Bright White Lights: fancy dress

Hello lovelies,

This post might sound like the crazed ramblings of a madwoman, and um ... that's probably completely accurate because right now I'm feeling so COMPLETELY inspired & motivated and and and ... WOW.

Had to take my friend Rose to the airport this morning at the crack of sparrow's fart (intentionally mixed metaphor: crack of dawn & sparrow's fart, but ruder! hee hee) so got hom by 7:30 & decided to catch up on bloggy blogs. I have a self-imposed rule that I only read The Sew Weekly on a desktop computer, otherwise I miss out on so many of the lovely images via my RSS Reader. ANYWAY.

Oona took on my innocent challenge to produce Oona-fied work wear suitable to my OH SO boring work environment. Oona! Dudes. The number of girl crushes I have on sewing bloggers is phenomenal, but Oona is high up on the list :)

SO! Also inspired by a lovely comment from Zoe a few weeks back, here are some images of several projects I've been working on since my last installment...

The main focus of October was Hallowe'en. We LOVE Hallowe'en, and fancy dress is a big feature in our world for pretty much any occasion - so, let's face it, Hallowe'en is going to be a pretty big occasion. Because Rob has a beard now (and it looks so good on him :)), he tries to come up with costumes which enable le beard - hence Osama Bin Laden for his birthday in July.

Blessed are the meek.

This time, he went for something a little more controversial: Zombie Jesus.

The very picture of zombified grace.

After my initial 'eek' moment, I though, 'Eh, well' and went ahead with modifying my self-drafted Osama tunic & troos-pattern into a Jesus-robe-thing pattern. The robe was then made from two Ikea curtain offcuts from the charity shop, the toga-wrap-thing from a Primark sheet (it was impossible to find enough red fabric that wasn't new. Grrrr) and the trim was from a VERY lucky c/shop find - a bag full of upholstery trim for £1. Hello dumb-ass, wanna sell me some really expensive stuff for nothing? GREAT!!!

My favourite part was embroidering the sacred heart: I've always loved these images and this was so fun to do. Took AGES, but it killed lots of time commuting to/from Europe for work.

when the sun was still out at 6pm. *sniff sniff*

I'd decided to go with a Ghostbuster costume on the premise that it would be quick & easy: pair of cheap overalls & a vaccum cleaner strapped to my back, TA-DAAAA!

Yeah, right. When did 'quick & easy' EVER work in our house? So, instead it became this:

Embroidered Ghostbuster Badge for Pocket

Tracing Simplicity 5151 ... on pegboard????

I bought Simplicity 5151 on eBay while looking for a jumpsuit/overall pattern, which was scarce as hen's teeth then and as is to be found in abundance at ANY other time ... what's with that??? I was so excited when the pattern arrived that I didn't notice until the photo above was taken that the instructions in the envelope were for another pattern altogether. So, I winged it.

FYI: excluding the 3 garments I made in primary school needlework classes, this garment would represent my 8th (complete) garment. Eight. As in onetwothreefourfivesixsevenEIGHT. And no freaking instructions???

Thank god I read blogs. Honestly, this pattern was the bomb and gave me no grief whatsoever, it really was very straightforward. In the end, I only omitted the button placket because there wasn't time to sew it on over the centre front zip and make the pretty button holes. More on that in a sec.

I finished the dress at approx 11:00 on the morning of the party, due to start at dusk. My dramatically-minded husband put that vague description on the invitation, so we really had no idea what time people would start turning up, and the house still needed to be decorated, AND I still had no proton pack.

Enter chaos.

Proton Pack in Progress ... recognise any sewing items, folks?

MANY glue sticks later, the pack is ready to be sprayed black.

We took this sucker outside and sprayed the heck out of it with - wait for it - Poundland-variety black matt car spray paint (seriously, £1! kicks ass). Rob sacrificed an old backpack so that their straps could be glued onto the front of this tea tray-rubbish-glue gun confection, and that was it. The most fun EVER.

Fast forward several bored guests (who arrived early, looking amazing only to find their hosts running around like lunatics trying to get Zombie Jesus' contact lenses stop moving around) to later in the evening and here are the proud results of the whole shebang:

With 50p LED light and everything!!!

The goggles only last an hour or so as they were way too flimsy ... but still cool :)

Who you gonna call?

Last point to mention: we ran out of time to make an appropriate gun-handheld-thing to be attached to the proton pack ... so I got an old vacuum hose from some junk in the garage and wielded it at people incessantly for the rest of the evening. They weren't annoyed at all.

As posted about here, we had a 'Dead Famous' birthday party for Rob on Saturday.

He'd come up with the idea while we were visiting my family in South Africa over Xmas, and had ~~obsessively~~ diligently been working on the playlist ever since. His playlists are amazing. Anyway, we sent out the FB invites to the usual suspects about 6 weeks before the day and then the mayhem started.

Rob, of course, had to dress as someone controversial. There are no 'normal' fancy dress costumes in my husband's repertoire (in fact, I think I'll do a post about that soon, as most if not all our fancy dress gigs have been thrifted/vintagey/handmade). So, his choice was either Jesus or Osama Bin Laden --- mostly because they both involved having a beard - which he had (until Monday - but that's another story) - and a simple costume.

LONG story short, he picked Osama. We decided to make the costume as simple as possible, so we found a white king-sized sheet in the local charity shop and he bought a US army jacket on eBay. Unfortunately, I had a bit of a glitch with my self-drafted tunic pattern ... well, not that pattern so much as the idiot who thought she'd found a piece of fabric big enough for the front collar facing without realising said piece of fabric was actually the tunic back. D'OH!!!! Several minutes of frenetic piecing & decorative top-stitching later, we ended up with quite a pretty (if basic) result. Huzzah!