One of my first date movies with my now husband was Wes Anderson's gorgeously animated movie version of Roald Dahl's book "The Fantastic Mr. Fox". It was a treat for the eyes, as it was made in painstaking stop-motion. The textures of the fabrics used in that movie were exquisite and the yellow and brown tones used throughout, gave it a warm, natural, autumn vibe, so it was the perfect fall movie if you love Halloween, design, and something that is adult but not too scary. The movie has a wonderful, whimsical feel with lovely patterns on outfits and wall papers, and the style is very much Wes Anderson, with his symmetry, his in depth and thoughtful backgrounds, revealing so much about the lives of the characters, his clever, creative touches peppered throughout and his charming sense of humor. The eye for detail made it hard for me to believe that this was his first stop-motion feature, but it was not his first movie and perfectionism is something he seems to have mastered somehow. Though this is not a movie review, just a loving tribute to this amazing movie. Halloween is one of my favorite times of year and I try to challenge myself with costumes, sometimes I make them fairly accurate to the original as possible and I often base my costumes on something animated or pop-culture related, so that can definitely be a bit difficult to make accurate at times. I picked this costume because it's fun, I love animals, and foxes are just lovely, (I used to see real foxes skulking about on my farm when I was growing up, they would often munch on our ducks) and it's perfect for fall. I loved Felicity's (or Mrs. Fox, the character I went as) dress, and figured I could make a similar pattern as I love doing textile designs, plus because I'm an artist I related to her character. She appeared to paint a lot of oil paintings of scenic landscapes with lightning bolts in her pieces. I also loved the little detail of her pocket dress and how she filled it with scissors and paint brushes to show this creative side of her.
For this costume I made in advance Felicity Fox's apple dress. I looked at a plethora of photo references for this costume to try to get it as accurate as possible. I made the apples in Illustrator then moved the design to Photoshop, and made the pattern seamless and as close to the original colours as possible. I then scouted out one of the sites I work with Artscow to see if there was a dress I could put this pattern on that was as close to the original dress as possible. The closest to me looked like the Turtleneck Maxi Dress, and because it was a maxi dress it provided more material for alterations. The dress was a bodycon dress, and because I had never ordered this type of dress before I made sure to go up a few sizes more than I normally wear, just in case. I also chose to buy a second dress just in case I needed to make some alterations or in case the first dress was a disaster. It's always good to have back-up options available, especially since I didn't have too much time to order another one if things went awry. I made the pattern before the month of October began and placed the order a bit before too. Luckily I ended up getting a deal very similar to the Halloween deal that happened a little bit afterwards and my dresses arrived about 2 and a half weeks prior to Halloween.
In the meantime while I waited for my dress I gathered up my materials. I ordered some oval brooch cabochon settings for Felicity Fox's fox silhouette cameo she wears on Ebay. We tried going fairly early to Value Village before the Halloween rushes really began and found a corduroy blazer, and pants that fit my husband (both brown, not a matching set, but it was close enough) we also found a light yellow button-up shirt there to go underneath. I ultimately had to hem the pants, and there was already a pocket that he could put some "wheat stalks" in for cute decoration. I made the fake wheat (as I couldn't find any) out of raffia from the dollar store, jewelry wire (I think it was 22 gage), and hot glue. After we hit Value Village and the dollar store we trekked to Fabric Land and picked up some faux fur to make tails, masks and fox gloves for my husband. We bought about a meter or so of orangy fox fur for Mr. Fox, Tan fur for Mrs Fox, as she is slightly lighter in colour but I didn't see fur of that lighter orange so I thought tan would do, and some white (a little less than the other fur) for the tip of the tails, their ears and around the mouth. I also bought matching thread for the fur, and stuffing for the tails before we left.
I already had cat masks I had purchased forever ago for another costume. I also happen to sell these masks in the art store I work at, DeSerres. So I needed to extend the noses, on the masks, which seemed tricky at first but while in Value Village I found a wolf nose, but there was only one. I bought it thinking it would be easy enough to find it's match elsewhere and let me tell you, that search was long and I came up short, but I ended up finding a full werewolf mask for $6 at Walmart that satisfied me enough so I purchased it. I also had to make the cat ears longer and more fox-like. I'll go into more detail later about the mask process.
So I pretty much had all my material, and my in-laws came in to town for about a week, halting the costume process, but we had fun showing them around and being tourists in our own city. When they left I worked my day job and tried to gather up the courage to start sewing. I hadn't sewn in about a decade and I bought this new Brother SQ9130 Computerized Sewing & Quilting machine in the beginning of the year, afraid to do anything on it for fear of damaging it somehow. I got sick with a cold and it made me pretty tired, so I lacked a lot of energy, but the deadline of Halloween was looming over my head and I somehow tried to get things done as I was weak and craved sleep. I prepped the fabric for the dress by cutting things out first before I started sewing, starting with the first dress, this is the cutting instructions and how I altered things from two dresses:
Of course I picked (for accuracy and comfort sake) some of the most challenging fabrics to work with: knit fabric and faux fur. I started with the dress which was a combination of cotton and spandex, delightful for wicking away sweat and also stretchy enough to be comfy. But with stretchy fabrics comes thread nests, clogged machines and lots of frustration. It took me a lot of Youtube videos to gain the confidence to over-come the first challenge. I found out with knit fabrics, I had to change the tension setting on my machine, change the needle that came with the machine to a needle with a rounder tip for knits, change the stitch setting to one of a zigzag (as a straight stitch won't hold knits, it may even break) and the thing that was the missing piece of the puzzle for so long the foot had to be changed to a "walking foot". Once I figured out all of these things and how to prevent thread nests (by fixing tension and threading the machine when the foot is up, not down) I was able to try the sewing on some test scraps of fabric until I was confident in my abilities to use it on the real project. This was not fun when I was sick, I almost completely halted this project because of the many frustrations I ran into and because I lacked energy, as soon as I had energy, I pretty much finished most of the dress from I think it was 9:00 am to 2:30 pm and I was very proud of myself with how fast it flew by and how accurate the dress looked in the end. I first began sewing up the pocket as a stand alone piece, which in hindsight I probably didn't make accurately, but the excess fabric made it feel more durable when I put art supplies in it. I put the pocket aside and began doing the tricky task of sewing in the triangle inserts I made to make the dress flare out slightly. To make things easier I used clips instead of pins to keep the fabric in place as I sewed since pins may damage the knit material if they are too pointy. I carefully sewed up both sides making sure the seam lined up and tried on the dress to see if there were any problems, luckily it looked good on the first try and flared out the way I wanted it to. I also hemmed the cuffs of the sleeves to a nicer finish and that looked good too, I then hemmed the whole bottom of the dress to my desired length. Now came the trickiest part, putting on the pocket. Normally, the best thing to do would be to sew on the pocket on one piece of fabric and then attaching the other side, but because I was doing alterations I made it awkward for myself with this method. A lot of fabric was bunched under the machine in order to attach this pocket, but I took it slowly and tried to be good to the garment and the machine. I first sewed the top part of the pocket or backing of it to the tummy. I of course measured out where I wanted it to sit first and the apples on the dress actually came in handy when lining things up, I counted a certain amount of apples down from the neckline to make sure things were placed accurately. Once the backing was on I sewed the other three sides through at least three layers of fabric, the dress itself, and the two pieces that came together to form the pocket. I was careful in pivoting or at least raised the needle and cut the thread down so nothing was tangled and tried to start again in the same corner onward. I don't know if that makes sense to anyone but that's how I can best describe that process. It was tedious and time consuming...it took about an hour or so until I was done. I went over the pocket's three sides again too for durability and kept it close to the edge as well so it looked nicer and more polished. Much later on I bought some buttons and painted one large button yellow to match the dress and I hand-stitched the button on the turtleneck part of her dress as her character has a button there. The dress was done and I could put art supplies in the pocket with ease. It was very comfy and I may even wear the dress outside of Halloween as it's super cute!
The next step was filling my brooch. I had many options at my fingertips for this one but I ended up trying one method out on everything. I was going to try resin, and air-dry clay, but ultimately I picked out some black Sugru (moldable glue) I bought a while ago at my store and put that in a few of the brooch backings. It dries within 24 hours or so and turns into a rubber. I rolled the Sugru into a ball and squished it in a few backings, smoothing them out as much as possible with my fingers. Some of them looked like onyx when I was done. It has almost a plasticine feel to it as you work with it only not as oily, so it was ideal for this project. I let most of them dry as is, but one I took a toothpick to and a tiny silhouette template I made and lightly carved out the outline of the silhouette into the Sugru and also lightly scratched a few defining markings on the silhouette to make it look as though it was fur. Once the brooch had fully dried after 24 hours, I took some white acrylic and painted around the outside of the silhouette. The white looked more textured than I liked, and I probably could have lightly sanded between coats, but the texture also gave a bit of hand-made character so I kept it. Then I sealed it with a satin outdoor/indoor craft varnish and was done that intricate detail.
I also sewed the tails. Faux fur is not fun to use, it gets everywhere, and when you are sick with a nasty cough, you run the risk of getting the fur on your lips, in your mouth or worse, in your lungs, so I put on a mask over my mouth and nose for the majority of the time I worked with the fur. There is a trick to cutting the fur which I didn't heed at first or all the time, but I watched a video on a woman who cut the fur with straight fabric scissors. Apparently cutting the mesh backing mainly, slowly and spreading apart the fur gently was the cleanest method. I tried this and there was definitely less fur about but I still kept a vacuum around at all times. It looked like we owned pets (I'm allergic to most animal fur so that's unfortunately not the case) as the fur was everywhere! Oh, also when cutting the fabric I made sure the fur went in the direction I wanted it to go, so that was a bit tricky too to keep my eye on. I made at least three different tails and I don't think many of them came out that great but I tried a few methods out and it came out ok. The fabric is very thick so I thought I broke my needle in my machine a couple of times, be very careful using this stuff if you're new to sewing or the fabric, it is very tricky. When I got it the way I wanted, I used an old wooden spoon and flipped the fabric to the right side and stuffed the tail with batting. I over-stuffed my first tail but learned for the next ones to just really stuff the bottom part and leave some space in the top. It was easier to sew closed that way too...most people tell you to hand-stitch that part, and it may be a good idea but I used the machine. It's probably best to make a pattern on paper too before starting this task to see if it works out, I was winging it so there was a lot of trial and error with this one. My tail was safety-pinned to my outfit but my husband's tail was just to hold on to as (*spoiler if you haven't seen the movie nor read the book) Mr. Fox's tail gets shot off partway through the movie and it's a big plot point, he then puts a bandage over his suit where the tail used to be, so I did that for my husband's costume too. I bought large fabric band-aids and put a few small stitches in each corner to secure them on to the costume.
On to the masks, I left that till last and I was very nervous to do them. To make the template I was pretty much winging it and probably could have done this better but I sort of drew out (with a black Sharpie) where I wanted the fur to be on the back of the fabric and used the already existing cat mask as a guide. I made sure to extend the ears a bit to make them bigger and more fox-like. I then hot-glued the fabric to the mask and layered the fur, hot gluing each time. I cut the nose off of the full werewolf mask and hot-glued that to the top of the fur (prior to this I painted the noses with white acrylic except for the actual black nose and let them dry) and hot-glued my nose on mine, removing the elastic before gluing. I then took more black Sugru and made it go on the bottom of the nose where it met the mask, it made the nose more secure and made it look like their mouths were open. I painted (in acrylic) a sort of matching colour to the fur on the top of the nose to make it look like it's just short fur on top. I then took some very watered-down black acrylic and a paper plate as a safe surface to work on, and brushed the tips of the ears to make them have black-tip markings. Not only did it look cute with this detail but when the acrylic dried the hairs stood up on their own, which was great because the ears were so floppy prior to that I thought I would have to insert wire somehow. I then took that same watered-down acrylic and a fine paint brush and painted on final details carefully, starting with the eyebrows (I looked at picture references for this entire mask-making process) and for Felicity's mask I painted what looked like eyelashes and eyeliner but doubled as looking like her fur markings. It was delicate enough that she didn't look like a raccoon but instead very feminine.
For the gloves my husband wanted I bought some black dollar-store gloves (I couldn't find any nicer colours that would match) cut the fingers off, put the gloves on my own hands, made a template with his left-over red fur in the direction I wanted the fur to go in, cut it out, hot glued it on (while my hands were still inside to stretch out the fabric, it did burn a bit, but I've felt worse) and it was done.
I had also bought white leggings from Ardene and tea-dyed them (with chai tea) in boiling hot water for about an hour or so and then rinsed them with cold water and hung them on a chair and plastic bag to dry out. They smelled lovely, like the chai tea! So that was an added bonus! I also bought tan over-the-knee boots from Torrid and they looked really cute with the rest of the outfit, warm and comfy too, perfect for a Canadian Halloween.
After that I washed my husband's outfit, hemmed his pants and sewed on his band-aids where his blazer had a split in the back. When it finally came time to wear our costumes I couldn't have been prouder of myself. They turned out so cute and were super comfy to wear. I hope to wear this costume again next year, and I rarely wear my costumes twice, but for this one I may make an exception.
