part is that by its very nature, the costume came with a built in place to store all of the treats he received from the neighbors.

Cranky the Crane

If you have kids, you probably know about the Island of Sodor, with Thomas the Tank Engine and all the associated characters.  My older son decided he just had to be 'Cranky the Crane'.  This put me into a funk for a while, as I gave thought to how I would pull it off.  I think I succeeded in the end.

Construction of the costume was almost entirely cardboard, hot glued into shape and spray painted gray.  IIRC, the black areas were just sharpie marker.  At the base of the crane, I left the four sides unattached so that his legs would have some freedom to move, which was partially successful.  The bucket was simply hung from some string.

All of the pictures I have of this one came from the parade his elementary school held that year, starting in the classroom after getting dressed up.  The fact that he actually managed to walk all the way around the schoolyard means the thing basically worked.

Clearly he was in a very happy place wearing this, and enjoyed putting on a show for everyone.  The reactions to his costume were very positive, too.