My Ted Costume
Halloween 2022 was the perfect opportunity for me to indulge in the full breadth of this special interest, and I dedicated a solid couple of weeks to building up my very own Ted Theodore Logan costume from the ground up. With a lot of lucky thrifting, I was able to follow along with the 'How To' guide that was featured on the old billandted.org fansite - a copy of which I've reuploaded onto this domain here if you're interested.
On this page, I figured I'd show off my final results as well as detailing some of the experience of making it alongside some additional notes that might be helpful for anyone else who's in search of their own Ted costume! I didn't take as many pictures as I wish I had in hindsight, but that's life sometimes! If I ever decide to make another costume in the future, at least I'll be more attentive to documenting the process then!
First things first, getting lucky at the local thrift store was my real big break on this project. I was able to find the grey sweatpants, the black shorts, and the base for the jacket there. I was a little conflicted about the jacket selection - the one I was able to find was originally a white women's denim jacket. It fit me, but not as oversized as Ted's is in canon, and the fact that it's a women's jacket means that the buttons are on the wrong side. The store I was at did have a white denim men's jacket that fit better, but the front was decorated with these sewn in pleats, which definitely would have been an inaccurate detail. I decided to take the wrong fit over the wrong look, and still hold out hope that I might find a better match out there one day. Still, for 17$, it was a pretty good steal.
Finding a jacket in the right color was going to be a borderline impossible task, so I figured that a white base would be my best bet so that I could dye it as specifically as I needed to. I loaded up my sink with water and Rit Dye and set to work. I believe I wound up using 1 or 2 bottles of Golden Yellow dye alongside 1 dry packet of Scarlet. The color came out a little bolder than Ted's - which is canonically more faded - but that's another acceptable variation for me.
I wasn't able to find a comparable pair of shoelaces to thread through the buttons, though, and couldn't really afford to spend too much of anything trying to get something that specific anyway. Instead, I used some old cotton thread I had leftover from a Fibers class I took in college and made a blank knotted friendship bracelet long enough to stretch the length of the jacket. Then I went in with silver and black sharpies to draw the design right onto it, since I've never been able to figure out how to knot actual designs into those things lol. (I'm not sure how Ted keeps the shoelace in his jacket anchored in, but I stuck a couple of safety pins through the knots at either end of the 'bracelet' and threaded them through the top and bottom button holes to anchor in on the inside of the jacket. Once I wrote in the Wyld Stallyns along the length of the sleeve, the jacket was finished!
(It bothers me just a Little bit that the jacket is lopsided thanks to the buttons being on the wrong side - the Wyld Stallyns sleeve and the shoelace are supposed to be on opposite sides instead of sharing the right, but that's the price I paid to avoid spending big money on a brand new white denim jacket lol.)
The shirt and patches I made using iron on paper. I used the jpeg included in the Creativedude tutorial for the shirt, and printed it out so that the design was split between two pieces of paper to get it in the size I needed it to be. Because of this, there was a thin line at the seam of the two photos where the iron-on design basically bled through the back of the paper instead of sticking to the shirt, which was a bummer. BUT, putting my art degree into some use, I was able to mix some acrylic paint to match the colors that were missing, and combined it with a fabric medium to fill in that gap manually. It doesn't hold up to close scrutiny, but if you're looking at the shirt from a normal human distance away, you can't really tell that anything is off - at most it kind of just looks like a crease left by a fold. I borrowed a suit vest from my dad, since that was the only piece I wasn't able to find at any of the thrift stores
I just googled a photo of the 'Save the Humans' bumper sticker, and ironed that design onto a piece of thin cotton fabric. The smiley face patch I painted manually, since I had some yellow fabric paint lying around. Both patches got a blanket stitch edging to keep them from fraying during wear or washing, and then got sewn onto the shorts.
I was able to make a comparable version of Ted's watch using a leather band bracelet that I got as a gift. I believe the original was bought at a store like Michaels? It has four hooks on it that are meant to be used to hold on an exchangable plate design for the face of the bracelet. I found a cheap watch at Walmart that would fit the band properly, unhooked the strap from it, and hooked it onto the bracelet instead. It hangs a little strangely, because the two aren't actually meant to fit on one another, but it's functional! This part of the costume has actually become a staple in my wardrobe - I wear it basically every day.
(I couldn't figure out exactly what the other bracelets Ted wears on his opposite wrist are, so I wasn't able to replicate those. Instead I just wore a couple of black hair ties, since the size and color were comparable, and it worked well enough!)
The socks and shoes were last! The converse look a little like hell, because they're actually an old pair of Pink converse that I'd overdyed black back in 2020. I didn't do a very good job of it lmao, so the white pieces of the shoe all wound up stained, but they work well enough. I was at the end of my budget by this point, so instead of buying purple shoelaces, I took a purple Sharpie to the pair that I already had. The color bled strangely on the laces and onto the shoes, but it became one of those details that could almost become a character headcanon to me, like Ted coloring his shoelaces purple while bored in class or something! The socks were just a plain gray when I bought them, and I used acrylic paint mixed with fabric medium to get the red band around the ankles in place.
(Normally I have to wear my socks inside-out because I have a major sensory intolerance about the seams. Unfortunately, when I painted these socks, I totally forgot to turn them inside out before I painted the pattern in, which was a bummer! Instead, when I wore the costume, I had to wear a second pair of ankle socks inside out underneath these ones to protect me from the seam lol)
And this was my final result! I was super pleased with the way everything came out, and I think I spent a solid two hours hopping excitedly around after I put the whole thing on together for the first time. When I wore the costume out to work, I paired it with a bright red face mask. I'd intended to go through the effort of custom making a cloth mask - I was planning on using a red base fabric and using yellow paints to paint in the Wyld Stallyns logo (think Bill's hat from Bogus Journey), but I wound up running out of time, and I figured that the paint would wind up compromising the safety of the mask anyway :/ maybe another time though! I also personally skipped over including a wig in my costume - I couldn't bring myself to spend the 20$ on something that I'd only wear once lol, but it turned out beautifically recognizable even without it!