Quidditch robe VII

Yesterday, I headed out to Shepherd's Bush to pick up some cheap calico cotton to do some practice work/pattern making. I thought I'd head to other fabric shops to have a look, but in the end headed back to Universal Textile at 35 Goldhawk Road (020 8743 4154) to pick up 10 metres worth of the stuff at £2 per metre. I also picked up some faux leather for around £6.32 per metre (yeah, an odd price, I know. I only wanted one metre but there was an extra 90cm of it left on the roll, so they offered it to me at slightly discount rate) so I can put together my arm and shin pads after finishing my robe!

Having a studio replica robe was pretty handy as I could use/adapt the pattern they used in order to make my Quidditch robe. I totally underestimated how big the robe is when spread out and ended up using more fabric than I thought I would, but it's good I got about 10 metres' worth, as I still have plenty with which to play and experiment.

I started off by tracing the front and then the back of the robe. I can't really decide whether to do the back as one piece, or two, but am tempted to stick with two pieces for the back as that could help with the pleated bit at the back.

I then moved on to the smaller bits, tracing out the sleeves and the hood. The sleeves and the hood on the school uniform robes are longer than on the Quidditch robes, so I had to make some slight adjustments to the pattern, but kept the places where the seams should go the same, so it should fit together similarly to the uniform robe.

Now that I have the basic shapes of the various different sections, I'll be marking on my seam allowances before cutting them out!!! If you don't mark on your seam allowances, you'll end up making your robe (or whatever you're making for that matter) smaller than intended as you'll be sewing up your seams into the shape of the pieces.

The next stages will pretty much be double checking the patterns, and making sure the matching seam lines of the different sections are all the same length, adding the seam allowance, and cutting out the pattern.

I'm still undecided as to whether to find a cheap sewing machine to put this together, or whether to just hand sew the robe. I'll work that out at a later date, but if you guys have suggestions as to a first basic sewing machine, let me know in the comments please!!!

On a side note, the calico cotton is actually quite a nice thick fabric, and I might try and make some Jedi tunics, tabards and obi out of that stuff. But that's a story for a different day I guess.