Emily Winck's Blog

Well, the costumes are finished, the sets are built, the lines are memorized… it’s show time! Opening night was yesterday, and the show was great. Happily, the costumes held up, and I’m really happy with how they turned out:

Charlie Brown & Lucy

Snoopy on the doghouse

Linus & Sally

Schroeder

Designing the costumes for Charlie Brown was a great project for me. It forced me to try some new things and do more than just follow a pattern. It also gave me lots of stuff to blog about. =) Now to dream up my next project…

For Schroeder and Linus’ Peanuts shirts, I started with plain t-shirts in blue and red. Since I was a bit picky about the width of the stripes for each character’s costume, I figured it would be easier to add the stripes myself rather than look for commercially available striped shirts.

Step 1 was to cover the parts of the shirt that I didn’t want to have striped. I started with Linus’ shirt, and planned to use fabric spray paint, so I covered every little bit that I didn’t want blackened.

The spray fabric paint was a disappointment.

As you can see, it’s pretty splotchy, and doesn’t cover the fabric very well. I added a second coat, which did help, but it still was a messy project.

So for Schroeder’s shirt, I used a foam brush and regular fabric paint to add the stripes.

This process definitely took longer, but I only had to add one coat and it looked a lot more consistent.

My goal with the sleeves was to make them as puffy as possible. I started with the actual sleeve pattern from the tunic, and made it almost twice as wide and a bit taller (basically figure 2 below).

everything you could ever want to know about drafting sleeve patterns, from vintagesewing.info

This is the part where I realized I didn’t quite have enough fabric (who knew 3 yards wouldn’t be enough…). So I had to cut the sleeves in two pieces, with a seam running down the outer arm. Fortunately it’s hardly noticeable with all the puff.

To make the sleeve puff, I gathered the top edge of the sleeve, and sewed it into the dress. Then I made a wide hem at the bottom, leaving an inch or two open at the underarm seam. I threaded elastic through the hem and tied it off at approximately the length to fit comfortably around my arm.

puffed sleeve! yay!

I’m really happy with how the puffed sleeves turned out – I think they’re my favorite part of the whole dress.

Sally and Lucy have very distinctive Peanuts dresses – triangular bodice and full skirt, puffy sleeves, and unique collars. Starting from this tunic pattern, I needed to design some extras for the costume myself – collar, skirt, and sleeves.

For Sally’s collar, I traced a collar from one of my dress shirts, then cut it in half so I could have the back open (since that’s where the button is). Easy enough:

Lucy’s collar took a bit more experimenting. My first idea was to cut 2 pieces of fabric with a scalloped outer edge, then sew them together and flip inside out. That didn’t work very well, since the part where the scallops meet has to be clipped very very close to the seam (on the inside), and I couldn’t get it trimmed close enough to prevent the fabric from getting wonky. So, my second attempt was to make six separate “scallops.” Each pair is interfaced to help hold its shape, and then sewed directly to the bodice. I doubled over the hem so all the raw edges are enclosed. After Lucy tried on the dress, I’ve decided I need to tack these down so they don’t flop all over the place. =)

The skirt was the easiest part – I basically cut an entire circle of fabric, then cut an inner circle in it with the circumference to match the width of the bottom of the tunic. It took a fair bit of math (circumference = π*diameter!) but gives a very full skirt, without pleats or gathers. Lucy & Sally need to be able to move freely for the choreography, and since the fabric isn’t stretchy, the skirts needed to be very full.

the full skirt laid out with the bodice of the dress piled on top

how the skirt drapes

Next up: puffy sleeves!

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.