Part 3: Stranger, where's yer troosers?

One of the few parts of this ridiculous costume to involve traditional sewing, the trousers may not be the most charismatic part of the equation, but they're just as necessary as the flashy parts like the head, and it's just as important they fit the part.

I'm not the most gifted or learned individual when it comes to sewing, so I decided to go for a commercial pattern and adjust it. In the end I needn't have bothered, since the sizings on the pattern were completely off from what I was expecting, I ended up starting over once, and I adjusted everything so much it barely resembles the original anyway, but that's life, especially when you have an arse as big as mine.

The most important consideration other than the pattern was what fabric to use. Too light and it looks fake and stagey, too heavy and it won't hang right. Do I want to emulate leather, or go for a woven look? In the end I went for a heavy workmans cotton fabric, similar to a more lightweight denim. This felt appropriately cowboy-ish and had the additional benefit of being pretty cheap and coming in exactly the right colour

There were a couple of compromises needed for this part of the costume. Try as I might, I couldn't find a way of giving the trousers an unbroken waistband and also including the double fly front entry, eventually I concluded the original art and models weren't perfectly translateable to the real world. This is always a risk with costumes based on artwork or computer models, a model or drawing doesn't have to add up in the way a real object does. In any case, the workaround was pretty simple, just make the front flap fake and sew it into the seams, and add side entry via a zipper

There's still a good deal of work left on the trousers, the sides need eyelets and lacing near the waist, and the front needs a bunch of buttons. However, all that is going to have to wait until after weathering. Bright shiny clean trousers wouldn't work on a costume that's supposed to be a grizzled bounty hunter who spends his days creeping around in the dust and wading through swamps, so the next stage on these is heavy ageing and weathering. There are half a dozen ways to do this, the one I'll be trying first is just ageing them naturally: wearing them while gardening and digging holes in the dirt, and treating them like any other tatty work clothes, then allowing the dirt to bed in for a few days or weeks and washing them cold to freshen them up without completely removing all the stains. If this isn't enough, there are plenty of methods using paints, inks and powders that can make things a bit more extreme. They might end up 90% covered up by other parts of the costume, but that's no excuse to skimp