Hyello any followers who have managed to keep this on their watch list for threads. I'm promise I've been picking away at this project, I'v e just been forgetting to update here. When last I left y'all I was working on shaping the hat. That piece has been sidelined mostly because I'm at the stage where I need to start painting and mottling the material and haven't bothered to go get the paints I need. I have, however, been slowly working on the Beggar's body.
For some perspective, here is the base I started with, as cursed as it is (it was originally purchased to be made into a Nadja doll, but it turned out not to be the right size)
That being said, if anyone wants a creepy plastic Groucho Marx head, you can have it. Cannot guarantee it isn't haunted, though (thanks eBay).
I bought some polyfill batting in a rolled sheet and cut strips to layer, sew together (roughly and with some lefter over embroidery thread I will never use) and ultimately pad this scrawney little body out with (after sewing the head and arm holes shut). Eventually, I got around to using an old shirt to very roughly drape a pattern for the jacket. Please keep in mind two things: I don't use or draft patterns and I'm not even sewing this together; it will all be held by hot glue and the grace of the gods because I do not need this to be quality, just look decent. I decided to use an old shirt mostly because I was going to throw it away, but also because it gave pieces that were the correct shape to start with that were just going to be oversized. I did start with a tape form (from grocery bags and masking tape) that I roughed out basic pattern pieces with, then purposefully cut them too large to have wiggle room. I then pinned and trimmed as I went until I got something I liked.
I also knew I needed to be able to keep the knees stiffly bent up without having to hold them. At first all I did was sew it together (remember: I'm lazing and doing this as
cheaply as possible), which held alright, but I couldn't get the angles I needed (left). Enter a good friend of mine who has luckily supplied me with about 1/3 of the materials very randomly who happened to have a couple spare metal hangars. These were the perfect stiffness I needed for posability. Bonus is that I didn't end up with a whole spool of armature wire I never would have used again.
Now that the body is largely the proportions I want (I could make the legs meatier, but honestly at this point I just want to move on). So we started dressing! The tights are just that. I literally bought them at 50% off from a Spirit Halloween last year at a closing sale and they were the last pair (BTW, Spirit tights are a little fragile, but extremely soft). I decided I would rather utilize the crotch seaming to make sure they stay up like pants, so I scootched them up and cut off the excess legs. This little dude now wears a very fashionable pair of high-waisted pants.
The same friend who gave me the hangars gifted me with an old, dark brown leather jacket he hadn't worn in over a decade and was going to donate, so he happened to ask if we needed leather for anything and BOY HOWDY did he have good timing. At this point, I had already spent a couple hours seam-ripping a whole ass leather jacket into usable pieces for when I was ready to start cutting out my patterns and...
I am literally tailoring this as I go, cutting darts/slits where I need to fabric to bend just right, trimming the length of pieces and seam allowances down, etc. Again, doesn't need to be sewn or pretty. It's puppet clothes and likely won't see a ton of wear (having a creepy headless goblin puppet as constant decoration should be nice, tho).
My biggest obstacle is going to be figuring out how to construct and attach the collar, along with figuring out how to pattern the little knee pauldrons. I plan to just make those out of craft foam and paint them appropriately. The shoes will be a pain, but I hae plenty of this leather jacket left over to both add the accents to the jacket and make the shoes. The latter I plan on using the wrong side of the leather which is a more natural, untreated hide color and then I may paint and weather them. Once I have this body done, I plan on returning my attentions to the hat, which is currently sitting on a shelf tied closed to break down the interfacing I used for the brim to give the sides that worn droop (I will also start hand-working that once I have the time to literally just sit there and bend it).
