The Creative Maze: Costume-making for Film

Hello again, and welcome back to the Creative Maze.  Today’s post concerns costume-making, as a certain member of my family wants to work in the film industry when she’s older, and has asked me to make some costumes for a film she wants to shoot in Scotland later this year.  I thought it might be interesting to document the progress, and, hopefully, they’ll turn out alright!

Sewing has always been part of my life.  My mum made dresses for me when I was a little girl, and knitted cardigans and jumpers too, and I wanted to have a go and be able to make wonderful things like she did.  Mum taught me early on how to use her sewing machine.  Sewing was just something we did, and I loved it.  In fact, I don’t remember not sewing –  I recall patching small pieces of fabric together, and trying to make little dresses for my dolls when I was quite young.  It’s great that these sorts of skills are having such a huge resurgence at the moment, and I’m particularly enjoying the second series of The Great British Sewing Bee currently showing on the BBC.  I think it’s so important to be able to divert from the digital in the modern world, don't you?  Anyway, I digress, so back to the costumes...



Here’s what I’m going to be making:

I need to make a huntress-type costume and a cloak, so these Simplicity patterns are just what I needed.  Simplicity have a fantastic range of costume patterns to choose from, and I ordered these from an internet sewing retailer.

Pattern 1773 (on the left) shows the huntress pattern (the view on the left-hand side of the pattern), which I'm going to have to adapt slightly to suit the brief I've been given.  I need to adjust the pattern so that the finished costume has a shorter front section and shaped tails down the back.  Now that I've cut out the pattern, I'll make a different pattern with my adjustments and sew a mock up in some reasonably heavy calico, which I'll be able to 'fit' on the dressmaker's dummy.  I'm going to be winging it here, so we'll see what happens!  It's definitely going to be 'fun', but if you don't try you'll never know what you can do!

Pattern 5794 shows four views of three cloaks, and I'm going to be making cloak C on the bottom left-hand corner.  I wanted to make this out of a beautiful woolen-weave fabric, but it was too expensive for a first attempt and instead, I found the fabric (pictured below) which is a nice weight and drapes beautifully.  The slight fleck through the fabric might help to 'age' this cloak so it doesn't look too 'new'.  The cloak will also have a dark green satin lining and I think it will look quite striking on film:

 The huntress costume will be made from this fabric:

The pattern calls for 'Suedcloth or Velveteen', but we decided on this beautiful heavy velvet, which will be more of a pain to sew as it travels and I'll have to do something different with the slashed sleeves on the Suedcloth version, but I think it will look stunning with the cloak when it's finished.

So,  I think I should get back to my patterns, instructions and adjustments...

 

...and get on with making a calico mock-up of the huntress costume.  I'll take photos of each stage so that I can show you how things are coming along in my next Creative Maze Costume-making for Film post.  I'm off to drive myself nuts with pattern adjustments now, but if you'd like to tell us about any costumes or pattern adjustments you've made, please leave a comment in the box below.  We'd love to hear from you.  Until next time...