Costume Basics: Calling All Doctors, Nurses, Mad Scientists, and Escaped Mental Patients!

This is my second costuming post, and wouldn't you know it, I'll be using more pvc! We have had a bolt in about half of the colors they have at the fabric store so far, and we keep thinking of more ideas on how we can use it.

This round of costumes all started because my friends, my girlfriend, and I were all invited to a Halloween party that had a medical theme to it. We had one nurse outfit left over from a previous year, but we needed more (the white outfit shown in the picture to the left is the one that was purchased previously). Plus there are a lot of different doctor/nurse outfit themes that you can go with. Do you want to go realistic and wear scrubs? Do you want to go vintage and wear some of the older style nurse outfits that I personally love? Or perhaps you don't want to be a doctor or nurse at all, but a patient or a mad scientist? The following outfits can be adapted into any of these themes depending on the style that you choose.

 The first one that I made was one for Steffie. She decided she wanted to be the "bad" nurse. In the old cowboy movies, the bad guys always wore the black hats, so I made her nurse outfit out of black pvc.

We looked around at a lot of the Simplicity, McCalls, and Butterick patterns for ideas, but nothing was quite what we wanted. A few months before I had made Steffie a denim wrap dress, and she really loved the fit of that dress. So, I decided to use it for the nurse outfit as well. It was Simplicity Pattern 2981. If you decide you want this pattern, you will have to check online via places like Ebay since the pattern has been sadly discontinued.  The pattern goes together really easily and is very adjustable for different bust and hip sizes.  So that she could wear the dress to other places, we opted to make a magnet pin out of a small red cross applique rather than sewing it directly to the dress. I didn't want to use a regular pin because it would punch a permanent hole in the pvc. Instead I glued a magnet to the back of the applique and then used another magnet as the "back" of the pin. By not sewing a cross or other medical emblem, it allows her to wear it again for other occasions.

For my outfit that year, I decided that I didn't want to be a doctor or a nurse. I decided that I wanted to be a patient, but not just any sort of patient. In the spirit of Halloween I went with a mental patient theme, and no self respecting mental patient would be without his / her straight jacket.

I checked a lot of different places looking for a straight jack, and wow, are they ever expensive! My next step was going through all the costuming catalogs searching desperately for a pattern for one without any luck at all. None of the popular pattern companies have patterns for straight jackets in their costume sections. After that failed search, it was on to massive, LONG, internet searches for different ideas on how to create your own straight jacket. There is a lot of info out there, but not a lot of good, functional ideas. I did finally find a couple of YouTube videos that suggested using a man's dress shirt worn backwards with straps added on. I didn't want just an everyday, plain white straight jacket though.

Instead of buying a dress shirt and reusing it to create the jacket, I bought a pattern for a women's plus size dress shirt and then altered it. You'll end up leaving off the collar and the cuffs, and you'll also want to make the sleeves long enough so that they end an inch or two below your finger tips. I put slits about where the normal cuff would have been when I put the jacket together as well so that I could flip the end up to free my hand for eating and other things when I wasn't strapped in.

For the fabric I went a little crazy and purchased some of the printed vinyl that one would normally use to make a table cloth. Not only was it just printed ... it had a care bear print! If you decide to work with this vinyl take my advice and buy a silicone foot for your sewing machine. It's a nightmare to work with without it.






Keeping with that theme, I went to the thrift store and bought a handfull of little kid jelly belts to be the straps for the jacket. We cut the belts in half and attached three sets of straps to the edges of the shirt (where you would normally have your buttons and button holes). The last set of straps were attached to the edge of each sleeve. Voila! Then I had a straight jacket. For my costume, I paired the straight jacket with a set of pajamas that I also found at the thrift store and a pair of pvc boots that I found at Wal-Mart for less than $10.00.

I also later on made a great white pvc jacket that can be either a nurse dress, a doctor coat, or a lab jacket for a mad scientist. Sleep calls me, so I'll update this post with it later.