{"id":19985,"date":"2013-10-16T06:05:32","date_gmt":"2013-10-16T11:05:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/?p=19985"},"modified":"2013-10-13T18:21:01","modified_gmt":"2013-10-13T23:21:01","slug":"this-years-costumes-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/?p=19985","title":{"rendered":"This Year’s Costumes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Fez\"<\/a>Making costumes is one of my favorite activities, so every year I go all-out on Shadowboy’s Halloween duds. For the past few Halloweens I have predicted that he would eventually break my heart, costume-wise, and this is the year he finally went and did it. Doctor Who<\/i> is his new passion, and he insisted on dressing as the Eleventh Doctor. I’m perfectly happy with his Whovian fandom, but the Doctor essentially wears street clothes. Street clothes!<\/em><\/p>\n

To make it even worse, I also make costumes for a friend’s niece, and this year she wanted to be a cat. A shapeless overall with a tail and ears swam across my vision.* Sob.<\/p>\n

So I did my best. Shadowboy’s outfit<\/a> is, sadly, mostly purchased; the boots are from Morenza<\/a>, and everything else except the coat came from local clothing stores. I did make the coat; a simple blazer<\/a> pattern done in tweed. My only change was to add elbow patches. (Incidentally, if you’re looking for an exhaustive guide to the Doctor’s clothing, check out Steve Ricks’ blog<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

I had a little more leeway with the cat since she didn’t have to hew to a particular style, and I parlayed that into a lot<\/em> of leeway. I just couldn’t countenance a plain-overall-with-ears-and-tail sort of costume, so I decided that if the fabric was leopard- or tiger-print, I could do anything I wanted.<\/p>\n

I normally provide pattern numbers for reference, but the resulting kitty princess<\/a> is such a bastardized melding of patterns that pinpointing its parentage is difficult. A lot of its DNA comes from (discontinued) Butterick 4320<\/a>, but I added a stretchy velvet panel to the bodice and shortened the skirt dramatically. I added an underskirt which was just a simple circle skirt with a whole bunch of black tulle ruched on top,** a long tail (just a plain tube stuffed with fiberfill), and a fabric-covered headband with ears. She also requested a matching costume for her favorite dolly, and I was happy to oblige. That was Simplicity 1711<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My reward for doing this sewing every year is professional photos, which I add to my big gallery o’ costumes. The photos above, plus these of Shadaughter and Shadowboy<\/a> and Shadowboy and friend<\/a> make me awfully happy.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

\n*Thank goodness for Shadaughter. Not only did she request a gender-bent Tenth Doctor costume<\/a> (covered here<\/a>), she recently informed me that she wants to go to next year’s Comic-Con as Daenerys Targaryen. I can always count on her for a challenge.<\/p>\n

**A friend recently mentioned that she liked a particular costume made largely from pink tulle. I said, “If you don’t mind using black instead, I’ve got 100 yards of black tulle in the basement.” She replied, “Why would anyone have 100 yards of black tulle…never mind, I forgot who I was talking to.” Clearly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Making costumes is one of my favorite activities, so every year I go all-out on Shadowboy’s Halloween duds. For the past few Halloweens I have predicted that he would eventually break my heart, costume-wise, and this is the year he finally went and did it. Doctor Who is his new passion, and he insisted on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whatever"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19985"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20094,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19985\/revisions\/20094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}