Step-by-step guide: Be the best-dressed pirate at Maidenhead Festival

Town centre: Step-by-step guide to making a kid’s fancy dress costume

Gill Towell, who runs a sewing, patchwork and tutoring business in Maidenhead, GillyMac Designs, explains how you can make your own pirate costumes for your children – or yourself – cheaply and easily in time for this year’s Maidenhead Festival on July 26-27.

‘I have always enjoyed making costumes for my girls over the years.

And even though I could often buy similar from Amazon, Tesco or eBay, there is something really lovely about having a go myself.

In making this costume, I have incorporated a couple of the ideas I roll out for many of the things I create, I hope you find them as useful as I have done over the years.

1. When making any outfit, try and keep a focus on a couple of parts such as the top/waistcoat and bandanna for the pirate costume. The trousers can be any dark pair of trousers or shorts. You don’t need to make everything.

2. Have a look at what clothing you have that can be dyed. Machine dyeing – I always use Dylon machine dye – is as simple as doing a 40° wash and turns something old into a dressing up item of the right colour immediately.

The dye won’t damage your machine. Just run a 40° cycle afterwards with your normal powder and a cup of bleach (both placed directly into the drum) after you have finished dyeing the garment.

3. Finally, pop down to a local sewing shop  and see what they have that could inexpensively enhance the outfit – pop into Sew Crafty in Maidenhead to get your accessories.

To make the pirate shirt, I used an old school shirt, cut the cuffs and collar off and put some elastic in the

shortened sleeves to make it look ruffled.

I made a belt tie from a piece of striped fabric, but a red scarf would do the same job.

The shirt was finished off with some gold ric-rac ribbon.

To make the waistcoat I dyed a white T-shirt, which had seen better days, black. 

I then trimmed off the arms, cutting straight up the front and then shaping the bottom front to look more waistcoat-like.

I added anchor buttons to it and the rest of the gold ric rac.

I added a home-made skull and crossbones brooch, which I made with two circles of felt fabric, a skull and crossbones button and a safety pin.

The final outfit only needed a bandanna to finish it off. Using half the striped material I bought, I hemmed around it, folded it into a triangle and tied it into a bandanna. The final accompaniment was a cutlass which was made out of a cardboard box and tinfoil.

So the final costs  – and shopping list – if you want to replicate the outfit:

0.5m Striped PolyCotton Fabric £2.48

1m 0.5cm elastic                                     £0.50

2 Anchor Buttons (75p each)    £1.50

2m Gold ric rac (£1.20/m)                   £2.40

1 sheet of black felt              £0.75

Skull & Crossbones button                 £0.75

Total                                            £8.38

Plus Dylon at £6.95 which is needed to dye fabric if you don’t have a black T-shirt.