Leia Rebel Scout - Star Wars IV - Poncho

The second part of my Leia costume--let's talk about the poncho! I think this poncho is probably what makes this costume somehow so cool and so dorky all at the same time. I really love the neat cowl neck hood and the free flowing back as design elements. This is perhaps the most underrated Leia costume there is.

I hope to do a photoshoot of this later this spring out in the woods somewhere. For now you will have to settle for crappy mirror pics, as I don't even have convention photos of this costume yet...

To see how I styled the wig, go here!
















After patterning and mocking it up, I then cut out the pieces in the real fabric and laid them out. I used watered down fabric paints and splattered and sponged on some different tones in mixed greens and browns. I actually really like how the camo pattern turned out.

You can see below the difference between when it was wet and when it dried.

My one difficulty here was that my brown paint had expired and I was stuck in the middle of nowhere. The paint kept separating and actually added some extra unintentional texture.

Right you can see the hood pieces laid flat. The hood is made of 4 "C" shapes that make up the outer rim, 2 rectangles (not pictured) that form the centre top of the hood and that one super weird piece the forms the sides of the hood and wraps around the front of the collar. The goal was to not have a seam up the front of the hood because there isn't one in any of my reference pictures. I think I managed to recreate it pretty accurately.

After everything dried, I ironed it to set the fabric paint and then sewed it together. 

The actual construction was super straight-forward--and unfortunately I didn't document it. 

I faced the side edges of the poncho and hemmed the front and back. The hood was first pieced together and then attached to the poncho neck hole. 

Some pictures of the finished poncho. 

The last step was to add the holes for the belt. Which secures the poncho in the front only. I faced and reinforced the hole. The process was similar to starting a welt pocket. 

Taking Orders for Splatoon Commissions!

Taking orders for Splatoon hats and tentacles!

- 30$ for full "boy" hats 
- 25$ for just the "girl" tentacles

All are made of spandex and hand painted. Team colour on request!

**Shipping is extra, determined by location

***All squid headgear must be sewn down to a wig in order to stay on (including boy hats). This is not included.

Shoot me a facebook message if you're interested!

Photo credit to Elemental Photography!

Vaporeon Gijinka - Wraps, Bracers & Gloves - Pokémon

Part 5 of the Vaporeon saga! Let's talk about wraps, bracers and gloves! This was probably the most time consuming and difficult part of the entire costume to construct. Lots of hand painting and hand stitching was involved. The end result ended up looking even better than I had envisioned! >:D

Links to Part 1: Bolero, Part 2: Under Layers, Part 3: Wrap Skirt Tail, and Part 4: Wig and Hairpieces!

Thanks to Elemental Photography for the wonderful photoshoot! Credit for the original costume design goes to Cowslip!

The way I started drafting the pattern for these was super scientific! Not really. I literally traced my leg onto paper. This is so I could figure out the relational distance between my ankle, knee and thigh. This was purely to use to get the proportional heights of the bracers and wraps correct.

From there I was able to mark how tall I wanted the bracers and wraps to be. Then I drafted the pattern for the wraps and bracers separately. I also drafted the arm wraps and bracers at this time.

I'll start with the bracers first, since I finished the construction on those first.

I cut out my pieces in the various fabrics. I had an under layer in a shiny synthetic navy blue fabric and an over layer in a light aqua cotton (which was leftover from the Suppi costume).

I nearly cut out the wrong amount of pieces when I was laying out my pattern. Every piece has a backing because I needed that to properly finish the scalloped edges on the top and bottom. This meant every piece was doubled. The navy under layer was backed with the same navy cotton as the bolero lining because I ran out of my other navy fabric.

I assembled each of the fronts and backings separately, sewing them along the side seams. I ironed the seams open flat.

At this point I took the front over layer pieces of the bracers and painted on my scale pattern. I lightly drew this out in pencil and then traced over my lines with navy blue fabric paint. It sounds simple, but it took a really long time. I ironed them to set the paint before moving on.

Next I pinned each piece to its backing right sides together. I sewed them together along the top and bottom edges, leaving both sides open to turn them right way out. Before turning them out, I trimmed the excess seam allowance on the inside. I top stitched along the edges to neatly finish them.

I also added in my top stitching detail on the tops of the under layer at this time.

I aligned my side edges, zig zagged stitched over the raw edge of the fabric and then turned that to the inside and top stitched it down.

Then I used a punch to punch out the holes to put the grommets in for the laces. At this point I still had access to the grommet press at school, which I made good use of.

This was the point where I laid the project to rest for a year, because one of the main hurdles was the leg wraps, which I was positively stumped on. I didn't know how to rig them, I didn't know how to do the detailing and I didn't want to rush them and do a crappy job of it.

When I returned to the project, along with replacing the wig to fix the colour matching issue I also found another thing that was bothering me. The bracers were too teal for the rest of the costume, especially now that I had replaced the wig.

After re-evaluating, I decided to upgrade the paint job on the bracers, and in the process change the colour of them to be bluer. I added in depth to the scales, but also dry brushed over the whole thing to tint it. You can really see the difference it made in this progress shot.

The gloves I bought in Kensington market. I made gloves for an earlier project and decided it was by far the most horribly tedious thing to do ever. So I decided to buy and alter a pair. I cut out the hole that encompassed the index and middle finger on each glove, then zig zagged stitched the edges to finish them so they wouldn't fray all over the place.

The gloves were painted in the same style, except instead of laying them flat, I had to wear them each on my left hand in turn to paint them.

By doing the scale pattern and adding the depth to both the gloves and bracers it helped to meld them together visually and also give the false impression that they are even remotely the same shade of blue. Because they really weren't.

Now let's travel back to the beginning of the project when I traced my leg and started patterning. For the wraps I was venturing into an area I didn't have much experience with at the time--stretch fabric. In this project I can freely admit that I had no idea what I was doing and problems I encountered in the construction of these wraps are one of the main reasons I stopped working on the project for a while.

I will start with my first mistake: I bought fabric that was one-way stretch. Somehow it was more unpredictable than stretch fabric. I don't know, I just didn't like working with it.

I patterned out my pieces, figuring out the overlap at the top. In this picture you can see the two pieces for a leg wrap on the left and the two pieces for an arm wrap on the right.

I took them to school to assemble them with the serger, because this fabric frayed like crazy. I ended up making them slightly uncomfortably snug, but since I had serged off the seam allowance I couldn't let them out, and I used up all my fabric so I couldn't remake them.

I used the silver silk bias tape I had made for the bolero to finish the top edges.

At this point, I had no idea how to rig them. They were super snug, but not enough to stay up without slipping. This is when I threw in the towel on the project.

Zoom forward to one year. I am one year wiser. And I have ideas about how to finish this project.

First I decided to actually add the floral pattern to the fabric, which I had originally decided to not bother with (because of time constraints).

I decided to make stamps to create my design, rather than hand painting on the floral design. This is much quicker and easier if you are making repeating patterns/patterns with repeating elements. Based on the barely visible details in the reference image I sketched out some suitable flower and leaf designs, then traced those onto craft foam and cut them out. I glued the pieces onto a foam backing creating my stamps.

I laid out my wraps and began stamping. Using a blue fabric paint, I used a brush to apply the paint to the stamps and then pressed the stamp into a spot of my choosing on the wraps. I made the paint application purposely patchy. I didn't want the flowers to be solid. 

I wanted the flowers to be random and sporadic. There is no science to the design. I just made sure not to have too many of the same stamp to close to each other. 

I had to wait for them to dry before flipping them over and doing the sides and back. When everything was painted and dry I heat set the paint with an iron.

Next I decided to finish the overlaps differently. My original plan was to make the overlaps a functional closure. But it wasn't working--it pulled the fabric on a weird diagonal, and looked super bad. So I decided to sew it shut and just fake it. I sewed the frogs on top as decoration.

Next I used bias tape and hand stitched on all the fancy loops and detailing on each of the wraps. This took forever.

Lastly I had to rig them so they would stay up. As I mentioned in my wrap skirt section, the rigging for the wraps was attached to the inside of the skirt's waistband. At the back there is an elastic strap that attaches to each wrap using garter hooks. They are stretched to be pretty tight, but not so much that I can't bend or sit. Then I have a second backup strap made of webbing that doesn't put as much tension on it. This is for the sake of redundancy--if the first strap fails, the second will keep it up. You can see a bit of the rigging system in the picture below. I tried to keep it as invisible as possible.

The arm wraps are attached to the bolero with simple buttons and loops. Unfortunately they tend to pull the bolero sleeves down oddly. I plan to remedy this in the near future by stuffing the bolero sleeves.

Inkling - Tentacle Hats & Wigs - Splatoon

Part 2 of the Squids or Kids series! If you are interested in seeing how we put together the outfits and accessories, go here! Once again credit to Elemental for her fabulous job doing the group photoshoot! So many really great shots!

Let get down to business; time to talk about those crazy squid hats! Patterning and painting the tentacle hats was my big group contribution. It was a bit of a challenge for me, as I have very minimal experience working with spandex/stretch materials.

We did some google image research to see what other cosplayers had come up with. We saw quite a few who had made theirs out of fleece. We decided not to use fleece because we wanted to a) be shiny and b) be paintable for the gradient. We also saw ones who had made the tentacles and covered them in wig fibers. We all decided that was more effort than we were willing to put in. I decided to go with a hat, while the other girls were more partial to the "tentacles sticking out of the wig" idea. So for them we used the same tentacle pattern, but instead of sewing it into the hat, they stitched/pinned theirs directly to their wigs. I may go back and change mine to match the rest... I'm still on the fence about that.

For the girl hat I started with drafting a basic pattern. The patterning process was very loosely based on how I patterned the Newboy Cap a few months ago. It consists of 5 tapered panels of various sizes that meet at the top. 1 front panel, 2 back panels, and 2 side panels that were the fronts of the tentacles.

It is important to note that since these hats were being worn over wigs, all of the measurements were taken while wearing a wig and all mockups were tested over a wig for a more accurate fit.

The one difference between the mockup and the final hat is that after doing the mockup I realized that creating "bangs" with the front flap was going to be too challenging in spandex. So I opted to instead make the bangs of the wig stick out from underneath.

For the boy hats, I knew there needed to be a seam near the top that the tentacles could be attached from. The boy hat pattern ended up looking very different than that of the girl hat. It consists of two "semi circles" as the sides, and then a rectangular shape tapered near the top seam for the center front and back. After I put together a mock up that looked alright on me, I then had to create a second mockup in a larger size that looked alright on Andy. Because my head is really small.

After creating a mockup that I was satisfied with, I went fabric shopping. Affordable Textiles on Queen St. had a good colour selection of spandex for a decent price. When you are doing a group this large, it is more affordable to share materials--in my case the 1yd of white spandex I bought was enough for 3 pairs of girl tentacles with a bit of leftover. But the 1 yd length was necessary anyway because the tentacle pieces are so long.

After cutting the pieces out I realized that if I wanted to paint on a gradient on the green side and add a sucker to the white side I would have to do it before I sewed the two halves together. In both cases I wanted to work on a flat surface.

For the paint job I originally was only in charge of doing my own and Brian's (as payment for making my tank). But since I was the only real painter of the group, I was soon asked to do the full set so they would all match.

The gradient had a different tint to it in every reference photo. In gameplay most took on an almost purple-y hue at the tip, but in still photos it was a darker shade of the team colour. I decided to go with a darker shade of the team colour so it wouldn't look weird.

I was going for a watercolour & paint splatter look. I used round brushes and fabric paint. I did all the ones that had to be painted the same colour back to back so I could be consistent in my colour mixing. I started with the greens, then orange, then turquoise and lastly purple. I typically worked with a pair at a time.

I started by mixing my darkest colour. This would be the only colour I mixed for each. All of the hues in between were created by watering down my brush before painting. Sometimes I would only paint with water, to help blend the colours. At the very tips I used almost purely fabric paint. I would make darker spots here and there. Lastly I loaded up my paintbrush with paint and ran my thumb through the bristles to flick small spatters of paint onto the fabric. This left the dark little speckles. There was no real science to this process.

Above are the original 7 I painted, labelled as to who they belonged to. Louise and Patrick will be joining us for Squids 2.0.

The process for the suckers was relatively simple. First I cut out a 'donut' shape in white spandex. Pinning it in place, I then used a zig-zag stitch to appliqué it to the tentacle around the outer edge. Then it would get stuffed from the center. Then the center edge was pinned down. Lastly the center hole edge would get carefully zig-zagged closed. The picture on the left shows each step of the process.

Many thanks to Michelle and Andy for coming over and assembly-lining the cutting, pinning and tentacle sewing process while I painted. They did a great job!

The next step was to sew the tentacles together. They were pinned right sides together and then sewed with a slight zig-zag stitch. We left a hole at the base so we could carefully flip them right way out and stuff them.  This many tentacles required a surprisingly large amount of stuffing!

For the girls who didn't want hats the tentacles were at this point handed off to them to attach to their wigs. For myself and the guys, the next step was putting together the hats.

For the guy hat the tentacles were first sewn into the top seam. Then the two semi circle side pieces were sewn on. Lastly it was hemmed.

For the girl hat I sewed the two back panels together first along the center back seam. Then I sewed the two side (tentacles) to the center front piece. Then I sewed the sides to the back panels and trimmed the excess seam allowance from inside the hat. Then I hemmed the hat, tacking down the white fabric on the inside in the same stitch. 

I picked up this green wig from EpicCosplay. The colour match is pretty darn good, especially since there are so few colours of green to choose from when it comes to buying wigs.

Excluding my wig--which I cut myself--the rest of the group's wigs were cut and styled by the ever lovely Louise, who will be joining us for Squids 2.0! For the girls we cut blunt bangs straight across the front and trimmed the backs a bit. I wanted the back of mine to be more flippy, so I pinned it up in sections, lightly sprayed it with hairspray and then used a warm hairdryer to set the curls. Then I combed them out. They were a bit too curly, so I used a warm hairdryer again to get them to relax a bit.

For the guys Andy and Brian went with two different styles. For Andy's wig, Louise took the bangs and pulled them completely back and pinned them out of the way, under the wig. She left the sideburns, which she trimmed a bit, and then trimmed the back as well.  For Brian, he wanted to keep the bangs, so she just trimmed them to be shorter and out of the eyes. The sideburns were done similarly to Andy's wig.

For both of theirs, because the weight of the tentacles made the hat back heavy and the spandex was super slippery, they had to have the hats hand stitched to the wigs. For a finishing touch they added their own hair accessories to the tentacle "topknot" hat. As far as I remember Andy used some bright coloured hair elastics. Brian added the white headband and a dollarstore bracelet as a hair tie.

Inkling - Outfit & Accessories - Splatoon

This is the first post on our Splatoon Squad--affectionately referred to by the group as "Squids or Kids?". What was supposed to be a group of easy casual cosplays quickly snowballed into a crazy colossal effort to make the most awesome Inkling costumes possible. Special thanks (and photo credit) to Elemental for doing the group photoshoot! All of the pics from the shoot were wonderful!

The current group from the photoshoot consisted of: Brian (Ragz Cosplay) --the brains of the operation; Andy (Yavarice) --our task manager; Michelle (Mage Cosplay) --a heat n' bond wizard; Kim --the only one who can actually has the power to create vector files; and myself--the squid hat pioneer. Special thanks also to our fellow squids--the wig expert Louise and magical wizard Adrien--for all their hard work as well! We look forward to them joining us for Squids 2.0. :) There will most likely be a second shoot at some point in the future, with even more Kids. Or Squids?

Obviously since this is a large group cosplay there is a certain amount of tasks that were shared or delegated so that everyone's costume would match! I will do my best to generally explain how things came together, but obviously credit goes to the individuals who made each specific thing!

For the clothes we all set about creating our own outfits. I tried to keep the base items I bought on the cheap side.

Since the Inklings all wear a standard pair of black biking shorts with a stripe their team colour down the side, we all found black leggings/bike shorts to modify.

For my shorts, I bought a pair of black leggings at Ardenes for about $10. I marked how short I wanted them, then cut off the excess. I topstitched a stripe of green spandex down the side of each leg using a zig-zag stitch--so it would allow the fabric to stretch. Then I hemmed the pants.

We all opted for t-shirts in varying colours with one of the various logos from the game on them. In the game the clothes you can buy have different brands to choose from, and each brand has a unique logo. For those of us who decided to create our logos with heat transfer paper, Kim vectored and resized the designs. Those of us with inkjet printers printed the logos onto heat transfer paper. (Which I believe was purchased at Michael's?) Those were then applied to the shirts using an iron.

I bought my t-shirt in chinatown for $2. I think other people bought theirs at Walmart. I also got a green hoodie at H&M to match my costume--in case it was cold. Brian layered his shirt over a long sleeved shirt.

For the coloured tags on the shirt we each used a rectangle of our own team colour fabric and used a small version of our logo applied with heat transfer paper. Then we used heat n bond to attach the tags to our shirts.

Mage actually created her adorable squid shirt logo entirely with heat n bond to appliqué the design on in the different coloured fabrics pieces. I think it turned out really awesome! She also made several of the simpler tags (like the one on my hoodie) in this method. She is a heat n' bond wizard.

Accessories allowed us to personalize the costumes a bit more. We looked like a cohesive group, but the accessories gave our characters personality. For example: Andy wore goggles, Kim had headphones, Michelle had hair clips, and Brian wore glasses and a headband. In a lot of cases, we would find a colourful item for cheap and then slap a logo on it. Hahaha

For shoes, I got a pair of $14 high tops at Ardenes that I stenciled a logo on using fabric paint. I tried to make my accessories have a colour theme--which was pink. We had a group field trip to Walmart one night to pick up some accessories. We got some packs of brightly coloured shoe laces there, so I was able to swap out the boring white ones that came with my shoes for a pair of neon pink ones! Other members of the group picked up their brightly coloured running shoes at Walmart. I don't think anyone spent more than $30 on shoes.

I picked up a pair of bright pink headphones in chinatown for about $20. So I wouldn't have to worry about making any pointed ears for the costume, which we made a group decision later to forgo anyway. I wish the headphones I bought were a little bigger, but I wasn't willing to spend any more on them. I may mod them at some point. Perhaps for Squids 2.0?

The masks were our solution to not having to paint large areas of our eyes black. A friend of of the group put together an easy superhero mask tutorial, which you can find here! These masks are lightweight and can be spirit gummed directly to your face, or tied on. Andy made my mask for me, and it looks awesome, but unfortunately the felt backing seems to irritate my eyes a lot. :( I am going to look into alternative materials to make the same thing, because I really liked the look of the costume with the mask. Next time I am definitely going to fill in the area around my eyes with black makeup, though.

Stay tuned for part 2!

Toothless - Kigurumi - How to Train Your Dragon

Jumping up the schedule by popular demand: Toothless! I made this Toothless kigurumi (onesie) to wear to Atomic Lollipop this past July. To be honest, I had been contemplating buying a kigu for the longest time, but I had never seen a design that I really loved. So long story short, I decided to make my own. I picked Toothless because I really love the movie How to Train Your Dragon--Toothless is the most adorable dragon ever. Of all time.

An added bonus here is that because it was summer, all this fleece was on sale! Definitely worth it with the amount I had to buy. My recommendation is to never under any circumstance buy fleece in fall/winter. You will pay 3 times as much as you do in summer. For reference, I bought my fleece at Fabricland in July for 6$/meter, now (September) they are selling the exact same product for 17$/meter. Yikes!

I looked at kigu patterns online, but eventually decided to draft my own from scratch. It took me 2 tries to get the onesie itself looking how I wanted it and 5 tries to get the hood right. Lots and lots of mockups.

Below you can see the onesie version 1 and 2 side by side. The first sleeves totally didn't work, and my hood problems were always that it was too big and floppy.

 After finally getting a pattern I was happy with, I moved on to cutting out all the pieces. Here are the hood pieces complete with fins, below you can see the wings and tail.

I changed my initial design for the sleeve, ending up with a sleeve style similar to my Katamari cousin pattern. It is a mitten sleeve with a slit on the underside of the sleeve to slip the hand covers on and off. This means the sleeve top is made of one piece, and the under sleeve is made of 2 pieces.

The bodysuit is in 2 pieces, with each half (right and left) being cut on the fold along the sides. (Meaning there are no side seams on this garment!)

On each of these I first sewed up the leg and shoulder seams, then I basted the center back-crotch-front seam, stopping where the opening for the buttons would go.

I hemmed the edges of the opening, then the sleeve top and bottom pieces were sewed right sides together then flipped right way out. I made sure the hand cover was on the outside.

 I sewed the wings and tail fins right sides together, then clipped the excess in the corners and flipped them right way out. I top stitched on the details. (Not pictured here is the red fin!)

It took much deliberation, but I decided to line the hood in pink, to look like the inside of Toothless' mouth, as opposed to making it black to match the rest. I sewed the hood lining together; first I stitched the whole front together, then the back, lastly the side seam that divided the two.

I sewed all of the fins right sides together, then clipped and flipped them right way out. I made a whole bunch of triangle shaped ones in varying sizes that would go up the center back seam. 

Carefully spacing the spines, I sewed the 2 tail pieces right sides together, then flipped it right way out. (I had to make sure the spines ended up on the correct side during this process.)

 Next I attached the front pieces of the out hood together. While I was at it, I put two small spines on his forehead in the center seam. While looking at reference images I carefully arranged the fins around his face, pinned them in place then sewed the side seam, completing the outer hood. The reason why the hood is made of 6 pieces is partially because it made the shape better, but also because I needed seams that I could easily attach all the fins/spines into.

Next was detailing. Using leftover green fabric from Isabelle, I cut 2 ovals. Using black fabric paint leftover from Vaporeon I painted on the pupils. I pinned the eyes in place and then zig-zag stitched around the edges. This made the fabric ripple a bit, which I am not so happy about. I also zig-zagged on some nostrils while I was at it.

 Right sides together, I attached the hood lining to the outside along the front edge.

Blarg! What is this monstrosity? Looks like Dr. Finkelstein. D; The hood was not so thrilling at first, it took some cleverly hidden stitching to keep the lining tacked in its proper place, because it wanted to curl outward. Pulling the hood lining back inside the hood so that the outside over-hanged slightly I pinned it in place. Then I stitched the two layers together along the lower edges of the eyes and on the sides of the hood opening. Trust me when I say this helped a lot.

 Next I put cuffs on the pant legs. I also sewed the arms into the armholes at this point.

 With some difficulty I put a rectangle on each side of the opening for the placket.

I painted the viking skull on the red fin with white fabric paint. Way cool! Once this was dry I hand stitched these directly to the tail, which I had stuffed by this point.

Then I marked for the tail placement and spaced the spikes in the back seam according, picking it out to put the spikes in, and then going over the whole thing with a permanent stitch. 

 I measured and attached the wings, which were then tacked up with velcro so that they wouldn't flop down.
I pulled the kigu over an ironing board so that I could pin the tail to the back without accidentally catching the front. Making sure the tail was extra stuffed, I pinned it in place, then stitched around the raw edge with a zig-zag stitch to keep the tail firmly in place.

Lastly I added buttons and button holes to the front!

1 excellent kigu that made everyone at APop jealous. Sorry all! This kigu is one of a kind, but if someone were to commission me, I might consider making a second one. But not right now, because fleece is crazy expensive again!