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Well, I finally settled on a costume….

I decided to try and stay within the same genre as my nephew’s costume, so I’m going with a sailor costume. I don’t know how many of you run into the same problem when you’re looking for clothes during the rest of the year, but especially during Halloween, when you’re looking for a plus size costume, it can be frustrating. It just seems like everywhere you search online all you find are small little petite costumes or they go to the other extreme and they’re big giant tents. And they’re all queens or witches with giant dresses. I don’t know why it has to be so difficult finding something that looks nice. I just want to find something that I look good in and that I feel comfortable wearing. Anyways, I ended up settling on a costume I found at Costume Express. It should get here in a day or two. I paid a little extra for expedited shipping.

What size am I again…..?

Sizing is a whole other issue. I was looking at a costume. I kind liked it. It was cute, so I started looking at some of the comments from people who had purchased it. I focused in on one of the comments. She said that she was a size 10-12 but that she had ordered the XL to be on the safe side. The site said that an XL is a 14-16, but she says that when it arrived in the mail and she tried it on, the XL just fit her. So that’s another problem, Halloween costumes tend to run really small even in the plus category.

Now, I’m a bit more plus than the model here. But just to be on the safe side, I ordered a MUCH LARGER size. It’s better to have more fabric to work with than less. But, we’ll see once it gets here. I’ll let you guys know when it gets here, how it fits. If I can’t get this costume to work I don’t know where I’m going to go from there.

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Another year another costume…..

Well, since we’ re so close to Halloween….a little over a week a way. I’m gonna start by talking about my Halloween ritual. I have a nephew. He just turned 8 and I’ve been putting together his costumes every year since he was one.

I might post some pictures of some of the costumes I’ve done for him. Last year, he was Jack Skellington from A Nightmare Before Christmas and the year before that he was Spongebob Squarepants. I even made him a Gary-shaped Halloween bag. This year, we’ve decided to attempt to make a Classic Popeye costume.

When he was little and first started to talk, he couldn’t pronounce costume so he would say “custom”. So, I’ve committed to making his “custom” costume each year rather than just purchasing one. This is my yearly gift to him, for Halloween.

Classic Popeye

The Classic Sailor?

I hope….!

The problem that I’ve hit up against is that my sewing machine, which is at this point probably 15 – 20 years old now, decided to finally give up the ghost. I started doing some initial test stitching, making sure everything was working OK, but it kept breaking the needle.

I’m pretty good at taking things apart and putting them back together, so I took it apart. I kind of had to look at a couple of YouTube videos and do a little bit of research, but I got the covers off and finally understood how the looping mechanism works. You know…what grabs the thread from the needle. So I figured it was an issue with the timing, so I started adjusting the timing.

Everything looked good at first. It was going through the motion, but after maybe 1 or 2 rotations or dives of the needle, it was right back where I started, it would hit the needle. So, I started taking it further and further apart, and that’s when I realized what was actually wrong with the sewing machine.

It was a little cracked gear that turns a vertical rod in the center of the sewing machine.

HOW MUCH??

So, I took the machine over to a local repair shop and asked how much the part was, they told me ten bucks. Then, I asked them how much for their technician to replace it, and they told me is was gonna be $91. Now, $91 is probably not, in the grand scheme of things, a LARGE amount of money. But considering that I was already thinking about replacing the machine, I just thought it would be a little too much investment in money to put into this machine.

I mean it’s been a real trooper. It’s gotten me through 7 years of costumes

but a hundred and something dollars for the repair was just too much for it. The machines that I’ve been looking at are brand new, with two needles and I can get one for more or less the same price. So, I purchased the $10 gear and now I’m gonna go ahead and take the machine apart and hope that I can put it back together, because without this I don’t know how I’m gonna be sewing the parts of his costume.