I built a yellow “command” uniform from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds for Halloween.
The pattern drafting and sewing was pretty simple, but getting screen accurate materials is a challenge: the real costumes use a high-tech microfleece that’s challenging to source*, and the shoulders and the outer panels of the sleeve have a pattern that the costume team screen-prints in-house.
Derek Basthemer of Making It Sew has fantastic pictures of the originals. He also put together a vector image of the sleeve patterns.
Thanks to Derek’s work, I was able to etch the command pattern into my polyester. Here’s a close-up of the shoulder panel:
The longest pieces were 23 inches long, so just a little too big for the bed. I could have used the pass-through, but it would have taken more joins, which is more chances for the alignment to go wrong. Instead, I used the long dimension of the bed with extra material rolled up and weighted, and aligned manually. I can find the join point if I really look for it, but on the finished garment, no one’s that close to my sleeves:
*I may actually have found where they got it–or something really close! But this version is using polyester knit from the fabric store. When I make V2, I’ll use the glowforge to make a screen-printing stencil, which will be both screen-accurate and faster than etching. But for a last minute weekend build where I had to use what I had on hand, this came out great.
