Becoming Jyn Erso: All the Rest

Greetings folks,

So in reality I completed this costume on March 23rd 2019.  And I don’t actually have as many photos or footage of the final bits as I did previously. Mostly because this project was very time consuming in a ‘I don’t want to stop to take photos or I will lose my momentum’ type of way.

That being said, I do have some photos and other bits of info, so that is what I will be sharing today.

After I finished the jacket I moved on to making the shirt. I used pattern Simplicity pattern D0795 H5 which did not go super well the first time. The pattern instructions are not super duper clear and the fabric I used for shirt number 2 was awful. So for the third and final shirt I ended up buying a white linen and dying it to the color I wanted.

I don’t have a great deal of photos from the first attempt but I did video tape sections so that is all included here in the video I made for the shirt. It goes into the issues I had with this pattern in greater detail.

Long story short, good pattern, bad instructions.

 

This was also when I did the pants. Now in a lot of ways the pants were the simplest part of this entire process, because they only needed a little bit of alterations. At the bottom of Jyn’s pants she has a little pleating detail, and then a little band of webbing going around half the leg. So I took a pair of pants I found at Goodwill, and some blue fabric and went to town.

Now, I regret not taking the pants with me when I went to Joanns to get the blue fabric because the blues do not match. However, it does not bother me as much as I am sure it should.

I created the pleat pattern using wax paper first to make sure each leg would have the same number of pleats. Then I cut a rectangle from the blue fabric, hemmed all four sides, and then pleated it down. I also stitched down each pleat afterwards to keep them from flipping up, which is something I wish I had done on my yellow Luke jacket. Then I hand stitched down the entire rectangle onto the pants around the edges. The top fabric band and the grey webbing detail was also attached by hand. So the pants went by super fast. Like I think 2-3 days of sporadic work for maybe six hours of total time.

 

 

Now. The most time consuming, physically painful, frustrating thing about this whole project was her vest. And unfortunately…I have almost zero pictures. Because it was an absolute bear to make because I decided to quilt the entire beast. My fingers and hands were marred with pinpricks, my hands cramped a lot and my sewing machine tried to revolt against me not once, not twice, but about four times. For some reason I had enough video clips to make a video about it…but no pictures besides what went up onto my sewing Instagram.

So I will do my best to now explain my processes.

So I used the vest pattern that came with the Simplicity pattern, with some minor alterations. Like adding the collar, for example. Then I took the two front pieces and the back piece and stitched them down onto two layers of brown fleece. Because I always use fleece for quilting/batting/interlining. I then took a thread that was a lighter shade of brown and stitched out the straight lines across the front of the vest in all my reference images. I kept the two vest pieces on the same bit of fleece while doing this to make sure each side had the same number of quilted lines on it and they were all lined up evenly. For the back I marked all my stitch lines out with pencil prior to sewing. Then I cut them free of the fleece, added the pockets and other front detailing, stitched up the sides and added the collar and bottom band. The bottom band was also quilted, but because with only one layer of fleece between the two outer layers. I made the lining with red fabric and boom.

 

The black ‘wire’ detailing she has on the front of her vest that some people have used tubing for was done with black parachute cord. I tried to use an old cell phone charger at first but I could not get it to bend the way I wanted. But I don’t mind the cord, I like the matte look better then the shine rubber would have had. And then the last picture I have is the collar pattern I drafted. It was cut on a fold, and then folded in half and stitched around the edge before being turned right-side out. Same principal as a waistband mostly.

The belt and gun holster was made in one day. My sister drafted the holster pattern for me which I appreciate a lot. The belt is closed with four snaps at the hop and then the strap that goes around the thigh is another snap. The clip for the tonfa was handsewn on as well. A lot of small details and hand sewing in this costume.

The kyber crystal necklace started it’s life as one of those crystal points chandelier crystal type things that you get at Joanns. Which is in fact where I got my crystal. To fog it up and make it more natural looking my mother dremeled off all the edges and across it’s entire surface for me. Which was fantastic. And then I snagged some black yarn from my sister’s stash and secured it with a little bit of e6000. I just made the loop big enough to slip over my head, no clasp or ties or anything.

So, I technically still have two very little props to make that go with her vest, the little communicator tube thing and the ident card but for now I am calling Jyn Erso complete.

ANYWAY, here is the vest video from my youtube channel. I might make one more ‘getting into costume’ type video at some point and if so I will make sure to post it up here as well.

Eventually I will make a post on here of some full body full costume outfits once they are complete, but for now please take these head shots. Thanks.

 

As always please follow my sewing instagram if you are interested in more regular updates from me regarding my projects, thanks.

Cheers!

Becoming Jyn Erso: The Jacket

Hey, so, like. Do any of you remember back in April of 2017 when I mentioned that I was going to be making a Jyn Erso costume?

Well, I’m making a Jyn Erso costume.

I have actually been working on this costume since I finished the Luke Skywalker jacket in February but due to changing jobs and going through a bit of a rough patch mentally I really didn’t get a great deal of work done on it. And all I’ve really done for it is royally screw up my attempt at her shirt and finish her jacket.

Now this jacket….took an absurd about of time considering how very little I technically had to do on it. It was an altered dark navy blue turtleneck and I only had to change 3 things.

1. Cut down the front from neck to hem.
2. . Shorten and hem the jacket so it is at waist level
3. Add strips of brown pleated fabric to both sleeves.

Guys…do you want to guess what took me a long time to do? If you guessed the pleated sleeves you would be 150% correct. I spent a lot of time on twitter and instagram stories bitching about this jacket with very little progress to show for it. Because it was so hard to motivate myself to work on these pleats. I really don’t enjoy making pleats even though I really love how they look when they’re done.

From neck to wrist was 22 inches. So I needed 22 inches of pleated fabric. So first, I cut out a bunch of inch wide strips of brown fabric that I sewed together end to end until I had two strips of fabric that were 77 inches long. Then I hemmed all four sides a half inch so that in the end the strips were only 1 inch wide. Then I started pleating. But later, I then had to add 16 inches of fabric because with how tight I needed the pleats to be it wasn’t going to make the 22 inches. So in the end I pleated two 93 inch long strips of fabric down to 22 inches, filled with pins like a tiny death snake.

Then I had to carefully sew these pin filled monsters down as close to the edge as possible so that the pleats would be permanent. This was very slow, I bent so many pins, my thread kept tangling. It was a nightmare. But I managed to sew them all down, free them of their pins and iron the ever loving crap out of them.

As you can see they are a little bit wavy and a little uneven in width in some spots but I wasn’t going to dwell on it. It helps give the jacket a rougher, more ‘been through hell’ type of feel that I feel adds to the authenticity of a Star Wars costume considering Jyn was basically a dirty rebel for the majority of her life. I chalked it up to pre-weathering weathering and went onto the final step.

Handsewing these strips onto the sleeves.

It took a long time, it wasn’t fun because I had to be careful not to sew the sleeves shut as I went. I used a small embroidery hoop which helped out a lot but I still poked myself a ton and it was a slow process.

But in the end…it was so worth it. I’m so happy with it so far and having the jacket done is really helping motivate me to keep working on the rest of the costume.

Since I messed up her shirt I went out and bought a pattern for attempt two so I’ll talk about that more in another post. I’m making (really rather shitty) youtube videos about this process too, but I am going to link to those on this blog only after the costume is done.

Check my sewing instagram for more frequent updates. 

Also??? I’m just not going to apologize for / comment on the time between my posts anymore.

But yeah, thanks for checking in friends.

Cheers.

Luke Skywalker: The Jacket

Friends, I finished the Return of the Jedi jacket. It isn’t perfect because the fit in the shoulders is just a liiiiittle bit off and it is a tad short but I don’t even CARE! I love it, it feels so good when I wear it and it makes me so giddy. So lets get into how I got this monstrosity done!

It is truly a deceptive garment. It seems so simple and yet…AND YET.

The first thing I had to do, after ripping off the sleeves and fixing the one that I sewed backwards was to take in the jacket at the shoulders. After a lot of fussing I discovered that the shoulders were too long by three whole inches on each side of the garment. Even the smallest possible size of pattern was made for shoulders significantly broader then mine it seems. I measured three inches in on each side and carefully trimmed away the excess fabric on the front and back, following the pre-existing curve of the armhole. Which meant that I didn’t take away any of the width from the lower torso area, and I didn’t change the size of the armholes. So I could still accommodate my bust and I got to avoid altering the sleeves any further. A win win.

Next, I sewed up the lining and stitched it in. Now, originally I was trying to be really fancy and have an invisible closure for when I didn’t want the silver to show. I bought the worlds tiniest blackest button and then I tried to add an invisible loop using fishing line. The hope was that when the jacket was open the closure wouldn’t be noticeable. Unfortunately the line slipped out while attaching the lining because it is thick and waxy. So as of now I can’t not show the silver lining, which is fine since the silver bit is kind of iconic anyway. But I am still a littler frustrated that I wasted the time and materials on trying.

With the lining in the next thing to do was sew up the opening at the bottom and attach the loose bit of lining to the outer shell’s armholes. Because I am a savage who was very frustrated with this jacket…I didn’t make lining sleeves. I just sewed the lining armhole to the outer armhole and left it at that. I will probably go back later and hem it in bias tape to keep it from fraying but for now that is how I intend to leave it. I hemmed the bottom edge using my invisible zipper foot after turning the raw edges in by eye. Now…I have to admit that I did not trim the edges down so they were even before I did this. I just went as is…which meant that in some spots the hem is now  a little wavy. I do this to myself….I know but I really just wanted to be done. I was at the point where if I didn’t finish the project soon I was going to just end up hating it. And I really didn’t want to hate it, seeing as it is my favorite Luke Skywalker outfit period. So I made do. And in the end it all worked out fine. I might go back later and put in an extender panel at another time but for now, I am happy with it.

The very last thing I did was hand sew in all of my closures. I used four hooks and bars on the lower opening near the stomach, and two snaps up at the collar to keep everything closed. I’m still debating on if I need that second snap or not, I might get rid of it. We shall see.

So with that the bulk of the costume is done. All I need now is to alter the belt to include all the silver bits and get a better glove. But those are such small things that I probably won’t make a whole post about them. But keep an eye out for when I post finished photo shoot type photos!

If you want to see my struggle in semi-real time (but actually stretched out over a bunch of months) please feel free to watch this really nonsensical video here.

Cheers!

Medal Ceremony Luke Skywalker

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.