Saturday afternoon is fast becoming my “make day.” By 2 PM on Saturday, the house is cleaned (somewhat), the kids are fed lunch, and materials are set up for making something.
With Halloween fast approaching, it was time to finish the patterns for the kids’ Quorra costumes (see part 1 of this build here and part 2 over here) and actually get the chest pieces cut out of the gross-but-awesome vinyl I have kicking around.
The nice thing about using this kind of vinyl is that I can be lazy about the cutting and use a craft knife to cut out the cladding. Hurray for lazy sewing.
I already knew that the back pieces would work nicely from a previous test:
But it was nice to see them attached to to the chest piece.
Of course, there won’t be a dress underneath when the costume is done — there’ll be a patterned undersuit that will show through some of the holes you see. I talked about it a bit in the previous entry.
Of course, there’s a lot of cutting still to be done. The cuts I made from the pattern are just the symmetrical ones — Quorra’s lightlines are roughly mirrored but are still asymmetrical.
The tricky thing that I need to figure out is exactly how I’m going to run the EL wire through the chestpiece to make it all light up. I’m not going to be able to attach all of the “straps” across the back to the backpiece; it’s going to fit too snugly to just be a pull-over piece. I think that I can run the wire through the light-up areas with enough to spare that I can have it double back in a couple of areas and come around the front from just one side, so that the bottom two straps on the right can just Velcro to the backpiece. I’ll no doubt need to try a few different paths for the wire before landing on something that will work well.
I’ve also abandoned the idea of having the EL wire run down the girls’ legs. The amount of detail I would get from that is far outweighed by the sheer convenience of having more wire to work with. Who knows — I might be able to get a few much brighter spots by doubling up the EL wire thanks to the extra length I get from the bit that was going to be essentially wasted on their legs.
Until next time, as always, paddle your own canoe.
Trevor
