My First Custom Tailored Halloween Costumes 2023

Sewing machine on sale! That’s what triggered the following two weeks of pressure catching up sewing progress. Started with zero experience operating a sewing machine even though I'm a bespoke tailor’s daughter🫣. I went through the manual and started picking up the basic operation skills through practice on old fabrics. After a big shopping at Joann’s (costume patterns, fabrics and accessories), here we go! First policeman jacket and then dragon scale shirt.

As a tailor’s daughter, at least I have some sense to get patterns for cutting fabrics. Found a jacket and a tshirt ones!

So I laid out the pattern on top of “fully laid out“ fabrics, used pins along the pattern lines and marked the lines with chalks “underneath the fabrics“. Kinda dumb because I didn't want to cut out the small size right now in case I will make another larger ones in the future!?

We got some Halloween activity kits and we all worked together on the dinning table haha.

Hats are too thick to be machine sewn on so I’m confident that hand sewing is not a problem for me👌🏻. The headpiece was removed from previous Halloween headband and it’s totally worth keeping the battery case to shine the dragon lights! William loves it!

I wasn't quite sure about the sleeves so I found some youtube videos to get a sense of the process. The “double rows” are the trick to adjust the width and create the wrinkles to connect to the main pieces. And Charles’ hat is just a piece of cake✌🏻.

The jacket collars are a monster! I had to redo many times for sewing the wrong sides over and over again. Figuring out pattern instructions is one thing and getting it right is another. I ended up sewing by my instincts just by how the collar lines should look like.

Oh forgot to mention a very important thing before cutting - FOLD THE FABRICS WHILE MARKING THE LINES! So the right side will look symmetric! Fortunately this vinyl fabrics look similar on both sides and I just cut 8 duplicate pieces again whew…

This time I remembered to “fold” the fabrics and pin the patterns on top to create symmetric side!

The middle line was where it folded.

Easy to sew these four pieces together. Sewing the zipper was way easier than I thought and it works very well for the non-flexible fabrics. Compared to the policeman jacket of two weeks struggle, this shirt only took one day to finish!!