One Sleeve Complete!
Last night was one bigass night of tv for us with UFC 75 and the Hawaii vs. LA Tech game to watch after the kids went to sleep at around 9 pm. I was doing a lot of work on my sleeve while we were watching and unfortunately this meant a lot of replaying when I was looking down during a big hit on someone. I'm not a Matt Hamil fan, but he got fucking robbed by UK hometown advantage in his fight with Michael Bisping. I give him a lot of respect and I think it says a whole lot that the London crowd was booing the decision when Bisping won. That was seriously one of the lamest decisions I've ever seen. The football game gave me at least 50 heart attacks and I had to stop sewing at a certain point because my nerves were causing me to prick my finger too much due to shaking hands.
Anyway, enough of that and on to the sleeve. This first photo shows the strips of black and red I attached to the top. I cut the black from the bottom of a pair of pants of mine that was obviously made for Superwoman because I was able to cut off like 5 inches and still have more than enough to hem. I messed up sewing it on the first time and had to remove all the stitching to do it again. Thank goodness I was able to machine stitch this part, I'd have cried if I had to rip out hand stitches.
The black is flat, but the red contains batting to make it look puffy. To stitch this on I didn't want any stitches to show so I sewed the edges down. I'm not sure what you call that kind of stitch, but sadly, you can kinda see ridging where I pulled it too taut. Here is a close-up:
This one sleeve has involved a whole assload of work, so I wanted to show the back.
As I did more embroidery I began to use smaller stitches so towards the other end of this photo is where it looks a little neater and complicated, but I just wanted an overall photo of the back of the sleeve bottom:
After all of this, I finally sewed the sleeve together. I am still in the process of securing the edges inside the sleeve down, but I haven't finished that so no photo for now. Here is the sleeve standing up as if someone were wearing it:
Still not done though! I had bought some brown material for the inside leather patch but it turned out to look too dark for my liking so I went to Fabric Mart and Walmart to find something else. I ended up getting some suede at Fabric Mart that was a lighter color and much softer. It didn't cost too much, thankfully. I bought 1 foot at $5.99 a yard. At Walmart I bought darker embroidery thread to show the stitches. Suede is apparently extremely hard to pierce with a needle, I had to apply a ton of pressure just to get it through most times. And frustratingly enough, I didn't pay attention to the picture and stitched all around the whole patch when I wasn't supposed to. It turned out to be a good thing though.
On the edges where the suede touches the red, the thick stitches didn't hold the material down close to the red, so I had to hand stitch those edges down similar to the way I did the red strips, which was very hard because I was using a thin needle now instead of a thick one. After I stitched the edges down I cut the thick stitches and tied the ends down with knots to secure. The above picture is the end result! Here is a closer picture:
And another picture of the sleeve folded in half:
The final result is one part of my costume finished! Hooray!!
And yet, holy shit. All that work only for one sleeve. I still have the body, the flaps, and the legs to do. Yeesh!! I should start keeping track of hours. Looking back at what went into this one sleeve I'd have to guess 22 hours combined for this ONE SLEEVE.
Yeah, I'm fucked.
Anyway, enough of that and on to the sleeve. This first photo shows the strips of black and red I attached to the top. I cut the black from the bottom of a pair of pants of mine that was obviously made for Superwoman because I was able to cut off like 5 inches and still have more than enough to hem. I messed up sewing it on the first time and had to remove all the stitching to do it again. Thank goodness I was able to machine stitch this part, I'd have cried if I had to rip out hand stitches.
The black is flat, but the red contains batting to make it look puffy. To stitch this on I didn't want any stitches to show so I sewed the edges down. I'm not sure what you call that kind of stitch, but sadly, you can kinda see ridging where I pulled it too taut. Here is a close-up:
This one sleeve has involved a whole assload of work, so I wanted to show the back.
As I did more embroidery I began to use smaller stitches so towards the other end of this photo is where it looks a little neater and complicated, but I just wanted an overall photo of the back of the sleeve bottom:
After all of this, I finally sewed the sleeve together. I am still in the process of securing the edges inside the sleeve down, but I haven't finished that so no photo for now. Here is the sleeve standing up as if someone were wearing it:
Still not done though! I had bought some brown material for the inside leather patch but it turned out to look too dark for my liking so I went to Fabric Mart and Walmart to find something else. I ended up getting some suede at Fabric Mart that was a lighter color and much softer. It didn't cost too much, thankfully. I bought 1 foot at $5.99 a yard. At Walmart I bought darker embroidery thread to show the stitches. Suede is apparently extremely hard to pierce with a needle, I had to apply a ton of pressure just to get it through most times. And frustratingly enough, I didn't pay attention to the picture and stitched all around the whole patch when I wasn't supposed to. It turned out to be a good thing though.
On the edges where the suede touches the red, the thick stitches didn't hold the material down close to the red, so I had to hand stitch those edges down similar to the way I did the red strips, which was very hard because I was using a thin needle now instead of a thick one. After I stitched the edges down I cut the thick stitches and tied the ends down with knots to secure. The above picture is the end result! Here is a closer picture:
And another picture of the sleeve folded in half:
The final result is one part of my costume finished! Hooray!!
And yet, holy shit. All that work only for one sleeve. I still have the body, the flaps, and the legs to do. Yeesh!! I should start keeping track of hours. Looking back at what went into this one sleeve I'd have to guess 22 hours combined for this ONE SLEEVE.
Yeah, I'm fucked.