I'm on my 3rd suit now. The first I made myself. I used a bear costume pattern as the base. This didn't go well, as you might imagine.

My second was a Skygunbro suit. It looked and fit great! Then I lost 35+ pounds. And then it didn't fit so well anymore.

For the third, I wanted to tackle doing it myself again. This time, it actually worked!!!

The base pattern is Kwik Sew 3389:

Kwik Sew Web Site

This pattern makes an excellent base for the suit. I went with a cotton twill for the fabric. I got white and colored it myself, which I will get into later.

A few things to note when you are working on it:

• You will have to modify the pattern quite a bit. Make sure to do a mock-up before working on the real thing!


• This is meant to wear over regular street clothes, including belts, wallets, etc... So it runs really big. I am 5 foot 9 / 175 pounds, and a medium was way big.


• I found that the sleeves were really loose. To fix that, I took in the whole thing about 2" on each side. I basically just drew a line 1" in on the edge of the pieces and cut the excess off. This makes the armpit hole much tighter, and the sleeves and legs become nice and snug.


• The pattern has a waist band. I removed that entirely, sewing the top and bottom halves directly to each other. This makes it more accurate and fixed another sizing issue - the torso was too long for me. If you find that it's too short without the waistband, just add a bit of extra length to the top/bottom sections.


• The back of the pattern includes pleats to increase mobility in the coverall. For Boba, this just means you have more fabric stuffed under your tight, restrictive vest. I stitched the pleats down so that they can't open anymore. I think it would have been better to have modified the pattern piece to not have them at all (Fold the paper along the pleat lines, and cut your fabric out to the size of the folded piece)


• I used both the long and short sleeve pattern pieces. I hemmed the short sleeves then pinned them to the long sleeves before assembling the suit. When you sew the sleeves together, make sure that the bottom edge of your short sleeves line up right, else you'll wind up with a pretty silly looking suit.


• Once I got everything else together, I basted the inseam so that I could see how it would all really hang. I marked the locations of the thigh and shin pockets with some pins (I could have used chalk, but I was out). I then ripped out the basted inseam and stitched the pockets into place.


• Speaking of pockets... I didn't have any pattern for those, I just eyeballed the size and style. Unfortunately I didn't save any sort of template.


• I added velcro to the cuffs of the pants to tighten them up, and a bit of velcro in the fron of the pants that connects to the spats. That way the spats won't move around on me (ESB Fetts have no spats).

These pics are of my muslin mockup. One thing that bit me a bit was the properties of the fabric. Muslin is thin, so in places where things were too loose, the fabric just bunched up and didn't really show the problem well. With the twill, it just sort of stuck out at odd angles and looked terrible. So when you make your mockups, make sure it fits really well! Also make sure to put your vest / armor on over it to see what it will look like.

In the last pic you can see the suit sticking out of the back of the vest. That's from the pleated back that I mentioned above.

I still don't have any pics of me wearing the finished suit, but here are some of it hanging up:

In the last one, my skygunbro suit is in the foreground and the one I made is in the background.

On the note of "dye"... I was unable to get fabric dye to do what I wanted it too. I wanted a light grey color, as much dirty as it is colored. I tried Rit "Pearl Grey" and ended up with light blue. I tried a quick dip in Rit Black and ended up with light purple.

After many gallons of bleach, my white twill started to look like unbleached cotton.

At this point I got creative. I filled my sink with hot water and poured in a bunch of black Createx airbrush paint. I dipped some test fabric in, and it came out a nice messy grey color. Dunking the whole suit gave me just the right look. I don't know how well it will hold up to washing, but we'll see. It's got enough painted on weathering now that I don't know if the base color will even matter anymore.

The weathering was done with light grey rattlecan primer, black spray paint, and brown airbrushed paint.