Dalek dress/skirt - what type of skirt?

[chaucolaite]

So I'm trying to make another of those excellent dalek dress/skirt things for a con this year (I have a back up as Captain Jack Harkness, I even have the coat squee but I wanted to do this).
However, I'm still pretty much a newbie to sewing.

When I found this tutorial http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&hl=en&hl=en-GB&v=SdgLeVuPcck it seemed like a

Comments

[raptorgirl]

I did an apron-style overskirt with multiple panels. The balls were made out of Styrofoam cut in half. You can see pictures (without the petticoat) here. The problem I ran into was not the bumps getting hidden in the skirt, but them lying too flat. A petticoat seemed to help. Get a poofy one. The panels were nice because I could sit down in them--I just had to be careful and sort of sweep the back ones out of the way first.

[chaucolaite]

That was one of the ideas I was thinking of! Nice to see how it works, might go with this. (Yours was the first Dalek dress I saw and what probably kicked off this xD)

(And as alesta says, the ability to sit down is the best part of that idea!)

Edited because durr you state the pattern you used in the post xD

[alesta_wyn]

Oooh, what a good idea! I was thinking an A-line skirt might work, but your idea with the panels is brilliant! (It's always nice to be able to sit when wearing a costume).

[themegaloo]

When I made mine, I went for super easy because I was just getting back into sewing (I'll probably make an updated version at some point....) so what I did was actually a strapless a-line dress and then I cut out flat circles and used iron on transfer paper to put them on and then went around the edges with metallic puff paint. But as someone else said, I definitely got a petticoat to give it more shape after as well! So yeah, definitely with the petticoat, and an a-line skirt is pretty easy to make and also can give you clearly defined straight lines to line the bumps up with :)

[sarahtheboring]

Mine was this one. I think I started with a giant rectangle ~2x my waist measurement (wide) x the skirt length (long) and made box pleats in it to form the panels. The inside of each panel/pleat was lined with fleece interfacing, which is pretty sturdy. I also did a giant bumper around the bottom, which kept the pleats from shifting from that side, and wore a smallish petticoat. Nothing really moved/shifted much.

OTOH, it didn't have a lot of definition / A-line shape, so as a strategy it has its good and bad points.

The bumps were the rounded halves of plastic Easter eggs, sanded, spray-painted, 4 holes drilled around the edge of each, hand-sewn on. They worked out pretty well, with only a tiny scratch or two through 2 cons of wear.

The Skittles Daleks don't have bumps in the back, lucky for me, so that avoided most sitting-down problems.

[lizzwithay]

For mine I'm doing a full skirt over a hoop skirt, using the ball pen balls cut in half and painted. I think that if you have a petticoat or something just to poof it out a little bit then it won't fold in and disappear.