D I Y

I know that most of you probably went to your Halloween parties on the weekend, but just in case anyone is freaking out about a last minute costume I decided to do a little DIY collar.

I had a lot of people asking about my Poppy dress as they were going this Halloween as Suzy Bishop of Moonrise Kingdom. Although here in England Halloween is more about dressing up as spooky as poss (if you want to go as anything else you just have to make it the dead version), I love the idea of going as Suzy to a fancy dress party. Also, I realised that Wednesday Addams has a little white collar too, so this collar can be the perfect way of turning a plain black dress, or a pretty pastel dress into a quick & cheap costume.

(images from Google search)

So here is a step-by-step guide to creating your very own detachable collar (I'm sorry about the rather poor quality photos, they were taken in the day, but, we don't seem to be getting much daylight at the mo) ...

 Materials: Scrap of fabric, collar template, hook & eye fastening (or ribbon), pins, scissors, hand needle, thread, sewing machine.

 1. Cut two 15"x18" rectangles of fabric / 2. Place your fabric pieces together, fold in half, pin the template onto the fabric / 3. Cut around template.

4. Straight stitch around all edges leaving a small gap (about 3") on inside of collar / 5. Cut notches around all edges / 6. Turn whole thing inside out (this is the part I find very tricky) using a pencil to push out points.

7. Iron the collar once it's the right way round, folding in the fabric around the opening / 8. Hand stitch gap closed / 9. Attach hook & eye fastening at front, or perhaps a nice bit of ribbon / 10. Voila!

Click here to download the template.

As my fabric was quite robust I didn't need to use any interfacing, but if you are using a thinner fabric & want to create a stiff collar then just cut out a piece using the same template & iron onto one of the collar pieces. I used contrasting colour thread through out so it would show more clearly but a matching thread would leave a perfect seamless look.

Happy Halloween folks!