jacket – Mary Blanche

Drafting Rose Tyler and Gwen Cooper’s Jacket Patterns

Published on November 4, 2014March 18, 2018 by essieofwhoLeave a comment

Two weeks ago I was sick with the flu. While trying to think of something to get my mind off how yucky I felt, I decided it was about time I drafted some patterns for a few Rose Tyler and Gwen Cooper jackets I own. Although I adore the jackets Rose Tyler wears in Doctor Who and the jackets Gwen Cooper wears in Torchwood, finding them are very difficult and it’s even harder to find the jackets in my size. After a lot of thought, I decided that after this year’s Phoenix Comicon, I’ll use what money I had left over from the convention (If I had any money left over) and the money I’d use for going to other conventions and buy any screen accurate clothing I’ve been looking for for a while, buy them, and then make them in a larger size so they’ll fit me.

I’ve collected more screen accurate clothes from various characters from Doctor Who than I care to mention but I will talk about three jackets I’m currently drafting patterns for: Rose Tyler’s Idiot’s Lantern jacket, Rose Tyler’s School Reunion jacket, and one Diesel Gwen Cooper jacket. I’m not done drafting the patterns for the jackets, so I’m only going to talk about the jackets themselves. Continue reading “Drafting Rose Tyler and Gwen Cooper’s Jacket Patterns” →

Adventures in Dying Fabric- Dying a Jacket

Published on October 2, 2014March 18, 2018 by essieofwho2 Comments

Sorry about not updating everyone on my current creative projects. I’ve been busy lately with my day job and the weather here in Arizona was… well… crazy with flooding and such. Fortunately I didn’t have flooding trouble, but it did cause me to be stuck at home, unable to leave the house. Since I had a lot of time, I just worked and worked and didn’t take the time to write posts about what I was working on. I was very productive, but still. I felt bad about ignoring my blog. Ugh.

Anyway, on with the post…

About a year ago I began to look into dying fabrics. I didn’t have a main reason to want to dye fabric, but it was just something I was curious about and never had the desire to actually do. What finally pushed me to learn how to dye fabrics is because I wanted to dress as Rose Tyler and other Doctor Who characters, but the clothes and fabric I’d find at the store was the wrong color.

There was so much to learn, especially since I never dyed fabric in my life and some of the fabric I wanted to dye was 100% polyester or nylon. I also didn’t have anyone within a 10 mile radius to help me, mentor me, or just be the person that double checks my dye recipes. I did have a lot of quilt shows that talked about dying fabric and aired on TV when I couldn’t sleep. (The shows are great to watch and make me sleepy) After months of on-and-off research, I figured I knew enough information to at least try to dye fabric.

This is post one of two (Maybe three) to document my adventures in dying fabric.

My first dye project was to dye a jacket the color of the jacket used for Rose Tyler’s Impossible Planet. I fortunately found a jacket that would pass as the jacket from the episode that was white and made from cotton. I found the jacket on amazon. It looked like this…

043a Continue reading “Adventures in Dying Fabric- Dying a Jacket” →

Rose Tyler’s Stolen Earth Jacket- The Alternate Jacket

Published on September 5, 2014March 18, 2018 by essieofwhoLeave a comment

Its been a while since I talked about making my Rose Tyler Stolen Earth jacket. Since the last post, I ran into so many problems with the jacket that I’m thinking of the jacket and then deciding what I want to fix in a second yet-to-be-planned-for version.

Anyway, I’m taking a break from going conventions for the next few months, I have some extra money to spend, I needed another warm jacket (Growth spurts strike again), and, since I really wanted a jacket that would pass as Rose Tyler’s Stolen Earth jacket, I found one that looked like the jacket online (Ebay to be exact) and bought it.

Here’s what it looks like…

036a Continue reading “Rose Tyler’s Stolen Earth Jacket- The Alternate Jacket” →

GE Elementalist Bolero Jacket

Published on September 2, 2014March 18, 2018 by essieofwhoLeave a comment

After a month (Or so) of working, I finally finished another part of my Granado Espada Elementalist costume! This time, it’s the jacket. I call it the bolero jacket, because it is, and it was hard to finish. Thanks to breaking the jacket into workable sections, making the jacket wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be and I was able to finish the jacket sooner than I thought. It was still a hard project to work on because my sewing machine broke while working on it. This meant that if I wanted to finish the jacket, I would have to hand sew the rest of it.

Anyway, onto the jacket! Here’s the front….

Continue reading “GE Elementalist Bolero Jacket” →

Rose Tyler’s Empty Child Jacket- Version 2

Published on August 3, 2014March 18, 2018 by essieofwhoLeave a comment

It’s been a year since I made my first Empty Child jacket and as much as I like my first jacket, I wanted to remake it. There were problems with my first jacket, mostly due to the fact it was the first time I ever made a jacket like this. Most of the problems had to do with fitting and little nit picky things, but it still bothered me. I believed I could do better, so I spent months doing more research on the jacket so I could create a better, more accurate jacket.

Probably the most annoying thing about doing more research is that my original post about the jacket usually showed up in the searches as one of the top posts. Good for popularity reasons, bad for continuing jacket research. (Someone tell me I’m not the only one who made the jacket from scratch!) I’m not tooting my own horn, but I do think this is of note because it cause me to take me even longer than I wanted to in finding new reference photos and information on the Firetrap Harrie.

After becoming frustrated finding new research photos and finding the information I already had pop up more than I’d like it to, I attempted to buy a Firetrap Harrie jacket just to see how it was made and create my own reference photos. That ended up not working out so I went back to searching for reference photos and staring at screen captures for more information.

After almost year of doing research, I decided it was time to make the jacket over again with the intention of wearing it to the 2014 Phoenix Comicon. (It might’ve helped that John Barrowman would be a guest at the convention again) I ended up not finishing it in time to wear it to the Comicon, but after the Comicon was over I was able finished it.

Here’s what version 2 looks like….

Continue reading “Rose Tyler’s Empty Child Jacket- Version 2” →

Making Rose Tyler’s Stolen Earth Jacket- Figuring out the Patterns

Published on February 28, 2014March 18, 2018 by essieofwho1 Comment

It’s been many months since I mentioned that I was working on a scratch-built Rose Tyler’s Stolen Earth jacket. For the most part I’ve been too busy and frustrated to work on the jacket, but this past week I decided it was time to sit down and work on the patterns, cut out the fabric, and possibly finish a majority of the jacket. So far I’ve worked on the patterns, cut out the fabric, and pined the pieces together. XD

Originally I planned on drafting the patterns for the jacket from scratch, but I abandoned that idea for a variety of reasons, mostly to save myself from going crazy with the construction of the jacket. The jacket’s seams are… interesting. Nice to look at, but…. interesting. I never made a jacket or coat with seams like this before so I wanted to base my jacket pattern off an already existing pattern. That way if I made a mistake I could go back to the original pattern and not have to start from scratch.

As a reference, here is a promotional image of the front of the jacket with the seams traced over…

DW411-0002b

And here’s a screen capture of the back of the jacket with the seams traced over…

DW401-1926a

I know I missed tracing some seams in the pictures, but I wanted to focus on the torso section of the jacket. The sleeves seams (Which you cannot see in the pictures) are normal, sans the ribbed knit at the bottom, but the torso section of the jacket is kind of odd. I had a lot of trouble finding and modifying the back section of the pattern because, well, I messed up on where the seams are. I actually made an extra seam in the back, but I’ll talk about that later.

Although I had trouble with the seams and turned out “wrong”, I’ll still talk about what I did wrong so if anyone uses my posts to make their own jacket, they’ll know what can go wrong and how to change it. 🙂 Continue reading “Making Rose Tyler’s Stolen Earth Jacket- Figuring out the Patterns” →

Making Rose Tyler’s Stolen Earth Jacket- Figuring out the Fabric

Published on September 28, 2013March 18, 2018 by essieofwhoLeave a comment

A while ago I made a post here on my blog asking if anyone was interested in a tutorial on how to make Rose Tyler’s jackets from the Empty Child/Doctor Dances and Turn Left/The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End. I was surprised that there was a lot of interest in it (I really shouldn’t have been surprised, but still…), so I decided to delete the post so no one will think I’m still asking for input about a tutorial and begin to work on creating the jacket “tutorials”.

I decided to work on the Stolen Earth jacket and make the tutorial for it first because I already have everything I needed to work on it. The Empty Child/Doctor Dances jacket I made was in preparation for a convention so I didn’t take ANY progress photos, thus letting me work faster. So, in order for me to make a good tutorial, I’ll need to get more fabric and possibly make the coat again. So, the Empty Child jacket must wait for another day. Specifically a day when I’ve saved enough money to buy everything I need to make the jacket over again. 🙂

I decided to split the “How I made this jacket” into separate posts so I can update everyone on my progress and keep everything organized. 🙂

Please note: I never saw the original jacket used in the episode in person. I’m basing my version off photos, screen captures, and information found online. Links to the websites I used will be referenced in the second post about this jacket.

As a reminder, the original jacket is an Oasis dark purple leather jacket. This is what it looks like…

Rose Tyler Empty Child Jacket

Published on May 23, 2013March 18, 2018 by essieofwhoLeave a comment

This poor blog has fallen to the waist side while I worked on things for the Phoenix Comicon, so before I leave for the PCC, I decided to make a post about one of the costumes I’ll be wearing while there… Rose Tyler from The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. Specifically the jacket.

I know this isn’t the best photo of the jacket, but you get the idea of what I’m talking about. 🙂

I’ve been wanting to cosplay as Rose Tyler from those episodes for about a year now and I’ve gathered everything I needed for the costume except for the coat. I couldn’t find the real coat on ebay (It’s a Firetrap coat, style Harrie) or anywhere else. I did find some that would pass as a look-a-like, but they were too short for my torso, my size was sold out, ect. So, I do what I always do when there is a type of clothing I like but can’t buy…. I made it myself!

Continue reading “Rose Tyler Empty Child Jacket” →