For the second part of this build, I'll be tackling the lower half of the costume - starting with the infamous brown suit trousers! A friend suggested that I should save myself some time and just buy a replica Tenth Doctor suit, but those things run for several hundred £££s so I decided to torture myself and go down the DIY route. 😜
I learned several things during this stage of the build. The first: finding brown, pinstriped trousers for men is literally impossible. Even the next best thing, finding PLAIN brown suit trousers for men, is impossible. In the end, I had to settle for a pair of women's trousers because after literal hours of searching, they were the only thing I could find that were even REMOTELY similar to what I needed!😂 These are far from perfect (and the shade of brown is a lot lighter than it appeared in the eBay listing) but at least now I have a base to work from.
I have a pair of jeans that I really like the fit and cut of, so I used these as a guide for tailoring the legs of the suit. This was nothing fancy - I just turned the trousers inside out, used dressmaker's pins to mark the outline of the jeans, sewed the trousers with a very simple running stitch, then cut away the excess fabric!
Next, I dyed the trousers a deeper shade of brown and started adding the pinstripes with a white fabric marker.
... And as you can see, the results are terrible!
So, I did what I should have done from the very beginning and just bought some brown, pinstriped fabric.🤣The material of the original trousers is actually pretty thin, so the plan was to "skin" the trousers with this new fabric to make them warmer as well as more accurate, without having to tailor a new pair of trousers from scratch.
And then, I hit YET ANOTHER setback! For some reason the fabric glue that I used for my Spider-Man and Robin builds just wouldn't take hold of the pinstriped fabric. It dried, and the fabric peeled right off. I don't have a sewing machine and I'm far too lazy to do this by hand so out of sheer desperation I resorted to hot glue.
To begin, I laid my trousers out on top of the fabric and cut out the rough shapes that I would need, one leg at a time. Then, I applied hot glue along the edges of the trousers and fixed the fabric into place. Once this had set, I carefully trimmed away the excess fabric.
After I'd covered the front of each leg in fabric, I moved onto the backs (thereby maintaining all of the visible seams from the original trousers.) And voila - it took several hours of painstaking work, but I finally salvaged these into a pair of mostly accurate Raggedy Doctor trousers! As long as you don't look too closely, they're not half bad.
Next, I dyed the trousers a deeper shade of brown and started adding the pinstripes with a white fabric marker.
... And as you can see, the results are terrible!
So, I did what I should have done from the very beginning and just bought some brown, pinstriped fabric.🤣The material of the original trousers is actually pretty thin, so the plan was to "skin" the trousers with this new fabric to make them warmer as well as more accurate, without having to tailor a new pair of trousers from scratch.
And then, I hit YET ANOTHER setback! For some reason the fabric glue that I used for my Spider-Man and Robin builds just wouldn't take hold of the pinstriped fabric. It dried, and the fabric peeled right off. I don't have a sewing machine and I'm far too lazy to do this by hand so out of sheer desperation I resorted to hot glue.
To begin, I laid my trousers out on top of the fabric and cut out the rough shapes that I would need, one leg at a time. Then, I applied hot glue along the edges of the trousers and fixed the fabric into place. Once this had set, I carefully trimmed away the excess fabric.
After I'd covered the front of each leg in fabric, I moved onto the backs (thereby maintaining all of the visible seams from the original trousers.) And voila - it took several hours of painstaking work, but I finally salvaged these into a pair of mostly accurate Raggedy Doctor trousers! As long as you don't look too closely, they're not half bad.
The SHOES were by far the easiest part of the build. After a quick eBay search I found this pair of cream Converse for £14. I'm still not entirely sure whether they're fakes or not, but they look the part so I'm happy either way. 😊
And there we have it: my Raggedy Doctor cosplay, the first of 2020, is complete! Considering all of the setbacks and issues I faced, I am INSANELY proud of how this turned out!!
Comments
Post a Comment