Flash Suit Progress 4

One of the last steps in making the pattern was to trace the pieces. To do this I took all the pieces apart on only the right side, leaving the left side sewn together for orientation purposes. I used white tissue paper that you would use in a gift bag to trace my pattern on.

As I was progressing towards this step, I was curious to see if anyone else had done similar steps. Here is an excerpt from this article that I found helpful:

• Cut your fitting pattern from muslin or another light weight, light colored even-weave fabric.  You don’t want to use anything stiff or heavy because it won’t fit snugly and smoothly over your body.  You also don’t want to use a knit fabric, because the stretch will distort the final pattern. The natural muslin or light color allows you to see your corrections – you WILL be marking on this muslin, so don’t use a “nice” fabric!
• Note the wide seam allowances and all markings on the fitting pattern – these must be transferred to your muslin. Tracing paper and a tracing wheel work well for this, but you can also lay the pattern UNDER the fabric and use a fine-tip marker and a ruler to transfer the markings.  The muslin will not be used for anything other than fitting so don’t worry about making permanent markings on the fabric.  Mark the grainlines, too so you will be able to see if the garment hangs properly when it’s being fit. 

I'm not sure if the fabric I used was muslin or not, but it was a fairly light weight woven fabric that did not stretch. With the second bullet point, since I wasn't following a pattern, I applied it to transferring the seam allowances and markings from my fabric pieces to the tissue paper. I ironed all the pieces flat and ironed the tissue paper flat as well. I first traced everything in pencil in case I needed to adjust anything, and then went back with a straight edge and traced my lines with a thick size 08 Micron pen. 

To create the grain lines I looked at the orientation of each piece that was still sewn together on the left side and created the grain lines based on the vertical orientation of each piece. I made sure to mark the grain lines in such a way that the hexagon pattern on the final fabric are, for the most part, orientated vertically up the body of the suit. 

When the final version of the suit is sewn together all seams will have bias tape cording sewn between them. Bias tape cording is this:

And when is is sewn into the seams it looks like the light blue trim in this picture:

The bias tape cording would be used to create the embellishment of the yellow/gold roping seen following the seams of the suit in the model. It would take considerably more time, but for those wanting to have the roping light up, you could make your own bias tape out of yellow tool (mesh fabric) and use EL Wire as the cording that runs through the tape. As I have not gotten to this step yet I am unsure how much bias tape cording you would need to cover all of the seams of the suit.







Now that the pattern is complete, I will be able to shop for fabric. However looking into fabrics previously, I haven't been able to find one that both Adam and I agree with, so I will probably end up making my own design and having it printed by either Fabric On Demand or SpoonFlower.

If I am ever able to, I would like to try and grade my pattern, or make it available in different sizes. I found this article that talks a little bit about pattern grading and sizing, but I fear that my pattern is far too complex to try that with because as the article says,

"Pattern grading is fairly complex. It's best to avoid it unless it's necessary. "

But, here is the link to the article for those who might be interested.

For those of you who might need help understanding a pattern, I found this article to be very helpful.

Over all, tracing the pattern was the easy part, it was just time consuming because of the precision it required. By the end of this project I have probably spent right around 50 hours total, give or take a few hours. I found it best to try and devote multiple hours a day to different parts to see the most progress by the end of each day.

The pattern for this suit was perfected on Adam. Adam is a size 29x31 pant size, he is about 130 pounds, and is 5 feet 5 inches tall.

The next step for me will be making and testing helmet designs and figuring out how to extend the collar of the suit to the jaw line. The most helpful video I have found is embedded below. The video is from my Youtube Playlist: Flash Costume, so you can also see the other videos on ideas I have.

Thanks for following my progress, and I hope to share more with you soon!