On Saturday my friend and I raced in the 19th Annual PDX Soapbox Derby in our Jem & the Holograms themed car. It was a glittery pink guitar.
Our sponsor, Pine Crest Fabrics, let us loose on their remnant bin. We managed to find a ton of jems..I mean gems..in there! The only costume we didn’t find great fabric for was mine. There were only scraps of the sparkly stretch velvet, so I grabbed the kind pukey mauve fabric and a sparkly black mesh and figured I would, as Tim Gunn says, “make it work.”
I was crossing my fingers that there was some nylon in there so I could dye it..and there was. Yay!
I hacked the Cashmerette Concord tee into this dress. First I lengthened it into a dress and cut out the front and back in my purple fabric. Then I cut the front into 1″ strips below the bottom of the neckline and spaced them out by 1″ – essentially doubling the length.
I did a wide zigzag over 1/4″ black elastic along the center front and about 3/4″ from each side seam. I basted the ruched front piece to the purple front piece and sewed it together to the back as one. Then I pulled the elastic out of the sides, but left the center elastic in. This let me adjust the gathers to where they were more flattering. I added on the purple velvet sleeves – you’ll see sparkly velvet on all of our costumes. I liked the unfinished edges so the only finishing I did was turning up the bottom hem. This ended up being way more flattering than I expected.
For Jem’s dress I used pink sparkly velvet and the full skirted option on New Look 6301. Because the velvet was thick I sewed the neckline and sleeve finishes as bands. I made the belt from some faux leather from Joann.
For Aja’s costume we only had a small piece of that awesome metallic print for her skirt. So I drafted a skirt with an aqua velvet yoke/waistband to maximize it. I used Cation Design’s free Dolman Sleeve top for a starting point, but I omitted the sleeves, removed the bottom band and shortened the length, and widened the neckline.
Cimberly made herself an awesome Kimber costume. She found a basic white blazer at a thrift store and removed the lining and replaced the back piece with tails cut from an awesome blue sequined fabric. She also added hot pink ruffles to a tshirt and made an asymmetric skirt from royal blue sparkly velvet.
To unify our look, aside from that sparkly velvet accents, we all wore leggings. I made everyone’s leggings using Cake Patterns Espresso leggings. Everyone was stoked to have custom fit leggings made for them. I love that they are so quick and easy to make.
Cimberly and I also covered some helmets with holo glitter so we would be extra blinding in our races. Oh…and we built our car too! Want to see how our race went? Watch our video!
It was a really fun day despite it being ridiculously hot! Everyone loved our car and tons of little girls wanted to take photos with us, which we loved as the only all women team in the derby. My only gripe is that the team who won best costumes had store bought costumes (Elvis, Spiderman, mermaid). It’s always disappointing in any sort of costume contest when the judges don’t take into consideration that some costumes are handmade.
Anyway, while wandering around looking for the faux leather I came across the performance fabrics section. There I spotted a pretty good looking fabric for my pants! I wasn’t intending to buy more fabric, but when I spotted this spandex I knew it would take me less time to whip up a pair of leggings than to try to fix my flaking pants. So I grabbed it. It was thankfully not on sale so I was able to use a coupon to get it down to $8.50/yd. I used the 