DIY Boy’s Colonial Costume

For reasons I don’t even begin to understand, it’s almost impossible to find boy sewing patterns. It was Colonial Day at Luke’s school and he needed a Colonial boy costume. Normally I wouldn’t have heard about this until the day before, but for some reason this time I had advance notice. So I began looking around the internet for the makings for said costume. Well the pickings were very slim, though I did laugh my southern ass off at this blogger. I don’t know what that school was thinking expecting costumes in April. April? By April of a school year my kids are lucky if they’re fed and bathed.

I got most of my ideas from this blogger. Luke had a pair of pants that were worn through at the knee so I cut them off and made knickers per her instructions. I also did the shirt as well. I was lucky to find a tuxedo shirt at the thrift store and I just cut the cuffs off and put elastic in the sleeves. I didn’t like her idea of making a vest out of a t-shirt. Originally I had planned to just buy some fleece and make a vest from this pattern I got from this blogger. I’ve used the pattern a lot, and probably would’ve just made it longer and sewed on some buttons to make it fancy. Fleece is very forgiving and there’s no hemming involved. But since I had some time I decided to cut down a sports coat to make a vest. I liked this idea because Luke has at least one more year to wear the costume, and of course, I can use the same with Kell. This is the jacket I started with. I got it in the smallest size I could find at the thrift store.

Using the Frontier vest pattern, I traced the Frontier vest pattern on my sports coat.

As you can see here.

Then I cut it out.

Now here’s where things got tricky. Initially I’d hoped to find a nice heavy weight wool that I could just rip the lining out of, but my thrift store is kind of lame, so I had to settle for this one. The fabric was really too flimsy to take the lining out, so I had to deal with the neckline and the armholes. I folded the raw edges under and topstitched them on the machine. If it had been a real jacket instead of a costume, I probably would’ve done this by hand using a blind hemstitch. But for a costume, all that hand sewing was unnecessary.

I had to fuss a bit with the lapels, so the project took longer than I’d initially anticipated, eventually I just tacked them down with a few hand stitches to keep them in place. His socks were not long enough, next year when I do the pants I’ll make them longer. It was impossible to find longer socks, and I ran out of time because the baby got sick. What do y’all think?