the nightcrawler - part two

To make my life easier while drafting the pattern for this costume, my bf left me borrow his wetsuit. Obviously neoprene and swimwear spandex have different stretch properties so I had to reduce some of the measurements based on the wetsuit, as well as take some other measurements to ensure the bodysuit would fit properly.

I will blog about the gloves in another post--here I'll first talk about the pattern for the bodysuit. I draft my patterns on pattern paper, which I buy on a roll for $11 at the fabric store in downtown LA. You can buy it at 45" width or 60". I usually buy 45" because I have little need for 60"... until now. My bf is super tall so I had to tape more paper to the width of the roll.

I did some research online and in my personal sewing books to figure out how to properly draft a bodysuit. I decided for this style that we'd use a center back zipper so I bought a 22" regular nylon zipper. I always think about the closures before starting any pattern because how you get in and out of a costume is.. pretty damn important. So based on this costume using a zipper at the center back, I would have to draft 3 patterns total-- front piece, back piece and sleeve.

For the back piece, I drew a long line for the total length of the bodysuit from the top edge of the neck to the ankle. This was my fold line to help with the fabric cutting. I took measurements for the neck width, neck trim height and the highest point of shoulder, or where the neck goes into the shoulder above the collarbone. The other measurements I used I just based them off the wetsuit. I could have reduced each of the measurements by at least 1/4"-1/2" because swimwear spandex has more stretch than neoprene, but I wasn't really sure how the suit was going to fit so I wanted to be able to "trim" and resew, rather than make it way too small and keep wasting material.





The thin red lines are all the straight measurements (halved, of course), the thick blue lines are for the red panel at the back. You can also see that I made little notches at the knees, ankles, chest, waist; these are for marking the fabric when I cut and sew--to ensure I match everything up perfectly.





I added 1" to my CB fold line for the zipper. I added 1" from top to bottom since I will be cutting this pattern on the fold of the fabric, but slashing the fabric along the seam for the zipper.



 
Crotch space is quite important. I took this off the wetsuit, you pervs.
Here's the front piece with the chevron details (not cut yet). I traced the back pattern, pretty much.

Next is the sleeve. As you can notice on the wetsuit, these are raglan sleeves. I am not using raglan sleeves. I am making a regular set-in sleeve (due to the design of the suit), so I had to kind of wing it. I used painters tape to mark off where my armhole was, and laid my cut out pattern on top and traced the armhole.



I took the measurements of the entire "armhole" and drafted a knitted sleeve pattern from the armhole measurements. I remember that the wetsuit's sleeves were not snug when my bf put them on so I took bicep, elbow and wrist measurements of my own.

This pattern might not look like much but it did take me 3 full hours to draft which is pretty long considering there are only 3 pieces to this pattern--there are tons of measurements on this thing! Hopefully when I sew it together I will have few problems...