Skip to main content

Costume quandry...

For Halloween this year, the kids have embraced Star Trek.  Amanda is going as a Vulcan (she's dressing as Spock from the reboot movies---no slinky girl-costumes for her!), Luke is going as a pile of Tribbles.  Eleanor wanted to go as Captain Janeway.

I love Captain Janeway.  Almost everything she does makes me happy.  So we could have taken a couple of long sleeved t-shirts and done some creative cutting to make a costume.  However, I thought, "I've always wanted to make a real uniform..."

This is the costume pattern we bought after a short Google search:  Etsy Pattern
The first line of the instructions says that if you are not an experienced costume maker, you should give up and find someone who is.  That may be. 

However, there are actually lots of other people online making costumes as well, and some of them post helpful pictures.  This one shows all the pieces and how they go together: pattern pieces

There are other useful comments over there, I will link some more if necessary.

(Interestingly, everyone who makes this costume (the Kerezman pattern, I think) complains that the directions are too vague.  Some people have written about making a tutorial, but I think that by the time they put together the costume they are done and move on to the next thing.)

I figured out the yoke, and the sleeves seem not too hard (until I have to attach them to the rest of the costume...).  The directions for pieces I and J (the back) seem difficult: I think there is a pleat in there but no mention of this is made in the directions.

This site has more pictures: costume pictures

So that's where I am.  I made a mock up of the yoke and the sleeve.  I'm about to cut out a mock up of the back and see what I can do.  We'll see.  It's just a Halloween costume.  And if I make this one, I think I'm going to get one of these patterns and make it up next:
Bad wolf tutorials  Or maybe this one: roddenberry costume Although they seem awfully short on female costumes...

One of the hazards of having a PhD in math is that I assume that everything else I try in life will be not as difficult, if I can just apply my brain to the problem.  Unfortunately, this is not always true.  For example, gardening is not subject to being conquered merely by thinking.  Nor is viola.  Nor is costume-making, I guess.  But it is definitely fun to be challenged, and learn something new, and maybe failing will be good for me. We always have the two t-shirt option, after all.



 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Things that are true

"Axial tilt is the reason for the season." (Picture a globe with the northern hemisphere tilted away from the sun...) I believe this is meant to be an anti-theist slogan, although I would point out that I believe there is a reason for the axial tilt. This is a runner up to my favorite true science picture, the "Gravity Forecast." I linked to this when I was a graduate student, but the site is long since down. Picture a weather forecast graphic, but instead of clouds and temperatures, the 5-day forecast predicts 9.8 m/s^2 down. Even the idea still makes me laugh, perhaps I will reproduce it someday. Luke cut his 4th tooth today (Finally!). So far they haven't caused us too much trouble. We'll see what happens when he gets his canines.

Science at home

We had a fun "experiment" yesterday. We took a 2 liter bottle of diet Coke and some Mentos, put 4 Mentos at the same time into the bottle, and shot a huge jet of soda into the air about 8 feet high! It was quite exciting, although I think the warnings that you might want to use eye protection were a bit overblown. I suppose that it was an experiment only in the loosest sense of the term, but Michael forsees lots of fun in the future: using other types of soda, other methods for adding the mentos to the soda, and so on. It did get us out of the house for a while, and had Eleanor and Amanda dropping mentos into the used soda bottle and watching to see what happened---so cute!

A day at the fair

Yesterday afternoon the whole family went to the NC state fair. We had a good enough time that I think we are going back next year, although perhaps we will leave Luke at home with a sitter. We went right after Eleanor's school. Michael picked up Eleanor, I drove Luke and Amanda. Through an amazing bit of timing, we met in the parking lot and walked to the fair together, about a 10 minute walk (not bad at all, really). I had meant to get to the fair much earlier and see the parts that Eleanor and Michael claimed not to be interested in (the animals and crafts, mostly) but I was running a little late. Our area has been in a serious drought for the past few months, so I am not complaining that it rained (hard) on us as we were getting to the gate. But it does seem a bit hard that we planned to go to the fair on the one day in the past 3 months that we had a rainstorm. Fortunately, the rain was scattered, and the clouds soon moved off to water another area. We took the opportun...