A couple Halloween's ago (Halloween 2007, to be exact), I decided that I wanted to be Mrs. Lovett from my then-favorite musical, Sweeney Todd.
Might I add, that I am not talking about Helena Bonham Carter's Mrs. Lovett from the 2007 Tim Burton film---I'm talking
Angela Lansbury.
I started out by finding the simplest thing: a shirt. GAP had a rather nice white Poet's Shirt, so that was covered easily with the only difficult thing being finding one in my size.
My mom helped a lot with the rest of the costume. We found a nice pattern for the apron, and bought plain green cotton for the fabric. We typed out the text for the front (Lovett Pies) and for the pockets (We serve anyone...to anyone!) in Photoshop and printed it out. Putting the text on the window, we pressed the fabric against it so that light shone through, and we traced with with a fabric pencil. Then, stitch by painstaking stitch, I embroidered the text onto the fabric in dark blue floss:
One the embroidering was finished, it was simply time to follow the pattern and put the apron together.
The skirt is made of a blue couch-material. We wanted to find something stiff and durable, something that someone like Mrs. Lovett would wear to make horrible meat pies all day. The material we needed was fresh from the Sale Pile in Hancocks. Sewing the skirt itself was simple, not counting the zipper (That took a little more time!)
It was time to accessorize with the costume finished. The canvas tote bag is from Michael's Craft Store, and decorated with fabric pens. The plastic cleaver comes straight from Aisle Seven at Target. The shoes come from my mom, but I later ditched them in favor of some plain, black mary janes.