Wonder Woman costume

All the Avengers and other super hero costumes last year inspired me to try a Wonder Woman costume for Halloween 2012.  I loved the old Lynda Carter TV show way back when it was new, so I started looking at the details of her costume:

After making my Felicia Day "Codex" costume 3 years ago, and sewing the corset from scratch, I swore I was never going to do that again, so the first task was to find a corset of the right color that I could use as a base.

To the rescue: sexy "Santa Baby" costume, which I think was from Amazon, or possibly ebay:

The straps were already removable, and the hat, belt, and g-string no use, but the corset itself was just the right colour and a good starting base.

However, this corset had metal hook-and-eye fastenings up the front, and laces up the back, which were both problems.  I unpicked the stitches and removed both.  The front had to be solid fabric, because the gold eagle would be sewn on top of it; and the laces at the back looked wrong for Wonder Woman.  I sewed both up, and instead unpicked the side seams and sewed in zippers.

Since removing the laces and the hooks made the corset width smaller, it was now too small, and I needed to add some extra fabric at the sides also so I could fit into it! Fortunately, a matching red satin was pretty easy to find at the local fabric shop.

Once the corset fit comfortably, it was time to sew on the golden decorations.  The fabric shop also had gold spandex and thread, so I sewed a lot of gold tubes, and the cat was VERY helpful as I tried to lay out the eagle wings.

The spandex was a real pain to sew; I think I wasn't using the right type of needle, but I'm definitely going to avoid spandex again as much as possible!  However, eventually the feathers and then the eagle and rest of the gold detail were in place, and the top was done.

I didn't try to make the outfit a one-piece; I ordered some stretchy blue athletic shorts from Amazon and simply sewed some white stars onto them.  Comfortable and not too high cut.

The shorts were still fairly short however and female super hero costumes tend to be rather more revealing than male ones, and since I'd likely be wearing it around work colleagues, I decided an added skirt would be appropriate. I came across this great blue gauzy material with silver stars in the "seasonal" fabric section: apparently it's Christmas-y?  It was perfect for a skirt.  And, apparently, a cat tent.

Rather than make a full skirt, I just sewed the fabric to some more of the gold spandex as a waist band and added a fastening at the front so it would be open at front, but long at the back.  I also sewed lots of gathers into the skirt so that rather than hanging down straight, it hangs in gathers.

Wrist band and headband were easily sewn out of the same gold spandex.

I'd found the boots fairly cheaply on Zappos.com back around February, and I used white bandage tape to add the highlights. Add some flesh coloured stockings, and of course the invisible plane.

And so it was assembled!

This took a LOT of work, probably more than last year's dalek outfit, but everyone seemed to like it.  And it was actually pretty comfortable too - the headband (which was slightly too tight) and the contact lenses were the most uncomfortable parts.