If you've read the title of today's post, you'll see that my first cosplay of the new decade is the post-regeneration Eleventh Doctor (a.ka. Amy Pond's "Raggedy Man"!) I actually started working on this wayyyy back in November, with the plan being to debut the cosplay at Science of the Time Lords last weekend. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make it to the con (which is probably just as well, because finishing this cosplay took a lot longer than I'd anticipated.)
One of the things that drew me to cosplay the Raggedy Doctor in the first place is how interesting his costume is! Matt Smith is my favourite Doctor, but for my first Doctor Who cosplay I wanted something more involved than just tracking down various pieces and throwing them together for a traditional 11th Doctor look. Also, I haven't really worked on any projects since before Christmas and I wanted to stretch my crafting muscles!
I started by gathering as many photos of the Raggedy Doctor as possible from the BBC's Eleventh Hour galleries here and here so that I could work out where to concentrate my weathering. I then put the shirt on and used a pencil to roughly sketch out where the various holes and tears needed to be, scrolling through my reference gallery as I went to get everything as close to the original as possible.
And this is where the fun begins!😜 I used a pair of scissors to make a series of small holes in the fabric, then tore it open with my hands to get that frayed, just-crashed-landed-in-the-TARDIS look. You can't see it here, but I also scored the collar with a pair of scissors before rubbing sandpaper over the fabric to make it really ragged and frayed - just like on the original costume!
And now, dirt! All I did for this was mix a tiny amount of 'espresso brown' fabric dye with some water and applied it to the shirt with a small, stiff paintbrush - making sure to concentrate the dye around the tears and holes. As you can see, the dye had spread quite a bit and ended up looking more like a ton of sweat stains that dirt and burns.😂 To fix this, I added a few drops of water to the weathered areas and used an old toothbrush to disperse the dye a little more. I think this looks a million times better, and a lot more natural!
And finally, the centrepiece of the Raggedy Doctor's costume - his famous swirly tie! I actually made one of these way back in 2016 using a plain brown tie and some fabric paint, but I made the patterns way too thick and the paint started to crack and peel after a while.
For Swirly Tie V.2, I peeled as much of the old paint off as possible then used some fabric stain remover to clean off the remains. I then added two coats of fabric paint (covering the tie with a clean cloth and ironing it after each layer to "fix" the paint.) To minimise the chances of it peeling in the future, I made sure to apply much thinner coats this time around.
Overall, I'm really proud of how this turned out! Weathering the shirt was definitely a learning curve, but it was fun to try out new techniques and the results are definitely worth it! It was also great to revisit the tie and see just how much my crafting skills have improved over the years.
In the second part of this build I'll be tackling the lower half of the costume. Stay tuned! 😉
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