Junior Doctor

If you are familiar with my Tennant Suit Blog, you will know of an occasional thread I run there called Me And My Tennant Suit. I featured a number of suit owners, all proudly displaying their prized suits.

There have been a number of cosplayers who have assembled some awesome Eleven outfits to date, but I just HAD to share the one below as he is undoubtedly the most endearing and inspirational I have ever seen!

His name is Jack and he is six and a half.

His Dad helped him get this amazing pint-sized costume together.

The jeans and braces came from H&M, the shirt is from Adams and the rest was picked up on eBay.
His Dad said, “The tweed jacket was the hard find, not many kids tweeds come up, and when they do the chance of getting a good colour, two button is slim. So bit of luck with that!” And he only paid £20 for it too!

The shoes were bought for 99p and are actually in the style of Converse All Stars, but by a different maker. I tiny touch of Tennant there!
The bow tie was also a snip at 99p!

His dad says it’s great fun having him run about the house being The Doctor. “It takes me back to my childhood, wearing the long 4th Doctor scarf my gran knitted for me and a hat my grandad gave me!”

The Tweed jacket

I had held off posting anything about the jackets Matt Smith has been wearing, mainly because I wanted to find a definitive way of obtaining just the right type rather than give vague, unhelpful info.

So far Matt has been seen wearing three distinctly different jackets:

Season Five

Harris Tweed

The first jacket Matt was seen wearing (for location scenes shot in July 2009 for The Time Of Angels) was a fine-checked Harris tweed (see left).

This was widely publicised at the time and soon after, included in a double-page spread in the Radio Times (see below).

It has since been revealed the fabric is a Mackenzie two-by-two dogtooth (see some of the online articles in the links at the end of this entry).

Click here to download a high resolution copy of the article: Radio Times.

The jacket has a two button closure with holed buttons; two outside pockets and a single vent at the back; as well as dark elbow patches.

This jacket was worn in: Victory Of The Daleks, The Time Of Angels, Flesh And Stone
It was also worn for the 2010 BBC Prom Concert.

Series Five costume index

A while back over on my Third Doctor Blog I ran a series of features about Jon Pertwee’s costume changes during his run as The Doctor.
I wrote it because I was curious to work out the transition from his first year when he wore the same clothes all season, through to his last where he rarely wore the same thing twice!

Matt  Smith’s costume appeared at the outset to be a fairly fixed affair, but as the series has progressed a number of subtle variants have emerged. What follows is an attempt to document these in one place.

All of the images below have been grabbed from the HD transmissions. Click on them to view in full resolution.

The Eleventh Hour

Jacket Donegal Tweed

NB: There is a minor continuity error in the closing scene, where a close-up shows The Doctor wearing the Harris Tweed jacket (see right) which does not appear for two episodes.

Shirt Burgundy Paul Smith with matching burgundy bow tie

Trousers Dogtooth design skinny jeans from TopMan
NB. These jeans can be quickly identified by the visible metal waistband button at the top of the fly (see below).

Boots Replica All Saints Layer boots

Meanwhile In The TARDIS

Disc 1 of complete Series Five DVDs

This bridging scene, which links The Eleventh Hour directly to The Beast Below, maintains perfect continuity between the two episode.

Jacket Donagal Tweed

Shirt Burgundy Paul Smith with matching burgundy bow tie

Trousers Dogtooth design skinny jeans from TopMan

Boots Replica All Saints Layer boots

The Beast Below

Jacket Donegal Tweed

Shirt Burgundy Paul Smith with matching burgundy bow tie

Trousers Dogtooth design skinny jeans from TopMan

Boots Replica All Saints Layer boots 

Victory Of The Daleks

Jacket Harris Tweed in Mackenzie two-by-two dogtooth weave

Shirt Blue Paul Smith with matching navy bow tie

Trousers Plain charcoal skinny jeans
NB. These jeans can be distinguished from the dogtooth jeans by their clean closure at the waistband with no visible button (see right).

Boots Unidentified brown boots

11 shirt - pattern cutting

A couple of months back I started work on producing a replica Matt Smith shirt.
To make it work I need to pull two aspects of the shirt together before I can make my first one.

Firstly, I needed to match the squiggly pattern design, which I have now done (see left), as well as the stripes for the cuffs.
You can read about that under Pattern Repeat and Screen-accurate Cuffs.

The other thing I need to do is sort out the pattern for the shirt itself.

Although I have a couple of Paul Smith shirts, each to a differing fit, my plan is to make a shirt that is much more of a classic size, rather than the over-tailored tight fit of the Paul Smith originals.

But instead of pattern trace my shirts, I am going to use a commercial pattern by Burba (see right) as a starting point.

It is a fairly straight forward shirt pattern with a number of permutations of style, but I will be making my own adaptions based on what I have learnt on my recent college course, as well as how the real Paul Smith shirts are cut.

I also have a cunning plan to make the cutting of the shirts a lot easier in the long term. I was originally going to have the fabric printed, then cut it out to my adapted pattern.
However, I have realized I need to make quite a few changes, so my plan is to make all those changes in a digital format, then directly apply the pattern shapes to the printed fabric itself.

First thing I need to do is scan the entire Burba pattern, which I have to do in A4 bits and patch together (see left).
To aid matching up, I spray-mounted it onto dot and cross paper first, giving me alignment reference. This also made it more robust for scanning.

I will not be using all the pieces. For example the collar comes in three styles (see on the left edge of the image), but none of them are to the right shape. This I will crib directly from my Paul Smith shirts.

I then retouched to remove the background paper colour so it was easier to trace in Illustrator (see above).

The pattern contains a range of sizings, from S to XXL, all of which are superimposed on top of each other. You can see this in the sleeve shape.

To start with I will trace the L size and make sure the pattern works. Adapting it for the other sizes will then be a very simple job.