I finished the nieces' superhero knits a while ago, but I didn't get around to making the things that go with them until it was almost time to give them as presents. Niece the Younger very specifically asked for a cape to go with her Superman sweater ("so I can fly"). Niece the Elder didn't say she wanted a tiara like Wonder Woman, but she did want the Wonder Woman sweater, and if Niece the Younger was getting a cape accessory, I needed to balance things make something to go with the Wonder Woman theme. At least a tiara is canonically correct.
The cape is sewn, not knitted (it's lighter and less likely to stretch out that way), and I am terrified of sewing, so I did the tiara first:
There are lots of free crown patterns on the web, both in knit and crochet. I took this one and reduced the number of points to one, then embroidered the red star on. The yarn is leftovers from the Wonder Woman sweater itself, with the gold yarn worked double so it's stiff enough to hold its shape when worn.
The tiara only took part of one evening to make, which left me with absolutely no excuse to not start on the cape. I decided to just take it step by step: iron and cut the fabric one day, pin the next, sew the next, finish the day after that.
Olga from work is much better at sewing than I am, and kindly sketched out the shape I needed to cut on a spare piece of paper. I followed her sketch and what she'd given as instructions, measuring against the length of the finished sweater and its neck width to get the inner and outer curve measurements. I surprised myself by cutting straight the first time (I had more fabric ready if I messed up). The next morning, I pinned bias tape along the edges like my chiropractor had explained.
The sewing went better than I thought. I even remembered what my mum had taught me about stitch length. I did wind up having to redo the neck part, but that was okay, because as I was ripping off the original length of bias tape for the neck, I remembered that I should stay stitch the raw edge around the neck curve before applying the bias tape.
And yes, I needed advice from three experienced sewists to finish this thing, and I still felt anxious about it.
The last step was to sew buttons onto the tabs extending from the neckline, and create corresponding button loops on the wrong side of the sweater so Niece the Younger could attach and detach the cape as she liked.
The sweaters seem to have been well received, in that I've seen both nieces wear them more than once. The day after Yule, Niece the Younger put the Superman sweater on over her pajamas when she woke up in the morning:
Niece the Elder wore her Wonder Woman sweater to school the first day back after New Year's.
Usually I just let people put their own feedback in the comments, but this time I'm going to let Niece the Elder have the last word, and quote the comment she put on Facebook when she used my mum's iPad to look at the photo at the top of this post:
It. Is awesomely. GOOD!
So there.