dress up | After Dark Sewing

World Book Day came around again quickly didn’t it?
I knew it was coming because I’ve been getting loads of Pinterest repins on my Elmer costume – all the notifications have been annoying!
This year, S wanted to be Mildred Hubble aka The Worst Witch, since she’s loving the books recently. I used this drawing I found online as a basis for the costume ideas…

…along with this one on the front cover of the first book, which adds a cloak and hat!

I made a cloak, dress, red belt, striped leggings and tie. And customised a witch hat we already have.

I bought one metre of plain black cotton (£3.99) – enough for the dress and cloak, with some left over – and half a metre of grey/black stripe jersey (£4) – enough for the tie, leggings (read on though, they’re cheat leggings!), and the hat. I used some red fleece I already had for the belt, and she wore her own tops. So not too bad cost-wise.

She wore brown boots (not photographed!), I wish she had black ones as then it’d have been perfect, but never mind! We had the broom already (side note: apparently everyone at school was asking her if it’s real, haha). Hair in plaits and I drew on freckles with a make-up pencil! She didn’t take a cat!

OK, here’s the finished outfit!

I made the dress with no pattern besides one of her dresses. It’s just a basic A line shape, with a regular zip at the back.

The belt was a length of red fleece, with a fringe snipped into it at the short ends!

I also made the cloak with no pattern – I made it really quickly by cutting a rectangle and hemming three edges. Then on the top I added a rectangular piece of fabric, longer than the top of the cloak. I pressed and sewed it like bias binding (although not on the bias!), leaving a few inches either end. I sewed on some Velcro to fasten the tabs, and that was that!

For the tie, I followed the tutorial in an old copy of Love Sewing magazine. I just shortened the pieces to make it child sized!

And then the leggings… well, I really just needed long socks, but how were they going to hold up? Lightbulb moment! By sewing them on to leggings!

So I made two tubes, and whacked them on to the cropped leggings. Literally “whacked” – very quickly and very messily! Who was going to see and who was going to care?! I then cut of the excess length of leggings so it wasn’t too bulky on S’s legs.

I cut the pieces as wide as possible with the fabric I had but they turned out too narrow… so I unpicked them and added in a strip on either leg, a couple of inches wide. That did the trick!

The annoying thing was that I had to unpick my perfect stripe matching! Grr!

Last but not least, the hat. We already had this plain black hat; I just handstitched yet another strip of the striped fabric around it. And the badge was a joint effort of S and I, made out of card.