Halloween 2011 - Royal Wedding final touches

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!

It's official. My sewing machine is in for repairs. With the unexpected loss of my machine the day before our costumes needed to be done I had a lot of hand sewing ahead of me. (for several reasons, I opted to not use my spare)

Unfortunately that meant that I couldn't do all of the details I planned on for our costumes. At least not in time. I also didn't have Hubby's pants made by that point, so he wore a pair of black dress pants instead.

Some of the details couldn't be skipped though, such as adding the buttons on the back of the wedding gown, since that closure was necessary for the lace above the zipper. (of course I added them over the zipper too so it didn't look weird) The picture below shows the buttons and loops being added before sewing the lace in place.

I have no idea if I did the buttons "correctly" but it works, and I used what I had on hand.

Anyways, the pictures Hubby & I took in our costumes all turned out blurry for some reason. So, we'll probably take a few more tomorrow, which I will post soon!

To check out more posts (lots of details) about how I made our costumes, click on the "William and Kate" tab on the side of my blog, or "Wedding gown" if you're just interested in Kate's dress.

Halloween 2011 - Royal Wedding - Uniform details

Only 1 day left until I need these costumes done!! (Wow, I thought I had more time) Of course I somehow messed up my sewing machines tension and am not sure if I can fix it or not, ugh.

To check out the progress of our William and Kate costumes, click on the "William and Kate" label on the side of my blog.

Anyways, on to the details of Hubby's Prince William costume.

I searched everywhere for little gold buttons that would work for the coat front and sleeves. Unfortunately, I needed around 20 matching buttons and could only find 12 or so. So, I ended up buying some silver buttons in the same style and painting them with metallic gold paint.

To make the details on the sleeves of his uniform, I cut out felt (in the shape below) and added white piping.


Next, I hand sewed black and white cording onto the felt in the pattern shown below.

But wait, the details are supposed to be black and yellow (I couldn't find yellow cording at the store) So, out came my favorite art supplies: the puffy paint. I used a paint brush to carefully paint all of the white cording yellow.

Then, I added some of the buttons that I painted gold. Now it's ready to go onto the costume!

I really hope I can get my machine up and running again. I'm not the quickest at hand sewing...

Halloween 2011 - Royal Wedding - Uniform progress 2

After sewing the top part of Hubby's Prince William Halloween costume, I started working on the bottom part. Once that was sewn together and lined, I attached the top and bottom portions of the coat (no pics of that yet though), followed by a lot of hand sewing to get the lining in throughout.

Now that the coat is complete, well as far as the pattern goes, it's time to get to making the details that make it more like Prince William's uniform.

First of all, I cut black fabric to sew at the base of each sleeve. Using that fabric to determine the width, I cut black felt into the shape shown below. There will be one of those felt pieces on each sleeve.

To decorate the felt, I needed white piping and black cording. But, most importantly I needed yellow cording. I went to an insane amount of stores looking for the kind of cording that would be most similar (and least expensive) and ended up buying some from Hobby Lobby. However they only carried it in black and white.

Even though I was 99.9% sure that dye would not take to this cording, I went ahead and bought the white stuff anyways, and a pack of yellow dye.

The yellow color it turned out was perfect for what I needed. But, I still didn't get my hopes up. When I went to rinse the cording out after dying it, all the dye washed down the drain and my cord was stark white again. LOL. So, on to the new method.... painting it. I need to pick up a better yellow paint from the store, mine are too bright.

Halloween 2011 - Royal Wedding - Uniform progress

I've only got a few days left to get Hubby's Prince William (wedding day) Halloween costume done, eek! It'll get done though :)

For Hubby's costume, I'm using the McCall's Costumes pattern M4745 and making views A & D. I read a lot of reviews AFTER purchasing the pattern, and of course most of the reviewers said it was quite complicated. I agree. It actually isn't a difficult sew, but the instructions just aren't so great. So, if you're going to sew this costume, I'd suggest you fold up the directions and just do what makes sense. Oh, and unless you want gathered sleeves, you may want to make adjustments to the pattern beforehand.

This coat pattern is very fitted, so thankfully Hubby was kind enough to try it on for me at different stages of sewing.


It's a little hard to see, but the back of the coat has princess seams:



Checking to make sure the sleeves would still be long enough (I made adjustments to mine after cutting them out, so they weren't gathered)

Before sewing the sleeves on, I added little flap things (see below, what are they called??) on the top of the shoulders like Prince Williams uniform had.

After everything was sewn together for the top portion of the coat (and fit Hubby correctly) it was time to move on to sewing the bottom of the coat!

To check out more of the process of making our Royal Wedding day William and Kate Halloween costumes, click on the label "William and Kate" on the side of my blog. There are lots of details for both costumes, there's still time to make your own!

Halloween 2011 - Royal Wedding - bouquet

Another accessory I decided to make for our Royal Wedding Halloween costumes was a bridal bouquet.

Although I was hoping to find silk flowers of the actual types used in Kate Middleton's bouquet (sweet William, lily-of-the-valley, myrtle & hyacinth) I had no such luck. So, I just bought some silk leaves and little white flowers and went with it. I adore how much meaning went into every detail of William and Kate's actual wedding though *sigh*, how perfect.

Anyways, I ended up with 2 stems each of 2 different white flowers and one stem of leaves. I already had some floral wire and tape on hand (though I didn't end up using the wire).





I cut the flower stems apart and started bundling them (not knowing how large I'd be making this bouquet) and taping them together.



Then I added some leaves, then more flowers and went back and forth arranging the stems while taping more into the bouquet.


About 10 minutes later, this is what I ended up with, which for costume purposes works just fine:

Here's the side view:

I bent a couple of the long stems around to make a handle for the bouquet and wrapped them in floral tape.

To see more posts on the making of our William and Kate Halloween costumes, click on the "William and Kate" label on the side of my blog. There are quite a few instructions (especially for making the wedding gown) and they're fun DIY costumes.

For a link to other essential accessories for the wedding day "Princess Kate" costume, check out this post