Codex Costume Done!... (last October)

Though I have not had much time at all to blog, I have made some progress on a few projects while I was working on my first year in the PhD program. Oh, and I'm officially a 2nd year student! Huzzah!

I'm most excited about getting the Codex costume done, especially since it is my first 'true' corset project. I want to do a tutorial-esque post, so I'll go over each of the parts and how I made them.

The Cuffs:

The cuffs were the first and easiest parts to make. To make these, I just made a template out of paper by wrapping it around my forearm and cutting the paper into the desired shape. I then used the template to make the cuffs out of craft foam, added a layer of sheer white fabric, and trimmed in gold bias tape. I then added the grommets, which was greatly helped by using the handy-dandy tool below:

I found this tool at Walmart -- the only place I found that sold bronze grommets instead of brassy-gold ones. (I am not a habitual shopper of Walmart, only when there are no other options.) This was the first part of the costume that I completed, and I love them!

The Skirt: 

The skirt was the second-easiest part to make, if you know what you are doing. The first time I tried, I obviously did not have a clue! My first attempt at the skirt involved trying to make a tube for a draw string using a circle skirt pattern. Um, yeah -- that didn't work out so well. I managed sew the tube onto the skirt with the wrong side facing out, and then had issues figuring out how to make the drawstring work -- it was a mess!

Anyways, I finally broke down and followed this tutorial. I used a solid white satin fabric with a sheer white overlay. 

Once the fabric was cut, all that needed to be done is to make an appropriate-sized elastic waistband, and sew the skirt layers to the waistband. Finishing was a little harder since I had to learn to use a hemmer foot, but I think it ended up looking pretty good for my first time. 

The Necklace: 

The necklace was completely made of craft foam and flat-backed rhinestones. I painted the craft foam using gold model spray paint I bought from Michael's (like, the kind for painting plastic models). The best tutorial to explain how to paint craft foam can be found here. Essentially, I had to add a layer of watered-down glue to the craft foam pieces before spraying them with the model spray paint. Once they were dry, I just glued them together with superglue and added the rhinestones. Though this worked for the Halloween, I will probably add some kind of tie in the back since the necklace came off when I was taking my friend's daughter out to go trick-or-treating. 

The Headband: 

I really got lucky and found some awesome headbands that would work perfect for this outfit at Walmart (yes, again, I know, but they were the only place that carried them! I swear!). Essentially, I only had to spray the plastic headband with the same gold spray paint as the necklace and add flat-backed rhinestones to finish the headpiece. This is definitely my favorite part of this costume.. I wonder if I could wear this to school and not look completely insane?

The Knee Pads: 

The knee pads ended up being much less work than I thought they would be. The first time I tried making them, I made them much smaller than I should have. Knowing this, the second time around ended up much better. For the front part, I used red corduroy and some metallic fabric from Joann's, sewing the gold part on the bottom, and then making a duplicate shaped fabric piece for the back using some scrap fabric. Then I made some red corduroy elastic casings at about twice then length of the elastic pieces. Then I just sandwiched the right side of the front and the right side of the back together, and placed the elastic pieces and casing in between these two layers such that the seam on the casing would be against the right side of the back fabric. I just sewed a half-circle around, and had planned to finish the top by slip-stitching the fabric together, but I ran out of time by that point. Just another thing to work on before next year, I suppose!

The Top: 

Oh, the top was sort of a nightmare, but ended up looking pretty good. I took an old white tank top for the base of the shirt, cut some of the satin fabric I used for the skirt to cover the chest, and overlaid that with the sheer white fabric from the skirt like so: 

I sewed around that, placed it so gingerly on the tank top, and cut out the parts that were not needed from the tank top. For the shoulder pads, I used craft foam cut into triangles and sewed onto the tank top:

After these pieces were sewn on to the tank top, I trimmed the whole thing (very, very poorly) in gold trim, and added red jewels for finishing. Voila: 

Not terrible, but much improvement is needed; Such as properly sewing on the gold bias tape as demonstrated here. But, all in all, I got to be codex for Halloween, so I'm happy: