Waste not want not - Pirate Costume and a super-quick Pirate Eye-Patch Tutorial

We went to a little friend's 4th birthday party a couple of weekends ago, and it was ... yep you guessed it ... pirate themed. Ahoy There, Shiver Me Timbers ... and all that! 

Now being in a house full of girls (except Daddy of course) we don't have much in the way of pirate dress-ups.  A shame really!  We have also just been flat out busy, so I hadn't even got around to thinking about what Bethany would wear to this party until about the Friday afternoon before the party.  With absolutely no time and no chance to go to the shops before the party, I tried ... VERY hard ... to convince Bethany that she should really just put on every necklace and piece of play jewellery she owns ...which is A LOT ...and go to the party as the Pirate's treasure ... good idea, huh!?!  Well I though it was a great idea, but Bethany...not so much!  She decided that she definitely NEEDED to go as a Pirate.

Well, torn between being very time-poor, but never being shy to tackle a challenge like that one, I decided I'd just simply applique a skull and crossbones onto a plain T-shirt, and off we would go.  So Saturday morning came along, and about mid-morning when I finally had a chance to do this T-shirt, I discovered that Bethany has absolutely no plain T-shirts that I could potentially use for this project ... what!!  Mental note - next time I'm in K-Mart I'm picking up a stack of cheapo $3 T-shirts to keep in my sewing stash for occasions just like this!

I hunted through my fabric stash ... nothing suitable for running up a quick T-shirt.  Hmmm, no time to get to the shops as it was only 3 hours til party time, and I only had about half an hour left of Hannah sleep time to get this sorted.

Eventually, and with utter desperation, I had the idea to rumage through my own wardrobe to find an old t-shirt or something that I could cut up and use as fabric to make this T-shirt.  Found an old pale-yellow singlet, still in pretty good nic.  The coolest part of this was that when I got out my size 4 t-shirt pattern (traced from a T-shirt of Bethany's) I realised that I could make this work still using the original neckline and arm-hole edging.  Woo Hoo for that.  So with a bit of trimming, tucking, trying on, and a bit more trimming and stitching, Bethany finally had a plain top suitable for Piratising ... just made that word up ... do you like it?

I got this skull and crossbones shirt design from one of my favourite crafting books, The Crafty Kid by Kelly Doust.  The good thing about making the shirt as well was that I could do the applique before I sewed the top together, which is soooooo much easier than trying to keep the back of the shirt out of the way while sewing onto the front.

Then I got a little excited and decided to make an eye patch.  Simplest thing ever ... here's how I did it:

- I just free-handed 2 semi-circle pieces of left-over black drill, then ironed the edges under 1/4 inch all the way around.

- Pinned them wrong sides together with all the edges tucked in, then topstitched about 2mm right around the edge, making sure to catch in a piece of 1/4 inch black elastic (which i first measured around Bethany's head) at the top corners on each side.

And, done!! Super easy eye-patch.

Bethany actually hated wearing this on her eye, but it was quite easy to just flip up, and was almost like an elastic headband keeping her hair off her face while looking fantastically piratey (another made up work ... I'm on a literary roll today!)

Coupled with a scrap of red polka-dot fabric as a bandana and rolled up jeggings (which I actually pulled out of the 'too small' bag...didn't matter 'cause they were to be rolled up anyway, and Bethany only ever grows out of things in the length ... skinny little thing she is!), I reckon she made a pretty good little pirate!  And the total sum of this whole project ... $0.  I already had everything on hand either left over from other projects, from the 'too small' bag or from my own wardrobe.  Yay for that!