creative but trying not to be common.: Villains, but huggy. Or, costumes 2015!

Quite proud of this year's efforts... P just wanted a long black cloak with a hood -- Grim Reaper, Palpatine/other random Sith, or Voldemort. Easily achieved -- harking back to his original Jedi robes from long ago, it's a long selvage-to-selvage rectangle with slashes on the sides for sleeves, which were half the width of the body. I sloped both shoulder and cuff lines slightly. The hood is nice and deep and it has a snap at the throat so he can wear it as a cape too. It's exactly what he wanted, with lots of growing room.

With less than two weeks to go, K changed her mind from Scarlet Overkill (i was excited for that rocket dress!)

to Evie, daughter of Snow White's Evil Queen stepmother, from the Descendants TV movie...

and its animated follow-up, Wicked World.

and of course I agreed because of that very swooshy jacket. Kara Saun, the movie's costume designer/wardrobe mistress, put together the most interesting shapes and textures...

looking at these sketches I thought it was more like a cape, but looking at how it moves in the movie (and probably taking into consideration changes made during production), it's really more like a moto jacket with bell sleeves. So mine is a tribute to, or inspired by, Ms. Saun's distressed leather multi-layered creation.

I went with costume satin -- a dark royal blue rather than the navy/denim shade of the leather, and remnants of red for the lining. I used a basic raglan draft and a combination of slash-and-spread and plain swinging-out lines to get the right shape for the sleeves. (I wanted a fluid look, not the boxiness I sometimes get with set-in sleeves... )

I constructed the lined sleeves first, then sewed them to the body... I dithered about lining the whole thing, but I'm glad I did because it made it that much warmer, and prevented the back applique from irritating or snagging. Rather than the sculpted/princess seams of the leather source garment, I sewed the front and back as straight pieces then pin-fit deep bodice darts.

Franny helped with the hand-painting of the sleeves and wide stand-up collar -- we used Speedball waterbased screenprinting paint and regular flat and stiff round brushes. This is heat-set and washable!

I'm rather proud of the way the 24" brass zipper looks -- I used it as a non-functional edging for the open collar instead of trimming at the top. F has historical difficulty with jacket zippers, so i made sure this one stuck out from the bottom enough. Added a few brass studs to the front -- it's tiring doing those one-by-one, so I stopped at 6 per side...

jacket front: metal studs, 24" brass jacket zipper used as both closure and "piping"/finishing for the neckline.

The iconic cracked crown on the back is an applique of gold-on-black allover sequinned fabric, outlined with gold dimensional fabric paint then glitter.

Back applique and velcroed belt.

The other components: a dark blue mock turtleneck with finger-loop sleeves (that I made into a
leotard just because!), tights hand-painted to look wrecked, and a circle skirt with an elastic waist. I couldn't find any red/blue/black/white print, so I color-blocked a dark blue batik and a Robert Kaufman vortex/starry sky print. I then had some fun embroidering touches of red...