The Mad Hatter

Although I don't have anymore costumes to show off after this, the Halloween pics I had made by Jennifer Mazy are nearly done, so I'll be sharing those soon. I'll be using those for entries in a couple of contests, too. They're so good (I've seen the proofs) I can't wait to share them, and it's a miracle that they're decent enough even to share because Aldous and Audrey were horrid! And poor Rosemary kept crying. I'm sure her crown was too tight. In any case, Jennifer worked miracles with photoshop and we ended up with some fantastic pics! William is the only one who likes to model, but hopefully the others will follow suit in a year or two.




Here's my  "sketch" of what I'm making. I like to plan out what I'm doing. For my own stuff, I'll sketch it out and then find a pattern that will work, but this didn't need anything that elaborate. 

Here's the hat before spray painting. It looks pretty fancy, here. I started getting excited and working more efficiently at this point.

 Here's a beginning shot, I had painted the hat and the jacket, made the hat band and bow tie, and finished the vest.

Here's the thread bandolier. I used some fancy trim I had, and sewed a piece of black elastic on part of it, and divided the elastic into pieces big enough to hold thread spools. It turned out that William could take them out too easily, so I had to sew them in.

 I sewed lace onto the collar (from that never-ending spool of home-decor lace) then sprayed it a sparkly gray-black.

More of the never-ending lace, pluse a scrap of white and silver paisley trim.

I took the plain buttons off of the thrift-store jacket, and added some fancy ones from my vintage stash.

To make this woman's size medium jacket fit size 4T William, I took up the shoulders, cut 6 inches off the sleeves, and ran elastic thru the area that would fall at William's waist.

On the hat, after making the hat band, I cut some pieces of coat hanger, sprayed one black and two gold, then hot glued some fancy buttons on the ends to make hat pins. The feather part came from a peacock Christmas ornament. Doug burn the edges of the size tag for me.

 The bow tie and hat band were made from an odd shaped scrap of coral brocade. I cut it in 4 inch wide strips, serged them end to end, the serged the edges. After I got a good length for the hat band, I made a bow tie with the remainder.

I sewed this pin onto the bow tie, to make it easier to get on and off of William.

I didn't have a vest pattern, so I made one for this. The fronts are lined, and I added a fancy button.

These pants are the same fabric as The White Rabbit's jacket, and I spray painted gold lines onto it, for stripes.

I had William wear a regular white polo under this, rather than a long sleeved shirt. It was pretty warm here.

He likes to show the back of the pants, too. William's a good model!

He wore black dress socks, and I spray painted the boots. They were black patent, and he wore them with his Willy Wonka costume the year before last.

Close up of the bow tie.

And, lots of pics of William in the costume.

Stay tuned for the professional pics, coming soon!