We Are The New Black: The making of Superman...

I've always loved Halloween. Growing up my brother and I would always get dressed up and usually go over to our cousins' neighborhood to trick-or-treat because we didn't actually live in a "neighborhood" so there were no houses to hit up for candy. I remember many of my costumes and almost all of them were made by my mother. Princess, ladybug, mummy, witch... hmm, I guess I need to go ask her to dig up some old pictures because now I'm drawing a blank on the other costumes. Maybe I'll find them and add them to this blog at some point.

Anyway, for Halloween this year I also wanted to make a costume for my son. He was going to be Superman, and instead of buying the cheap, uncomfortable costumes I had seen in the store, I got an idea from my best friend to make the cape for him. I bought some Superman pajamas that I found online (bonus: he can sleep in them this winter!) and used the following website as a guide for how to make the cape:

http://pukingpastilles.com/?p=57

On one side would be Superman and on the other would be a personalized logo for "Bradyman", as we call him. The idea is that he can use it for the next few years to play "dress-up", so hopefully he will enjoy it on more than just one day!

I was going to use a cotton fabric like in the blog instructions, but MrKLB really wanted the cape to be shiny, so I decided to take on the somewhat more difficult task of working with satin. My mother went shopping with me and we got all of the supplies that we needed: red and blue satin; yellow, red and white felt; red, blue, yellow, white thread; pins; Heat N Bond material.

I didn't have a pattern, so MrKLB and I just measured how long we thought it should be on Brady and guessed at the width. I used some old fabric (actually an old sheet) to trace and cut out the size/shape we wanted it to be and then we held it up to Brady, made some adjustments, and used that as the pattern. I pinned my "pattern" to the red satin and cut it out. leaving about a quarter inch for seams. Then I used the red fabric as the pattern for the blue fabric. This is right before I cut the blue satin. I folded the red in half and placed it on the fold of the blue. I had pinned the red to the blue, but the pins aren't showing up well in the photo:

And the blue fabric after I've cut it:

Next were the logos. We needed to trace the logos onto the Heat N Bond material, cut around them, and iron them onto the felt. Here I've done the Superman logo:

I asked MrKLB to design the Bradyman logo, and here it is. The B's would be white and the rest would be yellow.

I am not an expert with a sewing machine, and it was a little hard working with two pieces of thick felt, so for both of the logos I actually cut out the top part (the red for Superman and the white B's for Bradyman) and sewed them onto a full piece of felt before cutting that part out. That allowed me more fabric to hold onto when feeding it through the sewing machine rather than having just a tiny edge. (Hopefully that makes sense? I should have taken more photos!)

Anyway, here is the Bradyman logo after I sewed the B's on and then cut out the yellow fabric. (Oh, and I should add... MrKLB is actually the one who did ALL of the cutting of the felt. He is much more precise and better at it than I am. Thank you!):

Okay, so with two logos I then sewed the Superman logo onto the red satin and the Bradyman logo onto the blue. I used the same color thread as the satin.

Oh, and I used a zig-zag stitch for all of the logo work. You can kinda see it in this picture, although the bottom is blurry:

After this I attached a piece of velcro to where the cape would fasten around the neck. I decided to do that before I sewed the two sides together so that the stitching wouldn't show through.

Alright, so then I placed the red and blue satin face to face and sewed about a 1/4 inch seam all the way around, leaving about 6 inches so that I could turn it right side out. After I turned it right side out, I did a topstitch all the way around. I was doing really well until this point... my seam was not even at all! I think I was just ready to be finished and wasn't using as many pins as I had before and the satin fabric started to move some while I was doing the seam. The perfectionist in me wanted to rip out the entire seam and start over... the Mommy in me knew that I just needed to finish and call it a day. :)

So, here is the Superman side after I finished the seams:

And here is the Bradyman side:

Anyway, nobody (including Brady!) noticed or cared that the seams weren't even, and I think it turned out great! And here is Brady modeling it for me: