Masamune coat test + collar

I've been inspired to work on cosplays the last two days so here's finally more Masamune progress. I really need to work more actively on this.. before I know it it's going to be summer and d'oh! xD Must stop procrastinating.. it's the bane of my existence lol.

First up I took the front upper half coat pattern and pinned it together with the back pattern to see if the neck cut matched with the front's shoulders or not. It didn't.

After I cut them to fit

After this quick fix I did a prototype version of the coat's upper half of some scrap fabric we had at home. Nothing special, just cut out the pieces needed.

Because this is just a kind of test, to see how the real thing will fit/look, I didn't bother to zigzag or do anything except sew the shoulder seams and side seams closed with a simple straight stitch. This is just a scrap test anyway, just to see how well my self-made patterns work or not when assembled.
After I had sewn what was neccessary to hold the thing together it looked like this. Not too bad.. if I do say so myself.

Face censor ftw.
The two pins are there as collar markers.

The shoulders will need some hardcore interfacing on the real coat to stay up like on the reference but the form seems to be otherwise quite alright.

Next up was time to figure out the collar. It took some thinking before I felt sure enough to draft a pattern. The pattern looked like this:

But the collar would need to have a strip of extra fabric added to the front, extending towards the coat's opening. Masamune's collar kind of starts already on the coat's V-shaped front and folds a bit out. I don't know how to explain clearly what I mean but on this anime pic it's pretty obvious:

So I went and took the front pattern piece, pinned it along the curve to a small piece of pattern paper and drew out the curve. I put the collar pattern temporary on top for reference and to get the starting point (aka 11 cm from the collar's middle) right.

After that I pinned the collar pattern (it's only half pattern, will be cut at the fabric fold) along with the extension piece to the test coat, to see if it would sit like I had imagined. Of course I pinned the collar's "end" (actually middle point) to the middle back of the coat and then just pinned along the neck curve and when I got to the front I pinned the extension piece along the coat's front curve. It sat really well.. I was surprised haha.

Straight...

.. and slightly folded.

Green lights! Time to cut out a prototype collar for the coat to see if it works as well with fabric..

As you see I just sew the collar on with a straight stitch just like the shoulder and side seams earlier.
No need to do extra work.

It looked something like this when worn after being sewn on:

Not half bad. The collar is a bit too wide but otherwise it seems to work.
Super floppy fabric though, so the real collar will need interfacing too.

 The prototype coat looks like this when on a flat surface:

I took the collar pattern and made it a little bit less wide.. I don't want a huge Dracula collar lol.

Drew a line with a pencil where I will cut

After fixing the size. Put it over the collar for comparison.
(prototype collar has about 1 cm seam allowance though)

That's all progress for today.. ~