Investigate

A few months back I decorated a bag for a friend's birthday present.  We started hanging out because of a common love for Dr. Who.  She had an iTunes subscription to the latest season so I'd go over to her place to watch it so I didn't have to wait for it to come out on Netflix and she'd tolerate my chattering and spoiling the episodes by predicting what was going to happen.  We're both also fans of the new Sherlock BBC series with Benedict Cumberbatch.  So, I thought of a way to combine the two to make a unique gift for my new friend.

A dalek cosplaying as Sherlock because not even aliens can resist the siren call of Benedict Cumberbatch

To make the bag I used freezer paper stencils to get the basic shape of the dalek, hat, and pipe.  I then appliqued them on using fusible interfacing.  Then came the time-consuming part of stitching all the details in by hand using a picture for reference.  I used a back stitch so that it would look like continuous lines. I had to take the ol' seam ripper out and start certain areas over again several times because they just didn't look right.  I am not good at free-hand drawing so it didn't end up being an exact copy, but enough to get the idea across.

Perspective is hard!

I then added the other appliques like the pipe, magnifying glass, and hat.  I used a bit of black ribbon for the magnifying glass handle and fabric scraps for the rest.  This is the same grey, white, and brown material I bought in Scotland and used on the napkins I made this summer.  I have an entire dress made out of the hat material.  Even though I attached them securely with fusible interfacing I stitched over them to be extra sure. I was careful to leave the hat flap unattached on the deer stalker when ironing the hat on and instead went back later and stitched it in place folded up.

Let's use that magnifying glass to cover up the crappy arm/blaster gun I made--perfect!

Next I added trim to spice things up a bit.  I put a black ribbon along the bottom and added buttons for the dalek's sense globes (I had no idea what those were until I looked it up just now in a handy dalek anatomy chart. You learn something new every day.)  I thought that this would add dimension to the dalek, help me avoid trying to stitch circles, and I like the idea of using adorable buttons to make a killing machine.

Cute as a button

Finally, I cut out a speech bubble and attached it with interfacing and stitching again because apparently I'm paranoid.  I changed the iconic dalek "Exterminate!" into "Investigate!" for my adorable deadly cosplayer.  I didn't quite get it centered, but by this time it was late the night before I had to give it to my friend and I have work in the morning so I let it slide.

My handwriting with a needle is marginally better than with a pencil--true fact!

And I then I was done and I had a lovely unique gift to give to my new friend.  Since then we've grown much closer and I like to think that it's all because I intimidated her into being friends with me with my skills at sewing cold-blooded killers in lighter moments.  Enjoy!

All pictures in this post taken by me and published under a Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.