The Ren Fest Vest

I had another fit of insanity on Friday.  It wasn’t the worst one I’ve ever had, but Becky and Mike encouraged me.  I’ll take that to mean they have a whole lot of faith in my abilities.

You see, I have a Renaissance Festival costume–but Michael doesn’t.  And every time we go he laments the fact that he gets to be plain clothes Mike while I’m all fancy schmancy (except for that one time when he got mistaken for Shaggy from Scooby Doo).  This time we weren’t going to Ren Fest, we were actually going to a Renaissance themed wedding for our friends David and Veronica.

Becky actually showed me the pattern and, as it didn’t look that hard, I decided to see if I couldn’t whip out a Medieval looking vest before the wedding the next day at 6.

Pattern Pieces

It only had 4 pieces and couldn’t have been easier to put together.  I used this suede fabric that was textured to look like pleather but didn’t have that plastic-y thickness to it.  After sewing on it a bit, I decided I could get away with not hemming it, but I did go back over and sew the seams open to give it a nice finish.

Sewing down the seams

This also helped to hold the fabric fllat without me having to iron the daylights out of it (if that makes sense).

The tricky part was the detailing.  I kind of forgot to borrow the pattern instructions (oops) so I was kind of winging it as I put it together.  It wasn’t a problem to sew it together, there was one back piece, two flaps for the front of the vest, and then four pieces that made up one sleeve–I could handle it.  I did not, however, know the spacing for the studs that were supposed to decorate the vest, so I spaced them an inch apart (it looked nice to me!) and attached all 100 studs to my trim.

Blogimage0045 Vest and trim

Of course, the pattern said I was supposed to use 54 studs, so apparently my spacing was off.  I’ll live.

The super annoying part came next and I had to very slowly sew all that trim on.  Eventually, I gave up and put the zipper foot on thinking that maybe less foot might help me out…it didn’t really, but it was a nice thought.

Zipper foot

After I made that magic happen, I was done.  Not a bad little  project for a few hours work.  It would’ve been done in less than 2 hours had I not bothered with the studs (and had I been feeling like a living person–this pollen is killing me).

Look how happy this man is!

Michaelinthevest

 

So happy!  We had to belt it around the middle, and, if you want a laugh, that belt is actually from the Rey costume.  Recycling is good!

In other news, the newspaper article is actually happening (in theory).  I don’t think it’s out yet, mainly because if I google my name and Appen the only thing that pops up is the Expo article that they fixed.  But I’ll put it up when I find it.

Don’t forget to check out my Etsy shop if you haven’t—> here

The pattern I used was Butterick B4574.

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