Despicable Me costumes: Lucy Wilde’s scarf and coat

Back to our Carnival costumes! To recap, my kids are dressing up as Despicable Me characters and I’ve already written about the wig and accessories of Agent Lucy Wilde. But the costume is just not complete without her scarf and, even more importantly, her turquoise coat.

What do you say? Is there a resemblance?

(Ok, I admit it, the wig looks a little more Stuart‘s wig than Lucy’s hair.)

So, we’ve got the wig and sunglasses.

And we’ve got the Anti-Villain-League badge and ID. So now for the rest. Let’s start with the scarf.

All you need is an old white t-shirt and a pink (or red if you don’t have pink) fabric marker or fabric paint. I quickly realized that my fabric marker would not be able to make nicely colored circles for the whole scarf, so I switched over to fabric paint almost immediately.

Cut your shirt into wide strips with perpendicular ends (no slanting edges). I cut mine 15 cm wide.

Sew the ends of two pieces right sides together with a 1 cm seam allowance. Continue doing this until you have one long strip.

Fold the long strip in half right sides together and with the two unsewn ends matched up at one end.  Pin together and then sew around the edges, leaving an opening in one side.

Turn the scarf right side out and iron the edges flat, taking care to fold the opening’s edges inwards. Then topstich all around, closing up the opening.

Paint big red dots of varying size on one side of the scarf. Make sure you have strips of wax paper underneath the fabric. I tried to get the dots looking sort of random, with some of them going off the side of the fabric as if they were part of the fabric itself.

Let dry well, then flip the scarf over and paint over the color that has seeped through to the other side. Don’t forget the wax paper underneath.

Let it dry at least overnight, then iron with a piece of fabric over it as specified on the instructions of the paint used. (If you don’t have any instructions on the container, you can look at my tutorial about freezer paper stencilling with fabric paint for more information.) Pink dots would’ve look more Lucy-ish. The red dots on white look a bit more like La Pimpa, but hey, we were happy with it anyway and you really don’t see much of the scarf underneath the coat anyway.

I left the coat til last because, quite frankly, I wasn’t sure that I would be able to make it. Originally I’d planned on just buying a coat pattern, but I couldn’t find any PDF patterns for kids with the right sort of look. I was about to buy this pattern on Etsy and just make it longer, but at the last minute I decided to just wing it and copy my daughter’s current coat to make my own pattern. To be quite frank, I was terrorized of that big stand-up collar Lucy’s coat has. I had no idea how to make it and didn’t really have enough time to learn properly, so I just kind of winged it. I found a precut piece of viscose fleece (or at least that’s what the seller claimed it was) at the market in just the right color for €7. It was pretty similar to regular fleece, although when cut some little stringy thread would come out. And my pieces fit in just right, so I was even more stressed that I couldn’t make a mistake or I wouldn’t have enough fabric to redo it. Eek!

But voilà! It came out almost perfectly! I had to make some easy changes in the sleeves, but I was thrilled that it was otherwise just right! I’m not going to get into how I made this coat because I know that my technique was not quite proper. So I’d suggest simply buying a pattern unless you know how to draft your own.

When I was done, I spent much time just admiring that collar. Definitely not perfect, but it came out just as I’d imagined! You can see here that I left the edges unfinished because I just didn’t feel like doing them properly. After all, this is a costume, not a real coat anyone will be wearing regularly.

The collar stands up nicely, except it does have the tendency to flop down, so if I were to do it again, I’d sew in some heavy duty stabilizer to keep it more rigid.

I decided to leave out the straps on the sleeves because I honestly was ready to be done with this project at that point. For the same reason, I sewed in a pocket for Lucy’s accessories instead of making her little white purse for them.

My daughter nearly swooned when she saw it! The whole ensemble is quite Lucy-ish! The only thing missing (besides the purse) is the turquoise slip dress underneath the coat, but I didn’t think we really needed that in February/March, so she wore a turquoise shirt and some leggings that I recently made her with turquoise in them. Ah, what is that she has in her hand, you ask?

Man, that girl had so much fun acting out her favorite parts of the movie! Such as…

“Agent Lucy Wilde of the AVL…. Oops!” Ha ha! Hilarious!

So I put together a complete costume full of accessories for a total of €11 (€2 for the wig yarn, €7 for the coat fabric and €2 for the buttons). Not bad, eh? But I spent even less for Mr. Nicky’s Despicable Me costume. Hopefully I’ll get that up for tomorrow, before Carnival is over!