Sadie The Sewing Machine

Well, not really.

I had a little under a week to come up with a costume for a party with the simple theme “movies”. This was surprisingly hard. When someone tells you to think up a character for something like that, suddenly it’s like you’ve never seen or liked any movie ever. Strange thing that.

Anyway, I wanted to be something from an action or scifi movie, so Ripley from the Alien movies was the natural conclusion, especially since Alien is one of my favourite movies.

So I settled on being her from the first movie, since she has overalls in that one and I’ve always secretly wanted to make overalls.

(As a sidenote, how sad is it that it’s 2013 and Ellen Ripley is still almost unrivaled in the category of “awesome female action heroes”? You’d think that in 34 years they’d have come up with loads of competitors, but nope.)

These were my main inspiration pics:

Now, since I didn’t have a whole lot of time, I decided not to try and copy the movie version exactly, but keep it quite simple (which also makes it more wearable at future costume parties as something other than Ripley). And I didn’t have time to figure out how to get the hair (I finished sewing this so last minute that I didn’t even have time to curl my hair or anything) so I ended up going to the party looking like this:

My action hero face.

The gun is just a water gun, but painted by Boyfriend’s mother who works at a local theatre (and who’s sweet enough to help me out with stuff like this). Please ignore the background stuff. I was in a hurry.

Without gun or action hero expression.

I had to make the patches by hand, since there wasn’t enough time to order anything from the internet and Helsinki’s few geeky stores are not very well stocked with Alien related stuff.

It took a LONG time.

I used this as a model for the shoulder patches and figured the smaller one out from the second inspiration pic.

Here are some of the details up close:

The stitching isn’t very pretty, I have to admit, but I was in a hurry (just in case I haven’t emphasised that enough)

The pattern I used was a slightly altered version of this one from Burda 4/97:

Here’s some Finnish for you to be confused by!

This was a fun project, though I would’ve liked just a little more time to finish it. The party was great too, and apparently I did something right since I won third place in the evening’s costume competition (or maybe it was just the gun :D).

– Sadie