Tuesday, January 28, 2014

August 2013 - Bookweek Alien

August brings Book Week and that means dress-up time.This year's theme was 'Reading across the Universe' and the kids were encouraged to come to school dressed either in a space theme or as a favourite book character.

  Jack wanted to be an alien so we dug through the book shelves looking for alien books and found 'My Brilliant Book' which has three-eyed-aliens who attack earth.
 
We had an inflatable alien head and hand set in the cupboard, bought on sale some time ago with the thought it would come in handy sometime. As luck would have it the head was a three-eyed-alien.
 
We needed a body so used a tracksuit pattern to draft up a one-piece jumpsuit with back opening, similar to a skeleton costume he already had, and went shopping for some fantastic shiny green dance fabric.
 
I did the work on the costume while Jack was asleep - bad idea, as was the idea of joining a tracksuit top and bottom pattern together to draft a jumpsuit. I should have traced the costume he already had and just made it bigger. Instead I did something wrong and ended up with a jumpsuit that was far to narrow and far too long in the body.

To salvage it I shortened the sides and added width by adding a shaped insert to each side seam from just below the underarm to the hip, gathering the side seams to fit. Jack thought they were gills and apparently gills are awesome. I added a row of gathering along the centre seam from front neckline through the crotch to the back neckline, and then stitched the gathers in place. It worked but the gathers didn't hold in place very well and a strip of elastic would have been better.
 
Jack thought he was super cool and had a great day, even though several people thought he was a frog. As a bonus he got to wear the same costume to a Space dress-up night at Scouts two weeks later and won a prize. 

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