Sewing Stuff - 1960s Jumpsuit

A few months ago my friend Diva asked me and a bunch of other friends to come visit her after hours at her work, which normally wouldn't be that much fun except that Diva works at the fabulous Watts Costume store. It seems that the website doesn't have a lot of photos that actually show what a HUGE amount of awesome costumes they have there and she had taken it upon herself to remedy that.

What this meant of course was that I got to play dress up for like 4 hours straight while drunk on pink wine.

While we were there Diva presented me with a costume that I fell in love with and didn't want to take off, like....EVER. It was a silver 1960s disco jumpsuit. Sounds awful right?
WRONG.
It was amazing, comfortable and looked fantastic on my ass.
See?

Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaah! The best part about that jumpsuit was how wide the legs were, it was so swishy and so fun. So of course I decided that for my second sewing project I should make my own.


I still had money on my dressew gift card so I went and purchased 3 meters of black stretchy fabric, a zipper, and an actual pattern this time. I mainly bought the pattern because I haven't had a lot of experience in making pants and the one I found was almost exactly what I was looking for.

Plus the artwork was super cute. ;)

It took me a while to actually start this project due to my work schedule getting crazy busy but after I had surgery on my breast I suddenly found myself with a lot of free time and I needed something to distract myself so this was almost perfect timing.

So Step 1: was to cut out my pattern (I used pattern A over B because the legs were wider), slap it onto my doubled over black fabric, pin and and cut it all out.

Step 2: I slapped the front and back parts together and sewed up the two length sides of them.

Step 3: The semi tricky part was mashing the two legs together and sewing up the crotch/ass area. But I managed to do and then slipped the pants on only to find that they were HUGE.
Like....you could have fit 2 of me in there.
So I took them off, re-measured my hips and what not and took it in about 3 inches on either side until they would up like this:

Step 4: To make the top I basically took a t-shirt that I liked the look of and laid it out on the black fabric and drew what the basic shape was, then I cut it, sewed up the sides and tried it on. It was too big at first but with some little fixes it fit how I wanted. The final bit that added a bit of jazz to it was a bit of  rushing that I added to the neckline.

Step 5: It was time for the actual tricky part, sewing the top to the bottom pants. I had to maneuver things around to get it to be seamless but it all worked out and voila! I was all done! I also wound up not even needing to use the zipper because the fabric was so stretchy I can just wiggle into it. Bonus!

The end result was this:

Total Time to Make: 4 hoursTotal Cost: 40$
Things I learned while making this Item: I need to trust patterns more, if it says I'm a certain size then that means that I am. And I shouldn't over estimate because that just means I will need to take stuff in later on in the process.
Also? Jumpsuits are so comfortable and rad.
<3