Foolhardy fun

WARNING! You are about to look at a lot of pictures of ladies wearing not a lot. Do so at you own discretion and preferably not at work. :) 

I generally take ages to do anything. I have a very short attention span so will generally find what feels like a natural stopping point in any task (or half way through a fiddly job, whichever) in which to wander off and do something else. It also isn't helped by the fact that generally I am sewing in 15 minute chunks before I go to work. Projects therefore take time and my to do list gets longer and longer.

Turns out buying fabric is much more rapid than turning it into things, who knew?

My last two projects however have been exercises in working to short deadlines and binge sewing. The one I'll tell you about here was very blatantly my mouth writing cheques my body could questionably cash. Interesting side note, my spell check doesn't recognise cheques ah the young spell checkers of today, it's all paypal and contactless payments for them.

Anyway, so exercise in blatant foolhardyness is agreeing to make a bikini in just under a week. I have never made a bikini before but how hard could it be.....ah that hard. My friend and colleague is an emerging talent in the body building world, she lifts many many of the heavy things. She needed a costume for her theme piece and I love me a bit of dress up.

Initially we were going for  a Zena feel however she had a bit of a look around and it was going to be done a hundred times in her show. I therefore used my nerd powers to come with a character that looks badass but no one could accuse of being over dressed. Which is why we ended up with Kitana from Mortal Kombat. If you're saying 'who?' then you are further proof of how I massively misjudged the reference points of pretty much everyone else in the world. *sigh*.

I purchased a pdf bikini pattern from a Jodi Lane Designs on etsy. I went for the triangle top and v cut bottoms. The pattern turned out to be really quite good and the accompanying videos were very thorough however I'm used to a lot more information being included with my pattern like what fabrics will work best and which notions you need. It was at this point I started to have some doubts. Had I possibly bitten off a tiny bit more than I could chew.

The cutting went very smoothly due to my new rotary cutter. I managed to cut myself on it's very first use but that was always going to be par for the course. I need to work out a few of the kinks of using a rotary cutter including getting more maneuverable pattern weights than tins of tuna but on the whole I think that is the future. Everything was so gosh darn tiny! How could there be enough fabric to cover a human being?!? Sadly I have no photos of the construction stages as I was running much too tight for time.

Anyway so it came to stitch it together and this is where we come unstuck. I hate working with elastic, I can't seem to get the tension even. If anyone has any tips I'd be overjoyed to hear them as I would like to make some underwear again in the future. Fortunately I had enough fabric to make a couple of attempts at it which was handy as the first top I made was far far too small. Oh also this fabric if put under any strain ladders like a pair of tights. Fun times.


It's not perfect by any stretch and I accidentally got contrast rather than matching thread which means you can see every point where I've gone over and over the same spot to make that sucker stay. I'm trying to ignore this and focus on I made a bikini!


For the rest of the pieces I made a mask out of same fabric and a jersey lining tied on with some black cord in a similar style to a surgical mask. The skirt is made in a similar fashion to the straps by wrapping thicker elastic in the fabric and zig zag stitching it down with two panels of fashion fabric wrapped over the front and back. The bladed fan is just plastic dinner knives stuck to a fan. What? I was working on a deadline with the resources I had. I think she makes it work though, don't you?