I am costume designing for Charlie Brown – and my current strategy is massive multitasking. I have 4 costumes currently in progress, 1 done, and 1 yet to start (eek). I’m pretty good at following patterns – the tricky part of this project is when there is no pattern. So it’s required lots of sketching, calculating, and trial-and-error.
Charlie Brown’s shirt only required a bit of math, to figure out how far apart the peaks should be for the zig-zag. My “pattern”:
Sally & Lucy’s dresses are rather more complicated. I looked for a pattern that would be close to what I wanted the final product to look like, but wasn’t able to find anything very close to the Peanuts’ dresses. I already had a pattern that was basically a loose-fitting tunic, so I used that as a base for the bodice, and am in the process of designing my own collars, skirts, and puffy sleeves for the dresses.
Schroeder and Linus just need stripes on their shirts. Starting with solid red and blue shirts, I calculated how wide each stripe needed to be, then marked them out with duct tape on the shirts. I found fabric spray paint that I thought would be great – I could just spray it on the shirt, since the non-stripe area was covered in duct tape. Unfortunately, the spray is nothing like regular spray paint – it’s not very consistent and tends to drip glops of paint. But I’m finishing one of the shirts that way, and striping the other shirt with old-school fabric paint & foam brush. Stripe by stripe.
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