TARDIS Costume

For Halloween this year, our family all wore Doctor Who costumes.  I was the TARDIS (basically a time machine that looks like a British police box, for those who don't know).  I had seen some pictures on pinterest of TARDIS dresses, so I thought that would be fun to try.

I started by scouring thrift stores for royal blue coloured clothes.  I ended up finding a skirt and top.  I also got a yellow shirt and a black sash.  I had some back heels at home, which completed what I needed for the costume.

Unlike my husband's and son's 11th Doctor costumes which needed very little done to the pieces I found at thrift stores, I had a bit more work to do for my TARDIS costume.


"Police Box" Belt

The first thing I did was add lettering to the sash so that it read "Police Public Call Box".  I used acrylic paint, since that's what I had around the house.  It was painstaking work to freehand the lettering, but I was very happy with how it turned out.

Windows

Next I had to make the iconic police box windows.  I decided to remove the front pockets off the blue shirt and replace them with windows.

I cut out white rectangles of fabric, pinning them where the pockets used to be.

Then I used a wide zigzag stitch to attach the white fabric and trace the shape of the windows.  I ended up tracing over it a couple of times to make the lines more solid-looking.

Police Box Sign

And finally I added the police box sign.  To do this, I researched how to print on fabric and found a helpful tutorial that explains how you can use freezer paper.

You cut a piece of your fabric that is slightly larger than 8 1/2 x 11 and iron it to make sure that it is very flat.  Then you cut an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of freezer paper.  Freezer paper has a wax coating only on one side.  You put your fabric on the ironing board wrong side up and place the freezer paper wax side down on the fabric, ironing it so that the freezer paper sticks to the fabric.  Then trim it so that it is exactly 8 1/2 x 11 (the size of regular printer paper).

Then you set up the printer to print high quality on "other" photo paper and print on the right side of the fabric that has the freezer paper attached to the other side.  This process worked pretty well for me, but I had a hard time getting our printer to accept the fabric/freezer paper.  But with Steve's help we were able to trick the printer into accepting it and the final product looked really good!

Then you peel the freezer paper off the fabric and trim the fabric down to the size you want to use.  I used my sewing machine to attach the fabric sign to the skirt.

Then all that was left for me to do was assemble all of the pieces together to make my TARDIS outfit!