#textile express

In the official Behind the Scenes documentary, Sam wears a slate blue teeshirt with a coffin drawing on the front, which I really liked, so I did a bit of investigating. It turned out that this was the "crew shirt" for the show - a promo item made and distributed to cast and crew only. Usually these are pretty tacky affairs with just the show logo on a tee or trucker cap, but I really liked the subtlety of this one - it looks like it does have the show name on the sleeve and a bit of text on the back that can't be read (my guess is maybe "Memory is a Monster"?), but mostly, I was into the coffin drawing. I did some cursory searches on eBay but with NDAs these days, I didn't really expect to find anyone selling theirs. So if I wanted one, I'd have to make one myself!

Since I sew, it was honestly easier to just make myself the base tee rather than buy one. I started with the fabric, using this "Powder blue" bamboo jersey from Textile Express. It's not a perfect match, but it's close enough for me and it's light enough that the black coffin stands out.

For the pattern, I used the Fehr Trade Versatili-Tops pattern, because I liked that it would give it a little something extra than just a standard teeshirt (there's no side seams!).

The next step was to design and cut the coffin detail. The only thing I really had to go on was the scant footage from the Behind the Scenes videos since the graphic was never used in any official promotion material. So I had to recreate the coffin from scratch, using Adobe Illustrator and some rough ink brushes to make it look hand drawn.

Jacob shared a quick little doodle of Louis ahead of the AMA session on Reddit back in November, and someone on Twitter took his Louis doodle and did Lestat and Claudia in the same style, which I absolutely love (and I wish I took note of who it was that did it so I could attribute - message me if you know!). So I turned this into a vector, as well as recreating the "Of Course!" heart that's one of the most used reactions on my favourite vampire Discord server, and cut these out on my Silhouette Cameo machine in black matte heat set vinyl. I placed the coffin on the front chest, in roughly the same placement as the inspiration tee, with the doodle heads on the right sleeve and "Of course!" on the left sleeve.

I absolutely love how it turned out, and is a totally one-of-a-kind tribute to the show. I have no aptitude for the skill involved in creating fan art or fanfic, and I'm not really into cosplay, so this is a way for me to express my love of the show in my way.

And still look like a fairly normal person (joke's on you - I've never been normal!).