So. My Return of the Jedi Luke Skywalker costume is still tragically stalled. Though not because of frustration because I have actually figured out a solution to my fit issues. No it has mostly been kept on hold because of other real life responsibilities and also because I decided to make a whole different Luke Skywalker costume for my cousin’s wedding.
You remember, the wedding from my last post. The one about the Endor Poncho. Yeah, that one. Anyway,
To be more wedding appropriate I decided to make the outfit Luke wears at the medal ceremony at the end of A New Hope. Which is something I had been wanting to make for YEARS so it was a great excuse for it. I absolutely love this outfit. In particular, I love this stupid yellow jacket.
I love the color, I love the stupid pleats that run from shoulder to elbow, I love how ridiculously poofy it seems to be, I love that like a goober he wears it with black and brown. I am just tragically attached to this look. As evidence by how often I lament about it on twitter. So my cousin’s wedding was the perfect excuse to finally sit down any make it.
Now, I thought this was going to be easy. I was wrong. It was deceptively complex. Like the poncho ended up being. But let’s just get into the nitty gritty details then.
So, I am fairly certain that the actual jacket worn in the movie is either a leather or a thick canvas material. I didn’t want to use either of those things. So what I did was I bought my favorite fabric ever, quilter’s cotton, for my main fabric and my lining fabric. My tan accent fabric is also quilter’s cotton. I just love the color variety I get with quilter’s cotton and it’s easy to work with and I don’t care if it wrinkles, I love it. I also bought yellow fleece to sandwich between my layers to create the poofy volume. It turns out at JoAnn’s they accidentally had two slightly different shades of yellow on the same bolt so parts of the jacket are actually different colors. But you can’t tell on the finished garment so its all fine. It is. Its fine. I also originally got interfacing for my collar piece but didn’t end up using it. The pattern I used for my base was a bomber jacket pattern, Simplicity 8418. It was the right basic shape and was very easy to alter.
I bought the pattern to make an oversized red varsity jacket for another costume project so for Luke I actually traced the pattern at it’s smallest size onto wax paper. Which was very easy and super satisfying for some reason. It also meant I could leave out the lower jacket band and the wrist cuffs. I would later have to make cuffs of my own to sew onto the jacket because the sleeves without them were just way too short. But that’s later.
Next I had to make the pocket that is on the front of the jacket. Which I had to make totally on my own with no pattern because the bomber jacket doesn’t have a front welt pocket. So that was fun. There were no instructions on how to do it in my sewing book which was distressing but I watched about six different youtube tutorials and figured it out. I am very happy with how nice it turned out. It fit my phone perfectly, which is really the only thing I can imagine ever really using it for.
I apparently don’t have pictures of the process of making my little tan arrow like appliques for the front of his jacket but I just made tubes with pointed ends, turned them right side out so the raw edges were hidden away, ironed them flat and then temporarily attached them with this like…sewing glue stick? I got it in the notions section of JoAnn’s. It was actually pretty helpful. Then I topstiched around the edge using my invisible zipper foot so I could get right up on that edge.
Next came the single most difficult part of this entire process, which was the sleeves. Or to be more exact, the pleating details on the sleeves. I decided that the best way to go about creating them after looking at an obnoxious amount of screenshots and replicas was to create, essentially, two long yellow pleated pot holders which I then sewed onto my jacket sleeves before they were sewn to the main body of the jacket.
This worked out really well! It also took literal hours. And was the source of several hand cramps and iron burns. (I actually used my iron a lot during the whole process of making this jacket and I am super proud of myself because I can almost never bring myself to use it.) Originally my sister made me a beautiful pleating board out of poster board to use so the process would be quick and easy. Unfortunately, the pleats ended up being too big. So I sat down and hand pleated both strips of fabric by eye. It took about an hour per side to pleat and I used an obnoxious amount of pins. But they look so, so good so the whole thing was worth it. I bound the edges in home made bias tape and sewed them suckers on.
65 inches of material pleated down into 16 inches. Twice.
But once that was done the rest of the jacket was a literal breeze. I sewed the collar which I had to alter a little bit to be bigger since I wasn’t using a rib knit stretch material so the pattern piece was super small. I ended up just measuring how many more inches I needed, halving that number and then placing the pattern that many inches away from my folded edge. Easy. I also ended up not using the interfacing I bought because it was way too stiff. I attached the lining, bound the raw edges of the jacket opening with tan fabric bias tape and then made some cuffs. The cuffs were made by measuring the sleeve, cutting out a huge rectangle, sewing fleece to one half of said rectangle, folding it all in half and stitching that sucker on. Boom. Done. Childhood fantasy goal achieved.
The rest of the costume was super easy because it’s just simple clothes. I got some brown pants from Goodwill, I already had a long sleeved black top, and the boots are the same boots I got from a thrift shop for Return of the Jedi Luke. And the lightsaber I used is my actual Luke Skywalker lightsaber toy that I have had since I was like…five or six years old. I love and treasure it. I don’t have a blonde wig for this costume at the moment so I just threw my hair back in a ponytail and made do.
I’m not going to show you any pictures from the wedding because I’m not comfortable putting my family out there like that. HOWEVER, I do have photos of me in the costume that my sister graciously took of me.
In my next post I will have some pictures with my lightsaber, those just need some editing at the moment. Also I will show you my mom’s Leia Endor Poncho because it is now all dyed and it looks great! She did a phenomenal job on it.
Thanks for reading, I feel like this was a longer post then normal. Until net time,
Cheers.
And Now Sewing 