Tardis Tuesday [On A Wednesday!]

[This post was delayed, because yesterday was Jessie's birthday]

If you follow Kezzie's delightful Blog you will know that she is into "Dr Who Cosplay" - finding outfits to match the various characters in this long running TV series [It celebrates sixty years this year- way before K was even born!] Because I love sewing, and working on costumes, down the years I've tweaked quite a few garments for her, including these...

In 2015, I loved doing the ? on the collar, and the red collar band, for the shirt worn by the 5th Dr, and also Petronella Osgood

And then in 2019 there was the challenge of turning the green collarless dress into the screen accurate dress with collar and short sleeves for Clara.

This year I've had two challenges from Kezzie - to produce the logo on the back of an Ace jacket, and recreate Sarah-Janes 'Andy-Pandy style dungarees. Kezzie sent me a plain black jacket. I made the logo as a patch using fabric and bondaweb, edged with satin stitch on the machine, Then I stitched it in place by hand.

The patch can be easily removed if Kezzie wants just a plain jacket. I am glad she didn't want me to recreate all the badges from the front.

The dungarees were perhaps the most challenging. Kezzie supplied a pair of candy strip dungarees- but they had spaghetti straps, straight legs, and simple pockets. To be screen accurate, they needed wide straps and dungaree clips, ties at the waist, patch pockets outlined in red piping and red piping and stars on the bib, as well as gathered ankles.

I took off the thin straps and put them at the waist, piped 'faux' pockets, made straps from a similar fabric, piped a rectangle on the bib and then used my embroidery machine to create 2 stars which I handstitched in place. And threaded elastic through the ankle hems;

I am really happy with this one - everything I needed for the alterations to these two garments were already in my stash. The only thing I needed was the software for my embroidery machine to create the stars.For £3 in Etsy I got a great pattern which has 2 styles of 5 point stars, a 4 point [Star Trek style] star, and a 3 point star [as per Mercedes logo] - and these all come in 9 sizes. So I hope to get lots of use out of this star pattern.

I am looking forward to seeing pictures of Kezzie in her new outfits.

Top Tip if you are going round the edge of a patch in satin stitch, you may find that the machine does not stitch evenly and you get lumpy sections. Instead of using wide zigzag with shortest stitch length, use a slightly longer stitch length and just go round twice. 

In 1984 when I was pregnant with Steph, I made some red and white striped maternity dungarees just like this, and a mini matching pair for 2 year old Liz. Sadly we have no photos of these outfits!