The Thomas Tabard Tutorial

Fastelaun

There is the Brazilian carnival and there is the Danish fastelaun. This is where the kids dress up, hit a barrel with sweets in and go round knocking on house doors singing a song and ask for sweets or money. Well last year I was all new to this an had quite a surprise when the boys started singing a song to me - PANIC! What do I do?! I gave them 20 kr each, this I later found out was 10 times more than I should have given!

Dressing up for playgroup

Last week my son had a fastelaun party in his playgroup and so I had to sort out an outfit that he wouldn't refuse to wear. After a brief consultation with my husband he suggested a Thomas outfit or a aeroplane outfit. Well this is what I made!

I had planned to make you a tutorial but as a typical rookie mistake I forgot to take photos after my first  couple as I got quite into it. So hopefully you will still be able to follow.

What you need

1/2 metre of blue cotton and 1/2 metre of backing fabric or 1 metre of plain blue fabric

Grey felt

White felt

Black felt 

Red felt

yellow felt

Four sets of kam snaps

Lots of black thread

The tabard pattern

I used the pattern from this place. I didn't want the dangly ties in the side as it's got a bit of a girly look for it so rather than cutting four of the side ties I folded it double on the length and put kam snaps to attach to the front of the tabard. My mistake is that the side straps are slightly too long so I would suggest to you that you make them a bit shorter than I did.

The face

Once I had cut out the pieces for the tabard I got ahead and started on the face, to get the scaling of the face I used this picture.

The grey felt circle is 15 cm across, the eye whites are 4 cm across and pupils are 1,5 cm across. I then started stitching around the eyes in a small zigzag stitch with black thread, with my machine I put the setting for stitch length at 0.5 and stitch width at 2. At this stage the face my husband kindly pointed out that it looked like the nightmare before Christmas. The mouth is 1,5 cm at it's thickest part and 8,5 cm wide and I placed it 2 cm from the bottom of the circle. A bit more stitching and this is what it looked like.

You can nearly start to tell that it is Thomas now! The triangular eyebrows are 2,5 cm at the base and the sides 1,5 cm.

And this is the finished face! The width of the nose is 4,5 cm, the dimples are 3,5 cm long and the line under the mouth is 3 cm long. Then it was time to stitch the face onto the tabard. I put the stitching on my machine to 0,5 length and 5 width.

The top of the tabard

 The yellow circles are 6,5 cm across and the black circles inside are 4,5 cm. sewn on with the narrower stitch. The two thicker lines are Thomas roof and they are both 8 cm long just at the top of the tabard. the funnel is 6 cm thick and 4,5 - 6,5 cm long. Each line of the side of the funnel is 7 cm long. the lines level with Thomas eyebrows are 8 cm long each.

Mid section of tabard

This section of lines are a bit more complicated so I made a bit of a drawing on all the lengths. There is a line which if you have a look at Thomas that are supposed to join up these two lines length wise but due to the shape of the tabard the whole thing couldn't go on. The bottom black felt piece is 10,5 cm wide and 5-6 cm tall.

Bottom half of tabard

The grey felt piece is 5 cm wide and 35 cm long. At the widest the red felt piece is 6 cm wide. The black felt felt circles are actually 3,5 cm across but when I had sewn them on I thought they were too small so I re-did the stitching on the bigger setting so now the measure 4,5 cm. The white lamp is a bit of a peculiar shape. the top part of it is 2 cm wide and 1 cm high, the circle part is 5 cm across, and the stand is 4,5 cm wide and the foot is 5,5 cm wide. The whole length of the lamp is 8,5 cm long. 

The finishing touches

Now it's time for the finishing touches and sew the tabard together following Maggie's instructions for sewing together the front and back pieces. At the top of the tabard I put two sets of kam snaps and one on each of the sides about 20 cm from the top. 

Hope you enjoyed my tutorial and enjoy crafting!