Howdy!

I've got a little bit of progress to share on the vest pattern for the Nova Prime costume. In my last post I showed a picture of the pattern in Optitex. Well, as these things usually go, I've had to go back and tweak a few things here and there so the new pattern is slightly different.

Using Optitex to draft this pattern has been very interesting and certainly a learning experience! If I were to draft this pattern by normal flat pattern techniques I'd fold a whole bunch of 1" pleats on a piece of paper, trace my pattern on top of the pleats, cut it out, then open up the piece of paper. You don't really have the option to do that in Optitex. What I did at first was to make a series of grade points along the contour line where I wanted the pleats to be and then drafted in each pleat one at a time. This looked good on the screen and the piece looked correct when I closed the pleats up. However when it came to print out my pattern and I got to fold it all together something strange happened. I had a couple of pleats folding in the wrong direction (I should have checked counter clock wise instead of clockwise) and then one of them was actually folded over on top of another pleat. It was very odd!

I ended up going back and starting the piece over again and drafted parallel pleats all at once, eliminated the lower pleated panel, and let the computer determine where the pleats would go. This turned out to be much simpler and probably something I should have done the first time around. Oh well, that's part of learning!

So this morning I sewed up the muslin of the vest in the base size (a size 16) and all the pattern pieces worked out perfectly. I made a slight change to my initial decision to do pleats for the front of the vest and decided to make them all sewn tucks instead. This does not change my pattern piece at all but it means that each pleat has to be sewn down. This drastically changed how the pleats laid across the bust and looks 100x better than my first muslin.

Some general pointers I have if you decide to make this pattern in the future. First use the same color thread as your fabric and you won't see the stitching under the pleats. When marking the pleats I transferred all the markings of the pleats along the dashed lines of the pattern using tracing paper and a spikey wheel. When folding the pleats the foldline will be in the middle of the dashed lines. Pin the dashed lines together and stitch.

Also, steam is your friend here if you are ironing these pleats. The first mock up I made for the vest was out of some gross thrift store wool and I needed a ton of steam and a clapper (the wooden thing) to flatten the folds of the pleats.

The final pattern for the vest will have a neckline facing, lining, back separating zipper, and bound armholes.

Hi Everyone!
Melanie and I are at it again! Continuing her love of all things Glenn Close, my sister has decided she wants to make a Nova Prime Irani Rael costume from the Guardian's of the Galaxy movie. Being the sweet sister I am, I volunteered to make her pattern and her wig. I'm currently taking a class on pattern grading and computer pattern development using the Optitex software so I not only get to help my sister but I get some great guidance while developing this pattern.

This post today will just be focusing on the pattern for the vest.

Now if you don't remember this character from the movie she is the leader of the police force wearing a great blue suit and crazy Saturn ring hair.

Now looking at the costume I broke it down into several parts. First is the undershirt with the white collar that peeks out from above the vest and below her sleeves. I'm not going to draft this part. I'm going to leave it up to my sister whether or not she wants to make faux cuffs/collar or make a shirt. I know she can handle it. That leaves a vest which the jacket hooks on to, a skirt, and the outer jacket layer. I ended up sketching the skirt but I'm not going to develop a pattern for it since Mel has a skirt pattern that matches it almost exactly.

The exhibit photos were taken by Freya over on Flickr. Check out her gallery for more photos of the FIDM movie costume exhibit on display now.

Now looking at the vest it has a built up neckline, center yoke, and diagonal pleats running through the bust. You can't see much of the vest besides that. I made a few executive decisions and threw in a princess seam below the bust for better shaping, and did princess seams down the back. I also chose to bind the armholes to keep everything smooth. What you can easily see in the photo above is the panel of hooks where the jacket connects to the vest. Here's a even clearer picture of it.

I developed the pattern in Optitex from a size 16 sloper that I digitized using the digitizer in the lab. My sister is not a size 16, but as part of my project I had Mel develop and fit her own sloper. She will be sending it to me and I will be grading the pattern to fit her. A bonus of developing the pattern in Optitex is that I can easily change the pattern for additional sizes when I develop a grade system.

Anyway, here are my sketches for the costume. Notice my sketch of the vest does not have the princess line on the lower side front portion. I decided to add that in while drafting the pattern. Also my hook and eye guide has 5 hooks despite the fact that the jacket only has four. My sketches were done before the exhibit photos were taken. The exhibit photos have also given me the chance to see that the skirt is a 6 panel gore skirt and not a darted one like I have sketched. That's what happens when there are only screenshots to work from!

For the vest I incorporated a 2" wide back neck facing and cut a front facing from the combined front yoke pieces. I left the front facing with a center front seam in order to make it easier to line up the seams. I drafted a seperate pattern piece for the lining of the pleated part of the vest. I transferred all the access of the bust shaping in that area to a tuck at the shoulder seam to allow the lining fabric some space to move.

The pleated portion of the front panel is broken up into an upper section and lower section in order to contour over the bust.

Here is what the finished pattern pieces look like in Optitex

I will eventually be making this in different sizes and offering them as a download if people are interested. I will be making a muslin mock up of this pattern in the next coming weeks. Next is the jacket!!