It 'Seams' I Have Some Sewing To Do

It's that time again! The school musical is upon us and once more in a fit of creative stupidity I have volunteered to work on costumes.

This time around, I was lulled into a false sense of security, or maybe a real sense of inadequacy, when the Home Ec teacher ( a sewing whizz) also volunteered. 'Great', I thought, 'at least with an expert on board I won't have to make all the decisions.'

Wrong.

Lulled as I was, it took me some time to notice that not very much was happening regarding costumes. To be fair, the director also 'lulled' me when she said that the costumes would be 'easy' and that part of the time they would wear their own clothes. By the time I had realised what we needed to do; met with the Home Ec teacher and taken on board her ideas; seen the logo and realised the colours were all wrong; asked for the logo/sets to be redesigned colourwise and decided on a plan; I was just in time to notice that we had less than a month until the performance! How did that happen? I was sure that last time the show had been 3-4 weeks after the holidays. This year it is in week 2!!!!

(Oh and just to clarify, we are now entering the second week of the holidays).

So what do we need to do? Well, there are 15 fast food restaurant 'uniforms' to create. The 6 boys will wear red trousers, yellow shirts and black aprons. The 9 girls (yes, NINE!!) were originally going to wear princess line, button down, panelled dresses in black and red/yellow/or orange with white aprons. The time line check forced a very quick rethink on that!

My next plan was: buy red/orange and yellow T Shirts for the girls and sew some one colour, one hour, A line, pullover shift dresses, probably in black. Then I felt worried about the black and thought red, which meant yellow T Shirts, so I went on the hunt for yellow T Shirts. There were none to be found.

What I DID find though were some lovely red mens' chinos for $7.50 a pair at the outlet store! I bought up their supply, praying desperately that the random sizes could be made to fit our lads (this still remains to be seen). Next I found the cutest red flip skirts for $4.95 each! So I bought up 10 of them too. The tops are my next challenge.

I had planned to make shirts on the serger for the boys so I figured we could do the same for the girls so they all had tops in the same colour which would at least look like a corporate uniform.

I had thought to use these two patterns for the girls and boys respectively, until I realised how many buttonholes I/we would need to do. So now I am contemplating sewing up the fronts so the shirts go on over their heads, thus eliminating the need for buttons, but I am not sure it will work with the girls' pattern. Next step: make some prototypes.

Once all this has been decided, I have another 4 teachers willing to sew up one or two shirts each so we should be able to knock them off reasonably quickly. The Home ec teacher has agreed to take responsibility for the aprons (see girls' pattern above).

So that only leaves me the vexing issue of how to create both a hamburger and french fries costume in the time remaining. We looked online of course and you Americans have all manner of ready made costumes available whilst we Australians do not. Unfortunately the shipping costs to Aus will be ridiculous so that is out (not to mention the time factor).

I am hopeful that we can construct something like this:

or this:

although Himself is determined that I should be aiming for something like THIS! Sanity, blood pressure and marital/collegial harmony will determine the eventual outcome. Stay tuned!