Halloween 2010 Part Two: William Cutter Couture

With my costume out of the way, I can move on to Justin's costume - William Cutter a-la "Gangs of New York".  Justin has the tall, sinewy features to pull it off and in full mustache, even bears an uncanny resemblance to Daniel Day Lewis as "Bill the Butcher".

We gathered all of the following parts for the costume:

Handmade top hat
Mustache
Handmade killer sideburns = faux fur
Corn cob pipe
Handmade (p)leather vest
Hand-painted red-white-blue waist sash
Plastic knife and cleaver, "doctored-up"

Cereal box cylinder

I constructed the top hat using a bought el-cheapo western hat as the base.  I rounded out a large cereal box, making a cylinder and stapled the seam shut.  I hot-glued the cylinder along the base securing it to the outer edge of the hat.

Notched to fit

Next I prepared the round top to cover the opening of the cylinder.  I traced a wide oval on shoe box cardboard and cut it out leaving an extra 1" allowance.

Duct tape magic

To fit the round top neatly to the cylinder I notched all around the edge of the oval through the allowance.  I secured the top to the main hat with trusty ol' duct tape.

Finished hat

This hat is supposed to have a wide blue ribbon sash around the base, as do all of the men's top hats (on Cutter's side) in the battle scene at the beginning of the "Gangs of New York" movie.

Sophie giving me Cattitude

I cut the sash out of blue satin from my stash.  I pressed the seam allowances in and hot-glued it around the perimeter of the hat, finishing it with a bow made from the same fabric.

The vest Daniel Day Lewis wears in the movie is very fitted, shorter than you might think and does not look like leather.  It's hard to tell, but I think it is actually made from heavy canvas or oilcloth and made to look very dirty and weathered.  The best fabric I could find to mimic that look (and stay on budget) was a dark brown faux leather.

Finished vest

I made a cotton muslin using another costume vest pattern and made huge changes to it after a couple of fittings on my "model" aka Justin.  I made it shorter, contoured the neck edge and added long darts in the front and back to make it very closely fitted.  I pulled apart the muslin and redrafted a tissue pattern to cut out the leather.

Bias facing

The faux leather was easier to sew than I thought and I made bias binding to face all the raw edges, tacking it onto the inside of the vest.  I finally added six dark wooden buttons down the front.

Cutter's waist sash in the "Gangs of New York" battle scene looks like a strip of cotton canvas very hastily painted blue, white, and red (in preparation for battle).  So that is exactly how we made it.

Hanging to dry

Using some leftover house paints, we laid out a long strip of white cotton broadcloth and painted it blue down one side and red down the other.  Once it dried it had stiffened enough not to become droopy and looked better than we expected- so cool!

Fake blood arsenal