Costume design. (Ooh!)

Sometimes I think I missed my calling in life. We were watching the special features on the Captain America DVD the other day (isn't this how all really interesting and cool conversations start? "I was watching the special features on this nerdy movie when...!"*), and I found the discussion about the dilemma of recreating Captain America's costume for this particular moment in time to be, yes, gripping. I mean, really, they got to design the costume, use special fancy-pants fabrics--including potentially top-secret military grade fabrics--and they got to go through several iterations until they got it absolutely perfect! Wow! That sounds like a lot more fun than grading papers!

Yeah. I know. I have just admitted to a strange new world of geekiness.

In the spirit of that Captain America special feature, let me share with you my own story of costume design.

Caleb's kindergarten puts on a play every year. All the kids get parts, and they spend lots of time practicing songs and dances and so forth. This year, they're doing Snow White, and I volunteered to help make costumes. I ended up making two bird costumes and two squirrel costumes.

The idea was to stay fairly minimal, so we decided on some kind of animal hat plus some kind of accessory. You'll just have to believe me when I say I made some cute bird hoods and wings out of blue felt because I forgot to take pictures before I gave them to the teacher. They were pretty straightforward, though: I just made blue felt hoods with a velcro attachment under the chin, and made a face on top (big eyes and a beak, in the spirit of the birds from the Disney movie).

I had to think about the squirrels for a while, though. The hoods couldn't all be one color and still look squirrelly, and I'd have to put ears on, too. And there was the problem of getting the tails to stand up.

I took a hood pattern I already had and altered it so that it would have an extra piece to make the cheeks white, and, again, I tried to copy the squirrel face from the Disney movie. It occurred to me at the last minute to line the ears with white. I was pretty pleased with how the hoods turned out, which made it easier to tackle the tails (which I was a little worried about).

Being a squirrel/chipmunk is fun!

Honestly, the hoods kind of looked like chipmunks rather than squirrels (no big deal, really), so the tails needed to be the piece de resistance, if you will. But then I kind of just made them up as I went along. I measured Caleb from waist to shoulders and from shoulder to shoulder, and made the tails to fit (more or less). I filled them with packing peanuts because I wanted the tails to be light enough that they'd attach to the hoods with velcro. That way they'd be more adjustable in terms of size, and they wouldn't be as heavy on kindergarten backs. Then I attached the tails to folded over, interfaced belts, and ta-da! I invented a squirrel costume!

The packing peanuts make the tail a little noisy, but it's really light.

Technical [read: boring] details: I tried a zigzag stitch on the face of this particular hood. Turns out I kind of suck at the zigzag.

I should've practiced first.

The tail didn't curl under (or, more accurately, flop over) very effectively if it was very full, so I had to understuff. On a different note, anybody need some packing peanuts?

A happy model.

Finally, I had to tack the tail to itself on the underside so it wouldn't flop all around.

Ignore the bad shadows. Ta-da!

 Fun. I've never successfully made something without a pattern before, so this was pretty exciting for me.



*Paul has ruined me. Ruined me!