Halloween.... a bit late

Time has just gotten away from me. I meant to post this sometime back in 2011 :)
The boulder outfit had 4 different elements: pants, wrist/ankle bands, belt and hair

1. Pants

To make these I just used the same technique as all of my Kung Fu pants only shorter. 

First, I fold the fabric into 4 such that i have a double fold on one side, then cut a semi circle for the crotch and down at an angle to the bottom. Next I sew the two halves together at the crotch then sew one seem to form both legs. After adding a bit of elastic I have baggy shorts.

After forming the pants I added some yellow ribbon to the ends of the leg holes to emulate a cuff. I added some extra fabric to the bottom so I didn't have to sew onto the elastic portion. I wanted to be able to snap it so it would be tight but this didn't quite work out so I ended up just having it sewed partly around. 

2. Ankle and wrist bands

In order to make both bands I formed a tube with the same fabric as the pants and sewed velcro to the ends to make it easy to attach.

This was much more difficult then I expected and took me several tries to get it right. I realized that I needed to use a continuous strip of velcro otherwise it would pucker at the place the velcro broke.

Also it took a while to get the size of the tubes right since the arms and legs do not increase in in diameter linearly.

3.Belt

For the belt I needed to stabilize it, so I sewed the lighter green fabric to a fake leather fabric that I had found a remnant of in walmart. This is the same fabric I used to make the water bag for my katara costume a while back.

I then cut out the 'loin cloth' strips from the brown fabric and hemmed them.

Next I cut out a wide piece of darker green fabric and gathered it to match the width to the belt. I then took the front brown strip and sewed it to the gathered portion of the belt.
I then attached the green gathered portion to the rest of the belt

After attaching the front brown section, I measured to make sure the cloths would lie evenly and sewed on the back section.

Next I added snaps to the wrong side of the stiff belt and right side of gathered portion so the belt could be held in place.












Next I needed to add the details to the belt. I used puffy fabric paint in yellow to get the relief I wanted on the belt. I used paper as a straight edge to get the edges painted.

Then used the paper with circles cut out to make the 'jewels' on the belt.

I let it dry for about 24 hours before removing the paper for each part. The other bits of the belt are rolled up and pinned to the underside of the belt so they didn't get paint on them.

4. Hair 

In order to make the top bun for the hair I used the same ribbon from the bottom of the pants and sewed it onto a strip of fabric.

 I the used hot glue to attach some foam to the top of a cardboard piece. Then wrapped bits of hair around it to form a bun.






I hot glued another piece of cardboard around the first to secure the hair and added strips of fabric to the bottom in order to be able to secure it to the hair.







Next I glued the fabric around the last layer of cardboard.






So this was the last sewing element.

The day of the Halloween party I drew the design on his back using silver eye liner to outline the pattern and non-toxic grey marker to color it in. I also used black eye liner to draw in facial hair that was missing like the side burns.