Dressed to Dress - Creativity and Fashion of Note: Refashioned Suit for 90s Costume Party

My husband and I are not afraid to dress up (because it's so much fun), so when our friend announced that he was having an 80s/90s cartoons birthday party we were in. I wanted to be a Ninja Turtle - Donatello to be exact - and in a rare show of creative laziness I bought my costume. I did add the purple ties to it and made the 'D' to wear around my waist. But I'm glad that I bought it because I may have run out of time in making the other costume!

The tights were a bit, ah, tight, so I added a little lycra skirt for my modesty.

All ready to go.

Back to the real costume making!

My husband wanted to go as Two Face, a villain from Batman. It showed on TV as a cartoon when we were younger, and this was the model for the villain:

Half of every piece of clothing black and the other half white. Challenge accepted!
It would have been prohibitively expensive to buy two new suits in each colour, halve them and made potentially two black and white suits. Husband had a cheaper black suit in his cupboard, so we pulled that out to convert. He decided that he wanted the pants, jacket, tie and a vest done, but that he wanted to be able to wear the suit as-is again. This meant that it couldn't be a permanent conversion.
We bought an over-sized large shirt to craft with, something like four sizes bigger than his usual so that it would fit over the jacket.

I cut the shirt in half and hemmed the raw edge. Then it was a matter of pinning it over the jacket to match.

The front edge had to be folded over and holes cut for the existing buttons to it through.

Trying to match the collar of the black jacket was a bit tricky, but I made a good effort.

This is the jacket all pinned and ready to sew.

The fabric is all hand-stitched onto the jacket, what you call 'tacked' - a loose stitch that is easy to remove later on. He wants to keep the jacket and pants as normal clothes, not permanently a costume. It would have been a lot easier to whizz through the sewing machine, but harder to unpick late and also more likely to show marks when I removed everything.

I should have taken some in-progress photos of the tie, but really all I did was take a white and black tie, cut them in half and sew them back together into the two combinations. It's very effective, I think:

Onto the underclothes. My husband had an existing cheap vest that I cut in half and used as a template on the remaining half of the white shirt.

It was much easier to pin and size on the dressmakers manikin. I shaped the bottom to match that of the vest.

I left some extra at the back for overlap.

The edge has gone wavy under the arms because the shirt armhole is bigger than the vest. I can fix this when I sew it all together.

Once it was all pinned it was easy to cut out.Then it was a matter of hemming all of the edges and creating button holes.

I matched the tie on the black side with one on the white side too.

It doesn't look too bad, I must say. I didn't get time to add bias binding to the edges before the party, but I will later on so that it is strengthened and will last longer.