18 July 2011

A Boy for a King

I started a new project - something that was requested by my son.

He wanted a king's custome.

So I went online to look for a cape and pants and a shirt. It took me, surprisingly, a long time to find something that sounded easy enough to recreate and that I liked.
For the cape, I kind of followed THIS tutorial.

I think it turned out pretty good. He can use it both sides, in blue or in red. He loves it....

For the pants, I kind of followed THIS tutorial. I know I keep saying 'kind of' - I am just not that good in following all the directions - I want to add a personal note to the stuff that I am making.
And for the tunic, I used THIS. It was not as hard as I thought it would be. Actually, the shirt took me much less time than those pants.

I learned alot doing this costume. The cape was so easiest to do, for sure. It's just cutting the right lengths of the fabric and sewing it together, adding the ties in the process.
The pants took me a long time, but they are not that hard. I felt that the fabric, which is just plain solid cotton, was too thin. I mean these are play pants that will (hopefully) get a lot of usage, so I needed them a bit thicker. So I doubled the fabric. Actually, my thought was to make them in such a way that he could use either side, yellow or blue. But I just couldn't figure it out with the seems, so I gave up. It took me enough time to figure out the pattern in general.
The shirt was the hardest, especially because I jumped in the 'cold water' with the sleeves. I had never done sleeves before, but I thought a king's tunic without sleeves would just be 'royally' wrong.

The thing that I am most proud of is that I actually made my own bias tape this time, for the shirt's neckline and the sleeves. They sell bias makers in the store, but you can make it with your plain old iron at home. So that's what I did. It wasn't as hard as anticipated. I liked that it was not so thick to work with, because you know, you are working with alot of layers when using bias tape. It work out great.

And here is my happy model - he is excited that I finally finished it, because this was one of those projects that I kept procrastinating with for over a month.

1 comments:

C. Beth said...

It's adorable and he looks proud wearing it! Great job...pants and sleeves can be tricky! And homemade bias tape--impressive!