Vaporeon Gijinka - Sandals & Accessories - Pokémon

The 6th and final instalment of my Vaporeon building quest: Sandals & Accessories! This costume was all about the details and finishing touches. Beading, painting, trimming, gems, accessories, props--all elements that helped give this costume the extra wow-factor. It's not often I break a costume down into 6 posts, but this one is certainly worthy of that.

Links to Part 1: Bolero, Part 2: Under Layers, Part 3: Wrap Skirt Tail, Part 4: Wig & Hairpieces, and Part 5: Wraps & Bracers!

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

Firstly I would like to thank my friend Harriet for lending me her fan! She does Chinese fan dancing and allowed me to borrow hers for this shoot. Thanks muchly!

For the sandals I started by buying a plain pair of cheapo flip flops from Ardene's. Which is a great place to buy shoes you don't care about.

I patterned my base cover shape out of paper, then cut out my pieces (making sure they were mirror images) in leather. Using acrylic paint, I painted these leather pieces navy blue to match the costume.

These pieces would wrap under the bottom of the shoe, with a single seam in the top. The long tails would be used to make a buckle strap around the back of the heel.

Once I was happy with the fit, I machine stitched that top seam.

Next step was to create ruffle bit. Using leftover navy fabric from the bracers I created the two pieces. Each is made of two layers, sewn right sides together along the outer edge, then flipped inside out and top stitched. 

These were then gathered and stitched onto the top of the leather part of the sandal. I also tacked them down with a hand stitch in a few places on the outer edge, because the fabric was super stiff and didn't want to lie flat. 

Next I sewed a buckle into the back of each and punched holes to finish the closure. 

The last step was to glue the leather piece to the sole of the shoe to keep it in place/stop it from rotating. I used e6000 to glue it and it worked quite well. 

Another step in the detailing process for this costume was creating the gems for the center front and the edge of each bracer. 

I sculpted them using apoxie sculpt and then I painted them using a few different shades of nail polish. I did a splotchy application of my dark blue and light teal. And then went over that with a translucent shimmery blue, before finishing it off with a coat of clear gloss.

I applied the same paint to my toenails later! Details are important!

All of the gems were glued onto the costume with e6000. 

My last accessory was a brooch I created for the front of the costume. It was based on the very faint squiggle in the illustration. I got to interpret it how I wanted and this was the result. (I think I sewed beads to  the center later?)

Overall I am very satisfied with how this project turned out, and look forward to starting my next complicated fancy project.

Once again thanks for all your support! Now that this is done I can move on with my life! Hooray!

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.

Vaporeon Gijinka - Wig & Hairpieces - Pokémon

Part 4 of the Vaporeon saga--Wig and Hairpieces. After my initial rocky start, I quite enjoyed creating the decorations for this wig. Though not the most construction heavy wig (like my Presea or Asuna wigs) it required a lot of labour and styling. This wig presented a new challenge for me: dyeing.

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

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

It's a complaint I have made many times before but I'll say it again: it is really difficult to find a base wig that perfectly matches your character if you need it to be a specific shade of grey, green, blue or purple. And even if you find one that matches you may not be able to find it in the length you need. I had similar problems with finding a wig for Tomoyo and Suppi because they fell into this colour spectrum where there is just not a lot of wig selection.

My problem was that I ordered my wig first, before I went fabric shopping. The wig I picked was a teal wig from Epic Cosplay (though it is really difficult to see here, believe me when I say it is really teal). When I was shopping for fabric I ended up shifting the colour palette to be more blue. When the wig arrived in the mail it really didn't match the costume. Also the wig I picked did not have enough length for the desired style...

(For the record, I don't blame Epic Cosplay for the teal wig, I blame myself for choosing a teal wig and then changing my mind about making the costume blue!)

At the time I was still under the impression that I could meet my original deadline, so I didn't have time to order another a wig--it wouldn't have arrived in time for me to style it.

I went ahead and styled the wig I had, but was super dissatisfied with it. Shown right is the original wig I styled with the original hairpieces I ended up later discarding.

A year later I re-thought my plan for this wig and decided that I really wanted to attempt the slight gradient that is in the original rendering. To do this I needed to order another wig that was longer, and much lighter--so I could dye it to the desired colour.

The second wig I bought was much closer to what I wanted for my base. I ordered a much longer curly wig in "ice blue" from Epic Cosplay.

The first thing I did was trim the bangs to the desired length/style. Then I sectioned off the remaining hair into 4 parts: the two lower pigtails would form the long braids, and the two upper pigtails would form the buns. The lower pigtails I took scissors to and thinned the hair. The bottom needed to be these two wisps rather than the chunky sections you can see in the picture on the left.

I changed the design of the hair a bit, because the upper part was actually supposed to have a lot volume before feeding into the braids, with these spikes of shorter hair sticking out. After the problems I encountered on my first failed styling I decided to add the buns to the top half and use the curls in the wig to create the shorter strands of hair sticking out. This gave me the width/apparent volume without me having to tease it/add it in with hair spray. Suffice to say because the wig was curly I was worried that any attempt to add volume was going to lead to a messy tangled disaster... So the deviation from the actual design was quite intentional.

Looking at some tutorials, I began by creating my dyes. I tested them of the off-cut hair from the bangs until I was satisfied with the colour. The dye was made using 99% alcohol and india ink. I created two bottles of dye--one that was blue and one that was more teal. There was no scientific formula for mixing these, I just added drops of ink until the colour was dark enough. Just write down what you did because if it is a long wig like mine was, you will probably have to make more. Which I did.

The bottles of 99% alcohol I bought already had these hand spray nozzles, but if not I would have bought spray bottles at the dollar store and mixed my dye in there. That makes the application easy.

I did this outside, because I didn't want to end up with blue dye residue everywhere. As it was, my fingers were blue for days after. I covered my stool (which is vintage and actually belongs to my mum) with a heavy duty garbage bag to protect it also.

I started with the bangs. To apply it I simply spritzed it with dye and combed it through. The more saturated you make it, the darker the concentration of colour. In the design, the crown of the head is where the darkest tint is, so I did the bangs first so as to give myself a reference point to compare to for the gradient.

I tied the upper layers out of my way and worked on each bottom pigtail next. I would let down the pigtail and carefully comb out the hair. Since I was trying to preserve the curls and keep the wig from tangling, I dyed each curl individually. Once That section was finished, I would carefully roll up the curl and pin it in position, allowing it to dry. If you leave them hanging wet it can straighten the fibers out a bit, leaving the wig more wavy than curly--which can be a good thing, but not what I was going for. To give it the gradient it had to be most saturated at the base, and I would carefully comb it down to pull the dye down through the hair.

You can see at the back that I parted the hair in a sharp zig-zag so as not to reveal the base of the wefts/netting. This was to save me from having to add in wefts to make a proper part. This works fine for this particular project since the lower half of the hair did not have to pull upwards into the high buns.

Using straight pins and plastic bags, I covered the bottom half of the wig while I worked on the top half.

The top half was done to be much darker than the bottom. I simply made it more saturated with dye. Same with the bottom, I did each curl individually and pinned it up to dry.

The finished dye job, before I brushed out the curls again. You can see the gradient best here. It was meant to be subtle, and mostly to match the wig colour to the costume. I think if I would revisit this wig I would make the crown another shade darker.


This is what it looked like once I brushed it out.

Next I went about styling the sections. I did a quick test style first (pictured left). Many bobby pins were used to create the buns. The lower braids were done in a fishtail braid style. I didn't pull the braiding too tight at the start of the braid, because I wanted it to retain some volume. I sprayed the finished braids and buns with hairspray to keep them looking tidy. I later replaced the black elastics with clear ones.

After doing the back, I moved on to styling the bangs. I used hairspray and a hair dryer to create the big curl and the large section that crossed over.

I decided to take my scissors and thin the ends of the hair even more. Reducing volume, but not length.

I made the silk flowers for the hair in a kanzashi style, like I did with my Cloche Hat last year. A good tutorial for how to make them can be found here! I sewed an assortment of beads into the center of each. The beads on this costume are a range of colours: navy, medium blue, pearly blue and teal. Each flower was hot glued onto a hairclip base. The barrettes I used had a little hole in each end, this came in hand later for attaching the bead strings.

I strung the beads on tiger tail and used claw hooks to attached the ends to my barrettes. This means they are removable.

Overall this wig was super fun to make and looked great. As much as it hurt my pride to do so, I am glad I scrapped the first wig and started again fresh.

Vaporeon Gijinka - Wrap Skirt "Tail" - Pokémon

This is the third part of my Vaporeon Gijinka costume. If you want to see how I made the Bolero, go here! If you want to see how I made the under layers, go here!

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

One thing I loved about this design was the way that the tail was incorporated into this wrap skirt.

The "tail" was made from the same blue silk as the bolero jacket. It has a really nice shine to it--without being overly shiny. The fabric itself actually has a salmon-y pinkish colour woven in, which you can see in the shine. It helps to break up a bit of the blue overload.

This piece took a bit of adjustment before I was satisfied. It was first draped and pinned in muslin to create the pattern--a much less scientific method than I am used to.

The tail itself ended up being over 5ft long. It was a bit cumbersome, so I pinned it up to walk about the con.

You can see how it tapers from the waistband down.

The next step was to finish off the edges. I neatly rolled them over and top stitched it. I wanted to make sure it looked neat from both sides, as the inside would be quite visible. Also, this fabric frayed like nobody's business. I wanted to make sure the edges wouldn't get destroyed.

I gathered it to the desired size and attached it to the waistband. The waistband was a simple rectangle of beige cotton that had a hook and eye closure. I would later reinforce the waistband with nylon webbing I had leftover from my Splatoon Inkling harness rig. This reinforcement was necessary, as later the leg wrapping rigging would be sewn into the waistband.

The tail fin pieces and decorative waistband ruffle were sewn right sides together, clipped, turned right way out and then top stitched to finished them off.

I used 4 long pieces of navy cording as my detailing on the train. I hand stitched them on at the top and tacked them at various points as they wrapped around the tail. There is easily over 12 yds of cording on this costume (including all the lacing on the bracers).

I pinned the tail fin to the end of the tail, arranging the ruffled look how I wanted it and then tacked it on with my most invisible hand-stitching. It's basically like a giant bow.

It was around this point that I realized I would not be meeting my original deadline (AN 2014) and gracefully admitted defeat. I took a year-long break from this costume.

The next step was to attach the decorative waistband ruffle. I arranged it and pinned it in place until I was satisfied with the look then tacked it on with hand stitching.

Then I went about creating the brooch that attaches to the waistband, covering the clasp. It was all made of scrap materials--leftover cording, fabric, beads, etc. I used some of the yellow silk from the hairpiece flowers to create a matching kanzashi style detail for the petals (I will go into more detail on my wig and hairpiece post for this costume.). The entire thing was sewn to a felt backing that was glued to a brooch pin.

Extra cording was used to decorate the waistband and create more dangling bits near the opening at the front.

Then I had my friend Harriet (the official Bead-Dazzler) sew on tons of beads. Props to her for her hours of hard work (in exchange for food)--I certainly have the skills to sew beads myself, but I definitely lacked the time.

The detailing is what really makes the design. There is such richness and embellishments, and I had a lot of fun realizing those little details.

Next I had to create the leaf detail that sticks up from the waistband of the skirt. The problem was, it need to be rigid, but also sheer. The fabric I had was nice and sheer, but super flimsy. 

On the Splatoon project I was introduced to this magical stuff called "heat n bond".  I essentially used it to fuse my fabrics together around a central support structure made of leftover corset bones. I have to say--I had no idea if my crazy idea would work, but it did, so YAY! 

First I traced out the shape I wanted on the paper side of the heat n bond. I cut this out and then ironed it to my first layer of silk. Then I used fray check and applied it all around the outline of the leaf shape and let it dry before cutting it out--this way, when I cut it out it would not fray. 

Then I laid the leaf shape heat n bond side down on the second layer of silk. I carefully lined up my corset bones where I wanted them and pinned them in place. I carefully sewed around them using the machine's zipper foot. The bones were now sandwiched between the two layers of silk. 

Then I ironed the whole thing, fusing my layers together.  

The next step was to apply more fray check, around the edge of layer two, allow that to dry and then cut it out.

The finished leaf feels completely different than the fabric I started with.

To create the veins on the leaf I used a similar process. 

First I traced out the desired shape in heat n bond. I then cut that out and used an iron to apply it to the first layer.

Then I fused it to the second side. I fray checked the outline, allowed it to dry and then cut it out.

This was then tacked on the leaf by hand in a few key spots.

The leaf was simply tucked into the waistband when I wore the costume.