ALICE’s Marvelous Costume is a blog about DIY costume making, along with instructions and tips. You’ll find updates about how the costumes are coming along, helpful links, and in-depth information about sewing and sewing machines.
ALICE’s Marvelous Costume is written by Alice McGinty, who has been making costumes since she was a child and hopes to help others do the same through her writing.
Alice’s Marvelous Costume is my outlet for my creative side. It started out as a blog that documented the process of making Alice In Wonderland costumes, which then evolved into a blog about DIY costume making in general.
I’m currently working on my own version of the original Alice costume from the Disney version of Alice In Wonderland, and I would love to share it with you. If you have any questions about the process or just want to post some photos of your completed project, please feel free to contact me.
My blog was started out of a love for costumes, how they were made and how I could make them myself. I find that everyone has a different take on what makes a great costume and I wanted to share my methods with other people so they can also create their own masterpieces. I hope you enjoy this blog as much as I love sharing it!
This post is about making an ALICE costume for your own daughter. The idea came from Isabella’s school science fair, where her project was about creating a costume to make the science of science fairs easier to understand, and more fun for kids.
I wanted to do something similar with my daughter’s project, but I didn’t want it to be just a copy of Isabella’s project, so I had to think about what was different.
We discussed the idea of doing a character from literature or film, like Willy Wonka or Jack Sparrow. But we decided that our daughter would rather go in the opposite direction: she wanted something from science fiction or fantasy.
I mentioned Alice in Wonderland because this is indeed quite a silly story, but also has some very interesting ideas about quantum physics and time travel. It also has a number of three-dimensional mathematical puzzles and strange rules (for example: if you turn around three times in one place, you don’t turn at all), which are good analogies for thinking about problems like fractals and chaos theory.
I have been working on making my own superhero costume. I will be sharing the process and what my results are so far here.
How do you make a superhero costume?
Step 1: buy 1-2 yards of stretch fabric from your local fabric store
Step 2: cut out the pattern pieces (I made mine all out of one piece)
Step 3: tape together and pin
Step 4: sew the pieces together. I had to take out a few stitches here and there to get it to fit properly but it turned out good for me.
Step 5: add whatever other details you want. I will be adding some to mine, such as gloves, headphone wires, etc. I will be posting photos and tips along the way if anybody is interested and would like to know more about how I did this or any other things they can do to make their own costume.
Every costume is a technical project. If you have never made anything before, it is always a good idea to read up on the subject. But sometimes there are certain things that you can learn from looking at other people’s costumes.
Googling “How to make a Captain Marvel costume” brings up many sites suggesting that if you start with a red hoodie, and just rip out the hood, you will have a Captain Marvel costume.
This is how you make an Alice bandage dress:
In the early 1960s, a young artist named Frank Cirocco was doing some freelance comics art for Marvel Comics. He was working with Stan Lee, who had just taken over from the legendary Jack Kirby and was basically learning on the job. Lee was a man of wide tastes, and he had a special fondness for the work of Richard Corben, a somewhat obscure artist who had done an obscure comic called “Monster Max” in which an alien monster named Monster Max goes to Earth to relive his youth.
Corben’s art leaned heavily on the gross-out humor of EC Comics, the publisher of such horror-themed comics as “Tales From the Crypt.” The central character of “Monster Max,” Max Kragen, was himself a kind of horror-comics antihero. Kragen looks like a generic monster from a 1950s monster movie, with big eyes and huge teeth and claws. But he had been raised in isolation by scientists who wanted to study him; he is physically stunted but mentally precocious. He has no memory of anything before his birth, so all he can remember about the world is what he learns from watching TV—and that’s when his mind starts to fill in the gaps with its own fantasies and nightmares.
In short, you need to be a good team player. You can’t go out alone and expect to get what you want. The thing that really matters is not the technical details but the motivation behind them.
You have to have a very clear idea of what you’re trying to accomplish. And you have to be able to convince other people that your idea is worth working for together. You shouldn’t wait for someone to tell you what your goal should be; you have to decide it yourself, and then set about finding people who will help you reach it.