Close Up on Suit Up! Aquaman (or, How I Got Rob in Pleather.)

Babe. DO. NOT. PUT. ME. IN. SPANDEX he said, in all caps. BABE. I replied, caps lock on: I GOT YOU. 

NO BABE YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND, I AM NOT WEARING SPANDEX. 

BABE I AM NOT GONNA PUT YOU IN SPANDEX YOU ARE GONNA LOOK AMAZING I GOT YOU

WE TALK IN INCREASING LEVELS OF ALL CAPS AROUND HERE BUT I MEAN LOOK AT THE RESULT

I *think* he ended up being down with it 😁

I'll tell you another thing: as the pieces came together, he was so down with this look, he demanded that I forge ahead with my idea of shoulder and hip gauntlets, when others were iffy on the extra-ness of it. I was like, EXTRA IS MY MIDDLE NAME. 

Babe, he assured me, if you see it in your head, do it. (We revert to lowercase, when encouragement warrants it.) And everyone ended up liking them once they were 3D.

Also 3D: gloves! These things were flat and lifeless pieces of flannel backed pleather, and I was pretty mad at them, to tell you the truth. I wanted them to look like ocean waves, but they were flopping lifeless as a sad little kiddie pool, until I started folding them in frustration. Eureka! I made the folds permanent with some simple lines of stitching. Oh, and I attached them to combat gloves. And painted the whole shebang for depth. OH YEAH SPEAKING OF PAINT...

Here's how I kept my no-spandex promise! Those are Levis, baby. Rob has about 20 pairs. I thought it would be very cool to take a little bit of biker/roadhouse/Momoa Aquaman (behold, Rob's weathered motorcycle boots), and mix him up with the classic green & gold Aquaman, by simply painting jeans to look as though they'd been underwater. I layered up some colors and went nuts on them with a tracing wheel dipped in gold paint. Rob liked the gold so much, he asked me to rub some of the paint into the creases of the jeans, "as highlights."

LIKE I SAID HE GOT SO INTO IT.

What he *wasn't* totally sold on was the color of the jacket. That burnished basketweave pleather...

...that Rob is displaying with SO MUCH BADASSERY...

...started out VERY! SHINY! GOLD! As you can tell, I am UBER EXCITED ABOUT THAT. Contrary to the smile captured by our awesome photographer, Rob was not of the same opinion. He's right, it's so wrong in its virgin form. I will say, in my defense, that our strange tv diet at that time included back-to-back episodes of Bret Michaels Rock of Love, and The Handmaid's Tale. I can't say why we were doing that to our brains. But I think it bled into the outfit. We started calling him Rock-quaman. That state of mind is also what pushed me into getting a blonde wig, rather than a Momoa toned 'do. I thought...I'm not going Gal Godot on my 'fro, why put Rob in anything but blonde Hair Band locks?

I digress. 

When Rob first got a gander of that gold pleather in full metal jacket form, he asked for a couple of swatches, walked mysteriously off towards the kitchen, and took matters into his own hands.

He returned with several hues of shoe-polished-pleather. I picked one, and yelped HAVE A GOOD TIME GIVING THAT JACKET A RUBDOWN BABE CUZ  THAT'S ALL YOU (we were back to all caps at this point, as Aquaman had well over a dozen embellished costume pieces. I went overboard, pun intended. THE HIP ARMOR ALONE HAS 7 PATTERN PIECES.)

Sorry, didn't mean to go caps lock on that last sentence.

But I mean can you blame me?! THIS IS MY DREAM COME TRUE!!!! ROB IN METALLICS AND PLEATHER AND WITH A FREAKING TRIDENT TO BOOT?! I DO NOT HAVE A LARGE ENOUGH FONT!!!

Out of this series, this was hands down the most fun to make. If Rob wanted stuff like this, welp, I'd be sewing for him alllll the time. As it stands, I'll be making another version of the jacket for him, in as wild a material as he will allow. Sans shoulder gauntlets. 

You can see how I (erm, we!) did it in Ep 2 of Suit Up! on Bluprint. (And if you want to make that jacket, I used Burdastyle's "Men's Pirate Jacket" pattern, with a few mods, natch 😉)

Alrightly then! I gotta go make my rocker birthday boy Coq Au Vin. His birthday week came with the promise of No Deadline Stress Sewing, so I've been cooking. Slightly poorly, if I'm honest. Who knows what'll come out of my machine when I'm back to sewing this weekend...

Close Up on Suit Up! The Dark Knight (I'm BATMAN.)

Do not adjust your monitors, I am indeed clad in head to toe black (literally--I mean, do you know how hard it is to get my mass of hair into a cowl?). This absence of technicolor is something I would only do for The Dark Knight.

I loved comic books ever since my bigger bro (as he likes to call himself--this is, again, a quite literal description) started a collection as a kid. The collection was solely his, as the ballet barre and mirrors installed in my room by my Dad were solely mine. Though I would've been delighted if Bigger Bro wanted to join me for a plié or two. 

I can't remember if this no-trespassing-on-hobbies-thing was a rule, or simply an innate knowledge that the two of us had to have some interests that were unique to us. Maybe the understanding came when I switched from Michael Jackson to Prince? Prince was Bigger Bro's domain, until I came to my senses. He was all DO YOU EVEN KNOW ANYTHING PRE-PURPLE RAIN YOU POSER.

Unfortunately for bro, I was HIGHLY interested in the plastic sleeved boxes of mini art that grew in his room. I was allowed in once a week to read a small pile of the latest issues, but really, I only ever got through one in a session, since it took me roughly an hour to get through fifteen pages. I was, and always have been, a speed reader, but comics had so much more than words to devour! They had color, they had art, they had lettering, they had story, they had layout. Usually about three pages from the end of my chosen issue, Bigger Bro would have enough of my presence in his domain and bid me farewell, the small pile of new issues mostly untouched.

(I would sneak back in later and read the rest when he was out with friends. Sorry bro. I felt it my reward for being the good kid who stayed in at night 😜)

You know that feeling you get when you're away from your childhood home for the first time, and you understand that you can have ANYTHING YOU WANT for dinner? That's the feeling I got when I walked into Midtown Comics, just a half block from the theater I was working in as an adult. Frank Miller's work jumped off the shelves, in the form of a Batman I'd never seen before. This Batman had had it. This Batman was the anit-hero, a Dark Knight who considered his previous career of crimefighting a mere slap on the wrist! This Knight was ready to FULL ON THROW DOWN, and I'm talking physically knocking Superman out of the Batcave throw down. I was in love, and bought everything Frank Miller I could find.

Out of the list of Super Heros for Suit Up!, Rob insisted I take Batman. Although his fandom equals mine, this ask was *mainly* because he thinks black looks great on me, and saw his chance. Civilian! I whispered, in my best Dark Knight bass rumble. You do not realize how easy an ask that is. I WILL ALWAYS CHOOSE TO DEFEND GOTHAM AS THE DARK KNIGHT. 

There's zero sew-speak going on in this post (I know, you're shocked) but the entire Batman episode is up for free on Youtube, and they're very good about making me talk about sewing (though I do still get to act a fool--that's pretty much impossible to contain). If you're a member, or start a free trial, you can view all four heroes, starting with Batman on Bluprint...and tomorrow, I'll be plastering Rob's Aquaman look ALL. OVER. THIS. HERE. SPACE. We went a little rock with it. Let's just say that green and orange spandex was a...harder sell, and I had some figurin' out to do.

Happy Sunday, Super Sewists. From the middle of Gotham, I hope you are fighting the very best fight, and finding a moment in this world to bring something creative into existence.

 (all photographs by Dylan Osborne, check out his Instagram feed for a dose of beauty)

Suit Up! Our New Series on Bluprint

Hiya peeps. This is a very quick PSA, as the week has gone upside down topsy-turvy. A kerfuffle, I tell you, A KERFUFFLE!

Our new series, Suit Up! in collaboration with DC Comics, launched on Bluprint last week. We had a rip-roaring, great good time doing this, and it was this comic book lover's dream to recreate some of my favorite icons--AND to dress ROB up too!!! (Y'all, I went absolutely overboard on his look. I saw my chance to get him in gold pleather, and I merrily took it.)

There are four episodes with four heroes in all--and although the goal of each is to create a costume, I think you'll get some cool stuff out of it in your everyday sewing life-- like how to work with leather. And the aforementioned pleather. Oh and I stumbled into a GREAT sewing machine that I'll tell you about soon!

But I digress. The main point of this quick post is to let you know that all content on Bluprint is FREE right now, through tomorrow (10/12). This event actually started earlier this week, but again, topsy turvy kerfuffle land over here. So! You've got, oh, twenty-four hours or so to catch Suit Up!, or Re:Fashion, or just go down the rabbithole of the gazillion things you can learn over there. Inspiration for a lovely weekend of creating that I dearly hope awaits us all. I'll be back next week with some costume close-ups, cuz I know we all like to get into the stitchin! 

Happy surfing, fellow creators...