Any decent “Smithie” out there will know that on her time in Doctor Who Sarah Jane Smith wore some very weird clothing, For example…

A very sporadically patterned Jumper [The Monster of Peladon]

A Yellow two piece rain outfit plus woolly hat! [The Sontaran Experiment]

And a….. actually I don’t rightly know what this is, it appears to be some kind of quilted vest type thing. [The Brain Of Morbius]

But the weirdest one and now the most infamous is the outfit she wore in her last episode “The Hand of Fear”.

Yes, it’s the infamous Andy Pandy Overalls!

Apparently Elisabeth Sladen still gets asked to this day why it was she wore this outfit, and was there a particular reason for it.

Personally I’d have asked her if she lost a bet and had to wear it for a joke, it is a very odd outfit indeed.

But actually, it’s kinda cool in its own way isn’t it? Check out some of the details on it.

 

So I got to thinking, after my Sarah Jane Weekend what can I do to follow it up? What else can I do that’s a little bit crazy but related to Sarah Jane? Then it hit me, how cool would it be to have your own pair of Sarah Jane’s Andy Pandy Overalls! [Not her actual ones obviously, that would be a bit weird.]

So….. How do I go about getting these overalls? On the extras on the DVD of “The Hand of Fear” Elisabeth Sladen says that this outfit was bought [it was bought! Shops actually sold this!] in a shop called Bus Stop, there’s the first problem, there are no shops called Bus Stop anymore and even if there were I doubt they would sell anything like that!

So the only way I can think to get this outfit is to make it from scratch, so here I go. [And again, this isn’t the first time I’ve done something like this, when I was 15 I made a replica dress of the one Sissy Spacek wore in the move “Carrie”, minus the pigs blood of course.]

First of all I needed the right material, I didn’t think I’d be able to get the exact patterned material so I went for something that seemed close enough, I chose this red stripy stuff in the end and that in itself was hard enough to find, actually the nice lady in one of the fabric shops I went into had to special order it for me. Ideally I would have liked the stripes to have been a bit thinner but I had to take what I could get.

They weren’t actually that difficult to make, I got my sister to help me with the pattern because that’s the area I’m not so good at, then all I had to do was sew it all together, I hand sewed them by the way, I don’t know how to use a sewing machine.

My Buddy K9 helped me out, as you can see.

Then I added the stars, they’re the most important bit you see! I decided to paint them on, I tried to find some sew on stars but I couldn’t find any in Cardiff.

And that’s all there is too it, they didn’t take me that long to make, about two days.

And here’s the finished product! Ta Da!!!!!! They might not be an exact replica but I think they look pretty good, I really should have a toy owl in my hand too but never mind.

Somehow I don’t think I pull them off as well as she did though.