Now on to the Toy Story Aliens. This was a look that I used for both San Diego Comic Con as well as the Disneyland Halloween Half Marathon weekend. It was originally conceived as a group look for SDCC which I then repurposed for the race a month or so later with another friend. So now there are actually 5 60s style Toy Story Aliens out in the world though I don’t know that we’ll ever be in one place at one time and all in our dresses. (If you’re curious about the looks in the photo above, there was some confusion as to whether we were supposed to smile or not. There are others where we’re all smiling, but I like the framing of this photo better than the others.)
We were looking for a look that would be easy to wear around the con, but still cute. All of us in the picture above (Mi, me, Lauren, Jill) are costume-y people so we were happy to do some sort of historical take on pop culture. We tossed around several looks and this was the one that ended up on top due to comfort and ease of creation.
We got several fabric samples and ended up going with compression wicking performance jersey fabric from Fabric Wholesale Direct. Mainly they had the colors we wanted, but I was excited to go for a wicking one because, as mentioned, San Diego is hot and I was also hoping to use it for the running races which I did with my friend Coco and it was so fun to get thematic pictures with Pizza Planet in Disneyland — even if we were sweaty messes!
The dress itself is the Tilly and the Buttons Coco dress which if you read this blog (or just use the search function), you’ll see that I’ve made many times. I actually let my friends try on various iterations as effective muslins. We did make one muslin using the actual fabric and since we were all close in size, we used that as an actual muslin to verify sizing in the real fabric.
One thing we noticed was that the neckline gaped a bit. I had actually noticed that myself on previous makes and thought that it was just me or that I had stretched out the neckline too much while sewing or that a light cowl was part of the look. But no, it was like that on everyone and when I revisited pictures on the website, they don’t have the gaping/cowl.
We “fixed” it by taking out 1/2” at the neck and then grading to nothing at the bottom. And we did this just by offsetting the pattern a bit at the neck down to no offset at the bottom when cutting the front on the fold. I say “fixed” because the actual fix would be to do darts (which I did have to do for my friend Coco’s dress because she’s more gifted in the chest than I am) or to rotate the excess into the rest of the dress and then true it up. But you know what? This worked well enough. You can see in the photos that there’s still a little extra right at the top of the neck, so we could have probably done 3/4” and I might for futures. This is a TNT (tried ’n’ true) pattern for me, especially for races, so I expect I’ll be making more. But it’s nice to know there’s a sorta easy fix for this, for races at least.
For SDCC we did assembly line with my friends cutting or hand sewing and me on my serger and then overstitch since they’re fidgety. The whole thing is only 3 pieces so it goes together really quickly. We were able to get them all done in just 2 evenings with people pining their hems and armholes as homework between to make the coverstitching faster.
For accessories, we made belts which as you saw I 3D printed the buckle for. The belt itself is just 4.5 inch wide strip serged together. We had to keep them pretty loose or else you get weird gathers on the skirt. If I were going to do this again, I would make the belt part of the dress with a little color blocking. But, hey, now I have a dress to wear for funsies.
For shoes we all got these Amazon Essentials blue shoes. For the price, they were fine. I would have preferred blue gogo boots which I did get (and missed the return window on) so I will wear them with this at some other time. But the blue suede shoes worked. I definitely had my right size, but the top edge over the toes had absolutely no give and started to dig into the top of my foot. It also did for Lauren. But that’s what you get for $20 shoes. I’m currently trying to stretch them out to see if I can make them more wearable. Otherwise they might go in the costume/photo bin.
Also from Amazon were the mesh gloves and the tights. The tights lasted just the one day at Comic Con. They were pretty terrible quality, but they worked for what we needed although I hate to be a wasteful consumer like that. For the Disney race, Coco and I got leggings. Lime green leggings with pockets are surprisingly hard to find. We found just one seller on Amazon and fortunately that were not too bad. The leggings I will definitely keep around and use for other costumes or just exercise. The mesh gloves worked pretty well. We stitched conductive thread in the fingertips so we could use our smartphones, but honestly, since they’re mesh, if you press hard enough, you can get it to work and that’s usually what I did.
I already mentioned my claw earrings in the 3D printing post. And we also ordered the eyeball/antenna from Amazon for Comic Con. I also opted to wear a wig because I was not feeling like doing my hair at all and really wanted that 60’s look. I wish I’d had time to do the bangs in a more poofy 60s style, but it wasn’t bad. I thought the one I got was really fun!
I had really wanted to 3D print headbands, but I just didn’t have time between my fashion show look and these. However, I did have time to do it for the Disney races — with lights! — so I’ll post about that soon! I’m really excited with how they turned out.
Finally the patches on the dress. For Comic Con, Jill whipped out her art skills and did puffy paint. They were so cool because the toys are plastic and the puffy paint had that plastic, raised look to it. They looked great!
For the Disney race, I wanted to challenge myself to make a patch. I’ve been wanting to learn Ink/Stitch which is an open source embroidery digitizing software extension to Inkscape which is an open source vector art program, like Adobe Illustrator. So for the Disney race I digitized and made the patches and it was an excellent motivator to learn the software! Still more to learn, but they turned out decent and I’ll post a bit more about that next.
The last part of this look that I did was a little claw machine bag. I whipped this thing together, drafting the pattern and all in about 2 hours. It’s not pretty, but it’s not bad. I used leftover fabric from my fashion show look that just happened to be the right colors! The pocket situation isn’t perfect and my little claw that I made to hand in it broke on the way down (I replaced it with one of the earrings half way through), but it was still cute.
I don’t know if I’ll ever need this look again, but I’d consider reworking parts of the bag. Some things worked great (the fins), while other things needed a second iteration (the pocket situation). I made it so that it can convert between backpack and shoulder bag which which actually did turn out pretty well. Though mostly at comic con, I just had it dangling off my actual purse because I didn’t feel like pulling everything out of my purse and transferring.
So that’s this look. I’ll post separately about making the patch and the headband since those have many thoughts on their own!
