I decided this year I wanted to dress up as my favorite video game character: Super Mario. But alas, people of the web, I am a female. Mario is a male. And although there are some rockin' girls dressed as dude characters all over the web, I wasn't sure that interpretation would look good on this costume, mostly because I don't have a mustache :D . This led me to my own version: I guess you could call it Super Maria :)
Of course I had to do a silly pose for the picture! This is me after all!
Sadly, none of my friends were willing to be Luigi, or should I say Louisa, with me. I would say overall I am pretty happy with the costume. I knew drafting my own pattern would be hard, but it was the only option considering the fact that they don't really make overall patterns for girls.
Basic idea of pieces
Drafting it turned out to be, surprisingly, easier than I thought. I just used my best fitting t-shirt and some chalk to draw out the top portion and traced it onto tracing paper. The shorts portion gave me A LOT of trouble. Turns out that winging it didn't really work in this situation ;) . For the longest time I could not figure out why they kept turning out 25 sizes too big! Then after some googling I found this awesome tutorial on Craft Passion that helped tremendously. She made some adorable shorts for her kids and included a pattern, which helped me realize that I was cutting the pieces entirely wrong! OOPS.
After tracing and cutting it was just a matter of attaching everything and taking good measurements. In the photo below the colored lines show which sides match up to which.
I used a seam allowance of about an inch to allow for a lot of mistakes. I'm not gonna lie; getting the correct measurements for the shorts portion felt like taking an exam you didn't study for. After a lot of temper tantrums and bad math, I finally figured out how I needed the measurements. I basically measured completely around my waist and hips for the top hem of the shorts, around my thigh for the leg hole, and up from the top of the leg hole to the waist for the "height." Don't know why that was so hard for me to figure out!
After forming the shorts I attached the top of them to the bottom of the top "shirt." The straps came up from the back, over my shoulders, and onto the front buttons. Sewing the buttonholes was actually pretty fun, and I found the perfect buttons at Walmart.
Successfully making the hat required a lot of luck, the luck being the discovery of this tutorial over at Fleeting Thing. I'm glad I found that; it's pretty hard to find the hat sold separately from the costume for a good price.
Overall, in materials and time this cost about $26 and 2 weekends. Not bad considering I have payed more than that for cheaply-made store bought costumes. If anyone would like more photos of details, I would be happy to add some.
Well that's it for this Halloween, hope you had a great one!
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