Gaogamon furry accessories in a rush!

Woof and hello~

For Nekocon earlier this year I made a new cosplay, my first Digimon gijinka Gaogamon. I didn't have time to do a WIP post before leaving home so I figured I'll just post it now that the summer con schedule is over!

So, uhh, this is a cosplay that I will improve later on and what I wore at Nekocon is basically the beta version lol. I was short on time when I made all the furry parts (as always :D) and a lot of the clothes are reused from my other cosplays and stuff I already have at home. The new parts are the "furry ones" that help with recognition – the ears, tail and mane.

I started with checking the local fabric store for light blue faux fur but of course there wasn't any available. Or well, there was one with an okay color but it had completely wrong type of pile! It sucks so much that there used to be an Eurokangas in Tornio and Kemi used to have, I think, two different fabric stores but they're all gone now and the only store left is Kangaskukkula in Tornio (and Kangastalo, but that's like almost entirely upholstery and home decor fabrics so it's not so good for sewing clothes). So yeah, finding the right fabrics for cosplay is extremely hard up here unless you're willing to mess around with ordering online or trying your luck at thrifting... or taking the train to Oulu for the nearest Eurokangas. And still I'd consider myself very lucky because mom has tons of fabrics in the attic from back when she had her own fabric store, but even with the "fabric store at home" option I still quite often have to go elsewhere to buy what I need.
So yeah, Kangaskukkula didn't have what I needed for the mane and so I decided to check out Kangastalo just to turn every stone around. They had a few faux furs, surprisingly enough, but mainly black and dark colors. I was feeling increasingly desperate and even considered buying some fluffy pillow covers from there to cut apart, color and piece together but I realized it would become quite expensive because one cover was like 16€ or something and it wasn't very big so I would have to buy multiple. With all fabric store options exhausted I suddenly had an eureka moment – why don't I just buy a sheepskin from Ikea and dye it? It's natural wool and thus, technically, any common fabric dyes I can find should work on it – and it would be cheaper than destroying tons of fluffy fancy decor pillows!
I felt lowkey crazy for even cooking up this idea but it was quite literally the best option I had and so I went over to the local Ikea and walked out with an ULLERSLEV sheepskin (which costs 349 SEK). I tried to pick one that was as uniform and light in color as possible and also with longer pile length and density; there's always some variation in each individual pelt and so I took my time picking a good one for my project.

Once I got home I took an old brush and started combing the fur to mark where I'd cut. You can part the wool anywhere and so it's actually very convenient to work with. I was also surprised how easy it was to cut through the leather on the underside! I made sure not to pull or tug the wool and brushed it out gently to get it to lay in the direction I wanted. One of the reasons why I parted it was to make it easier to visualize where to cut (pins get hidden in the fluff lol) and, of course, to preserve as many individual hairs as possible.

Parted and sectioned out the fur where I'd cut it.

I cut out one larger part for the front and one smaller for the back. I utilized the natural shape of the leather to minimize waste. My front and back pieces are not identical in shape, nor are they symmetrical anyway. I don't mind that and it's honestly not really that noticeable because of the floofiness.

With my pieces cut out (and over half of the sheepskin left for future projects – money worth indeed) I had to dye them. Fun fact: I've never dyed anything before. Needless to say I was extremely anxious about completely fucking up this part! I've kinda avoided having to dye something because I've been so scared of failure lol. I had bought some Nitor allfärg/yleisväri (number 16 for those wondering) in Tokmanni earlier. 

There's no turning back now. #ihavenoideawhatimdoing

I did read the instructions but I figured I couldn't exactly go throw in my dyes into the shared washroom's machine and then some unfortunate neighbor's clothes turn blue lmao. The other option seemed hella inconvenient too because I'd have to boil water and stir it while warming it up and it's not like I own a big enough skillet to dunk my furs in (and the instructions said it needs to be at least 7 liters lol) and just ugh, it seemed way too complicated and made my neurospicy brain spin. So what do I do? I disregard all the instructions and yolo it, of course! xD

Omg it's actually taking on the color!

So I went to my bathroom and covered the shower area with newspapers and threw my two fur pieces into the largest bucket I had. I filled it with hot water from the shower, put in a bit of dyeing powder and held my breath. I had no idea how much dye I was supposed to use because it was a marine blue and I wanted a very light blue shade! I was really worried of it turning too dark (both blue shades available were really dark) and so I was super careful with the dye lol, especially because I didn't have any test pieces.

The leather took on the dye so well, the heck?? xD

I don't remember how long I kept the pieces submerged but it was a pretty long time, at least 30 minutes? Probably closer to one hour. I kept adding hot water in the beginning and stirring it to make sure it stayed warm and then I slowly let the water cool down. I of course threw in some white vinegar into the mix as well. I kept checking the coloration every now and then and, honestly, I'm quite relieved that the dye worked because I wasn't sure if the natural lanolin the wool is coated in would somehow affect the absorption or not. But yeah, considering how I just winged this while ignoring the instructions I'm actually surprised it worked as well as it did! I ended up getting almost exactly the shade I wanted! Vaihteeksi ei ollut vituiksmän menossa mukana.

I also find it quite interesting how well the leather dyed, especially because the packaging doesn't mention leather at all, just natural fibers like cotton, silk etc. I mean yeah it says "and other materials from the animal and plant kingdom" but I've always had the impression that to dye leather you need specific products meant for just leather. :'D Well, I don't complain, this was a cool learning experiment!

Dyed pieces laid out to dry on my shower curtain rack.

It took quite long to dry (a hairdryer would have been nice..) but while they dried I had time to work on the other parts so it's not like I sat and rolled my thumbs or grew roots next to the Playstation with time running low. 

Once the pieces finally were thoroughly dry I took out the comb again and combed them out. With natural wool you can alter the texture of the wool by combing it! This is actually pretty neat because you can so easily change the look and touch of it to fit your needs and if you want to revert it you can just get the wool wet and it will go back to the original texture. I tested this because I had actually combed the pieces smooth before I dyed them. :)

Natural wool texture to the left, combed to the right.

Gaogamon has these two tufts or tassels or whatever hanging from its mane in the front and I had to come up with how to make them with supplies I already had at home. My last minute solution was to try to dye some white synthetic wefts with markers. I've had some wefts lying around for like, uhh, 15 years? xD
I realized that I have a ridiculously pathetic collection of markers for being an artist – I quite literally only have two blue markers. Heresy! And the other one is way too dark for this project. So yeah, I only had one option and it better work.

White ancient wefts and my one and only light blue marker lmao.

I went through the fibers with the marker and colored them in. It feels cheap but it works! Synthetic wig fibers absorb the ink from markers and the dye "stains them"... or something like that. Whatever the technicalities are behind the process it works. I didn't use any rubbing alcohol or anything else than just the marker, I don't know if there's different needs for different brands or methods or whatnot but I did a water test to check for color bleeding and it didn't bleed at all! I put the dyed fibers under running tap water and rubbed it against some paper and nope, perfect results. Maybe it depends on the wig fiber quality too but I literally used some Tradera (Swedish equivalent of eBay) random hair fashion shop wefts from a decade ago that are of unknown quality and it worked lol.

No color bleed whatsoever. Yes, I was surprised.

In case anyone's curious what marker brand I used it's Letraset's promarkers of the comic art set so yeah, basically markers for doing manga and comics. 

While I like the shade of blue I ended up with by itself I don't like how it's clearly a different shade from the wool, but it had to do for now. Ideally I would have wanted the same shade and I did try to look for light blue yarn before I settled on using the weft but yeah, I couldn't find the right light blue yarn. I also considered needle felting the tufts from the same wool but I didn't have enough loose wool nor the tools to do it. The last time I did felting was like 20 years ago too. :'D

Oh well, back to the weft I had to roll with for now – it was too long and I needed to split it into two pieces. I cut it in half and then cut the length in half too. This was such a messy ordeal and hell to work on. I needed to make wefts out of the loose fibers and I used some kind of universal glue for this (didn't have UHU glue available) and it dried way too slowly! It felt like it took forever to dry, despite claiming to be quick-drying, and a lot of fibers came loose and went everywhere and then I had to discard them, which was really stressful because the weft was rather sparse to begin with and I had no Plan B. Without exaggerating I probably lost half of the total fibers due to the glue being crap and the fibers getting stuck on my sweaty-ass hands when I just tried to manage them. I lowkey suspect I might have palmar hyperhidrosis because my hands have always sweated like crazy whenever I'm nervous, tense, stressed or from temperature shifts, emotions etc... it's a pain in the ass to deal with.

This was supposed to be easy but it was hell.

I eventually managed to add the glued self-made wefts onto the original weft rows to get double thickness. Gaogamon has these gold-colored bead thingies hanging from the tufts but at this point I had no time to check stores for suitable beads and so I did a temporary easy-peasy solution and used some golden steel wire that I just wrapped around the wefts until it was snug and stayed in place. I handsewed the wefts to the wool piece – the wool is actually so dense that I didn't even have to sew through the leather to get them secured in place lol!

To make the mane wool piece wearable I made it an over-the-shoulder thing so there's a strap on each shoulder running front to back. It's very simple the design is very human. This meant I needed leather because it would be easy to work with (no need to think of fraying edges) and fits the Digimon aesthetics. My original plan was to repurpose an old worn belt from my late grandpa but my mom wanted it for herself when she saw it (it was still functional, just worn) and instead of the belt she handed me grandma's old handbag and told me to slaughter the carrying straps. Okay mom, if you insist. xD

Handsewed the leather straps onto the wool piece. The thimble was goated.

With the mane accessory done for now I only needed to do the ears and the tail. I originally wanted to use a fluffy fabric for these but of course the fabric store didn't have the right colors and I don't own an airbrush or anything fancy like that so yeah, I resorted to using what I already had at home – which meant a leftover piece of dark blue fleece fabric. I had bought a cheap fleece blanket from a second-hand store earlier that I used for the white parts.

The ears were straight-forward to make, I just measured and cut out triangles of the fleece fabric and then the inner ear parts of white fleece and sewed them together, after painting on the details. 
The tail came with a headache because the more I thought about it the more I realized I had no idea how to make a curled dog tail – I mean, I don't really have any fursuit experience and the previous tails I've done have been much simpler than this (basically more or less tapering tubes lol). Not to mention that this was like the day before the day I had to depart for the con or something like that so yeah, the con crunch was too real. xD I realized I didn't really have time to start drafting impromptu patterns that might not even work and so I scoured the internet in my desperation for any kind of advice. Somehow all the stars aligned and I came across the perfect salvation for my urgency, namely a free pattern online that I could just print out in its actual size. Hallelujah!

Tail pattern by Pseudocanid. You can find it here.

This pattern was such a blessing, it was very simple to make and easy to follow. Of course it would have been even cooler with a tighter curl but I really couldn't afford to be nitpicky at this point and I'm so relieved I managed to make a tail in time, lol.

Tail and ear parts cut out.

Gaogamon's ears have these light blue/white tips that are inconsistent on references and I decided to just paint them on. I had no idea how well fleece fabric takes on fabric paint and so I did a test run first. Turns out you have to be very careful with how much paint you apply because it easily becomes spongy and it also takes forever to dry! I had to apply the fabric paint in a rather thin layer and, just to be safe, I set it with the iron later. I accidentally burned a tiny bit of the fleece when setting the paint so it took on this slight sheen, luckily it's hardly noticeable because it's so small.

Fabric paint testing on fleece.

While doing the painting test I did originally mix in some blue acrylic paint to see how it would behave but I felt like there was hardly any color difference, for some reason, and so I ended up just using white alone because it didn't dry opaque anyway. If anything I'm a bit surprised that the fabric paint didn't dry and leave a crusty surface that would crack and/or flake. Or well, maybe it would crack if I start bending it and had a thicker layer on but yeah, with ears I don't really have to worry about any stress points on the fabric.

Sewing the tail pieces together.

The tail I assembled with the sewing machine. Thankfully the patterns lined up just right despite my worries that something would go wrong. I filled the tail with cotton batting and soft fabric scraps, just like I did with the ears as well.

Tail and ears stuffed.

I was a bit unsure about how to do the base of the tail, aka the part that is against your back. The instructions didn't mention this part and all my previous tails haven't had a rounded base like this. I ended up using the same off-white fleece fabric to make the "lid" and I handsewed a couple elastic loops on it to thread a belt or such through. I couldn't have known at this time but in hindsight I probably should have used something rigid (foam maybe? idk) instead. I didn't catch the issue that this created in time to fix it because I couldn't test wear the tail while at mom's because the rest of the costume was in my own apartment lol. So there were two issues and issue one was that I had made the loops way too big, which made the tail hang and not rest against my back at all. This I tried to fix by making the loops tighter while sitting in the car. Unfortunately this didn't really fix the main problem, just make it a bit less unsightly. The tail was still rather low-hanging and unstable and I think that's because the fleece of the base is too soft and yeah, it gives in too much when the tail is worn aka hanging (aka something pulling on the base fabric, making it stretch), making the tail droop because of a lack of support. I will have to come up with some solution for the next time I wear this costume but it was at least wearable at Nekocon. Twisted around a few times and needed extra safety pins for stabilization but hey, I had a tail at least. :')

Oh, the ears are directly sewn into the wig with a few stitches by hand but my first attempt had me positioning them in a way that seemed okay when not worn but, when worn, it looked so bad I legit cringed when I looked in the mirror. xD It looked like some poorly drawn Sonic OC with horizontal flag pole ears lmao. Needless to say I removed the ears and reattached them on a different spot on the wig. I had to do an "anchor stitch" to lift the ears up (basically a single stitch on the backside of each ear towards the crown of the wig) to get them to look more action-y instead of sad, I mean Gaogamon has attitude and is supposed to look like a fighter, not like the Sorry-oo dog from Moomin!

I have like two photos of this costume and the tail isn't visible on any of them but at least you can see how the mane and ears ended up. 

Gaogamon gijinka v1.0. (photo: Firith)

As I mentioned in the beginning I consider this an early version of this particular costume, meaning I will definitely improve it later; I already know what I'd like to fix and add before the next outing. :D
This was a pretty fun costume to wear although there's a lot of moving pieces and so I had to constantly readjust something lol. I'm sufficiently happy with it for now but yeah, looking forward to fine-tuning Gaogamon over the years because I do have a vision for it!

Thanks for reading!
Shiro Samurai out.

Repairing Ukitake's captain coat a decade later

 Hello everyone!

 

I already promised on my last post that the next one I'd write would be some yapping about the captain's haori, aka coat, repairs. :'D So for those who don't know Ukitake is my fourth cosplay (fifth in order if we count the first version of my OC Yuuto, which was a closet cosplay back then) and I originally made this costume way back in 2011. I wore Ukitake extensively to most cons I attended during my early congoing days in 2011-2012 so yeah, this costume has seen its fair share of life lol. But of course with so many outings also came accidents – the most notable of which happened during Finncon-Animecon 2011, which was my second time wearing Ukitake out after his debut at Uppcon in 2011.

I remember it so well – I had put on the full costume at the hotel on the morning and was walking towards the con area, it was a rainy day and I had with me an umbrella and didn't think much more of it at the time. I used the umbrella of course to shield myself from the rain but what I failed to consider was that it had rained so much so that the rain and dirt water was pooling up on the streets... and well, walking around with zori-style sandals made me unknowingly fling up all that shitty water into the back of my costume with each and every step I took. I remember when I finally arrived at the con area and people were looking at me and my awful condition (yes, it was very anxiety-inducing); I was aware of the disaster and extent of damage my cosplay had taken and while my memories are kinda blurry of what happened after I do clearly remember a Rukia cosplayer appearing out of nowhere and patiently helping me get off the worst of the dirt by blotting wet paper towels etc while I was quite literally having a meltdown crying. I was so shaken and upset with myself and I felt massive guilt over ruining my nicest costume. Some of the stains were so bad they were impossible to get off and I just had to wear it as-is for the rest of the convention day. To this day I still don't understand how I managed to keep myself together as well as I did and how I managed to even have fun despite how visible the damage was. Knowing myself I just know that had something similar happened in this day and age I would have immediately gone back to the hotel to change out of cosplay and my day would have definitely been 100% ruined lol – back then the hype and excitement to cosplay beat anything life threw at you. I kinda miss that resilience and drive, those starting years were different.

When I got back home from Finncon-Animecon I threw the coat into the washing machine. Should maybe mention here that I never prewash fabrics because most costumes feel too detailed and intricate to wash safely after completed so you just air them out. And I couldn't be arsed anyway because I just wanted to get to sewing lol.
Well, except this was the one time I maybe should have prewashed. You see, what happened was that the outer fabric, aka the white bridal fabric, shrunk a lot while the inner red satin lining didn't. This screwed up how the coat looked because the red lining was now constantly showing up on the sleeve edges, looking "rolled over" and the hem was raised with the red lining peeking out when worn too. It really didn't look good but yet I wore Ukitake out a few times more even after that in my defense I didn't have many other costumes back then.
I stopped wearing Ukitake after one last outing at a tiny anime event in 2013. I had grown too unhappy and self-aware of how the coat looked and it felt like an impossibly daunting task to even try to fix at the time. And I guess I had some kind of mental barrier blocking me from even trying because I was blaming and tormenting myself so much for not preventing it by taking a taxi to the destination or changing into cosplay once at the con etc. Hindsight is a curse and although I know I had valid reasons for not doing said prevention measures (I couldn't afford a taxi and my anxiety ruled out using changing rooms) it was hard to get the self-blame to dissipate. I had ruined my proudest creation and that was an insurmountable obstacle to sit with.

Time flew by. I cosplayed other characters, got into other fandoms and so on. Yet over the last few years I've felt this increasing urge of wanting to revisit and rewear my older costumes for many different reasons. And then one day it hit me that I actually missed cosplaying Ukitake, said costume used to be so defining and important to me. I remembered exactly why I hadn't worn it but time had dulled my memory of how bad the damage actually was and so I pulled it out of my ancient cosplay box in the storage room to take a closer look. The lining shrinkage issue was just as bad as I remembered but there were also prominent large water stains along the hem, discoloration and a lot of yellowing along the collar, makeup stains etc. It looked even worse than I remembered, in fact. Yet at this point I thought "fuck it" and threw it into the washing machine for another loop with a generous scoop of baking soda this time, 14 years after the first wash. I wasn't even sure if it would do a difference after all this time or if all the crap had permanently set in but I thought that since the fabric had already shrunk it couldn't get a lot worse at this point. #yolo

Coat's a bit big so it takes up the whole drying rack lol.

I let the coat dry for a few days while praying to a various assortment of cosplay gods to give me their blessings. I was quite nervous because if I couldn't get those water damage and other stains out I would have no choice but to remake the whole thing and I wasn't quite at peace with that idea. Especially since that perfect bridal fabric I used is long gone from mom's attic so I would have to settle for a fabric that likely wouldn't look valuable enough to fit a Bleach captain's status.

Thankfully the second round in the washing machine actually made a bit of a difference. The massive water stain outlines disappeared and the yellowing got slightly improved, it was still there but it got a bit lighter at least. So I guess I could say it made it better at least, not worse.
Once the coat was completely dry I took it to mom's so I had access to better surfaces to work on and a sewing machine.

Just showing how bad the lining issue was. 

The photo above is to show how much of the lining was constantly overextending, that amount of red that you see was how much was always visible, even when the sleeve was relaxed and I didn't try to pull or tug it in any way. It constantly looked like it was rolled up and bunching uncontrollably, it was legit awful. Before the uneven shrinkage issue happened the red lining didn't show at all and was like a lining should be, aka only visible on the inside.

I started the whole reparation process by taking out the seam-ripper and undoing the seams on the sleeve ends. I know, I could have just made it easy for myself and save time by cutting it off with scissors but I was too concerned about how much losing those couple centimeters of fabric (especially the white one) would affect later on when I reassemble the lining. I didn't really want to shorten it because it would look wonky if the shihakusho black and white kimono sleeves were a lot longer than the captain's coat sleeves were. Every centimeter was precious lol.

This took ages but at least the ripper was ergonomically shaped.

Once I was done undoing the seam I just stared at the lining unraveling before my eyes. I was also quite surprised that I hadn't done any kind of fraying prevention measures on the lining fabric, it was just raw edges all over and that made me uneasy and judgmental of my former self lol. Nowadays I just couldn't, I'm very anal about zigzaging all edges even if they technically couldn't unravel. It just bugs me so much to leave something undone.

Notice how much longer the lining is, oh god!

On the photo above you can see how much the white fabric had shrunk compared to the lining because the inner and outer sleeves were aligned at the corner in this photo. This amount of excess explains why it looked so bunched up and just wouldn't behave no matter how much you tried to force it to stay down.

Another thing I was baffled by was that back then I hadn't even treated the edges of the white fabric?! I had just folded them in and been like "this is fine" all because the lining would hide them from view lmao. It feels weirdly surreal because I used to have this pure mental image that this cosplay was done so carefully and I had zero memories of skipping any corners so yeah, taking seams apart and finding raw edges staring back at me was a real 'what the duck' moment. :'D

Zigzaging all the edges reeeee–

I had some struggles with deciding on how to reassemble the sleeve mouths. Originally they were done in what I'd like to call the "default lining" way aka what happens when you attach the lining to the outer fabric's edges and then turn it over, press it down and do a decorative stitch around on top to make it crisp. So basically it wasn't folded or hemmed and looked like on official character references. I originally wanted to replicate this but figured that it would be a lot of extra steps because I'd either have to remove and reattach the whole lining (which would also mean trimming the excess down before refitting which would have been a lot of extra work) or do some fidgety precision folding techniques by folding both the outer fabric and the lining separately and then have them line up perfectly against each other and stitch them down and hope they don't shift while doing so, which would surely have been an exercise in carefulness and frustration. I figured that the easiest and most doable approach was to fold in the excess lining fabric enough times to make it have the same length as the white fabric (I didn't cut off any fabric, just folded it inside) and then fold the white fabric on top to seal the red fabric underneath it. It's a bit hard to explain but I hope that makes sense? xD

Ended up doing this approach to finalize the sleeves.

I worked on both the hem and the sleeves simultaneously but I decided to post the sleeve progress first to make it easier to follow. But yeah, I did a similar approach when opening up the hem, meaning I first undid the stitches to free the two fabrics from each other.

Ripping up the hem in progress.

The hem came with the additional problem of realizing that of course the lining fabric was larger in all directions than the white fabric that had shrunk. Ideally this meant that, for a perfect result, I should have removed the whole lining, trimmed it down and then reattached it but this would have meant that I would have needed to remove the whole collar as well because the collar attached to the lining on both sides on the front. I wasn't quite up to this task and so I stood there facing the issue that, due to the collar being attached to the lining and thus locking me from handling it from all directions, that if I didn't remove the collar I would have to be creative about how and where to cram and hide the excess lining. There were a lot of back-and-forthing at this point on whether I should make a strategic cut to avoid the otherwise forced wrinkling of excess lining at the corners but I eventually decided against it and just made a vertical fold in the lining, near the ends of the collars, to hide the worst excess bunching and then I folded in the rest at the hem in a similar way as I did on the sleeves.

Lining excess hiding aka sneaky folding in progress.

Of course it wouldn't end up flawless because I didn't do it in the most time-consuming way (aka remove the whole lining etc) but I feel like this approach worked surprisingly well while also sparing my sanity lol.

It was a bit of a risky choice but to secure and attach the newly folded and prepared hem I had to sew on the upside of the coat and that's because I noticed on my first try, when I tried to sew on the underside (to see that the needle hits where it should), that despite measuring and retracing the former stitch lines I still ended up having the stitch not aligning with the original stitch on the upside and this was a problem because the white thread was really visible if it crossed over one of those black salmiakki details. So yeah, I had to sew on the upside to make sure that the new stitch aligned with the old one (it looked fugly when it didn't, trust me bro) and just crossed my fingers that the stitch went correctly on the underside and secured the hem. Luckily it did after a few minor corrections.

This was a nervous moment lol.

After that I was finally done repairing this part of my Ukitake cosplay. It's such a relief because yeah, despite the coat having been neglected for over a decade it wasn't beyond saving. I proved to myself that I could do it despite how daunting it seemed. I also got it done in time for Kummacon where I also had a quick mini photoshoot and yes, it was such a blast to be Ukitake again! I really need to repair his twin swords next and although that's probably an equally ennerving project to tackle, if not more, I now feel more confident to try my best!

Thanks for reading! Have you ever repaired a cosplay after an accident, did it work out?
~ Shiro Samurai out.

Shiny Mightyena cosplay ears and tail WIP!

 Hello everyone!

Years ago I quickly threw together a shiny Mightyena gijinka (aka human version) which included making a pair of ears for ease of recognizing the character. I took a few progress photos already back then but never got around to publishing a WIP post of how I made them because I wasn't happy with the ears and intended to remake them at some point. Well, that "at some point" finally arrived because I plan to rewear this cosplay at Gingacon.

So if you've ever wondered how to make simple costuming furry accessories then here's my debut experiences lol. I'm sure there's plenty of other more professional ways to do this but I tackled the project in a hurry with a "random bullshit go" mentality, just winging it from my head. :'D

2018 unpublished WIP photo of the starting materials.

So I started this project and did the first version of these ears in 2018 with some yellow fabric, a scrap piece of fake leather, some threads in matching colors, safety pins and stuffing (not pictured). I drew up a pattern of the general shape of the ears and then transferred that design onto the yellow fabric and cut it out. Mightyena has that type of long pointy ears with the inner ear being almost the same size of the outer ear.

Inner ears also cut out.

I handstitched the inner ears to the front-facing half of the ears because I didn't want to have as many holes in the leather that a sewing machine would make. That and I liked the rugged look of the handsewing, I thought it was fitting for a hyena Pokémon. In case it's not obvious each ear has a yellow front and a back side and the leather part only goes on the front.

Completed handsewing.

After that I used a sewing machine to put together the front and back sides. I left the base of each ear open so that I could turn the right side back out again and fill the ears with stuffing.

It was at this point when I realized my mistake. I had not factored in seam allowances and the concept of volume, which meant that the inner ear part ended up way too big, covering almost all of the surface when filled. Another issue was that the filling made the ears heavy and so they would droop when attached to the wig with safety pins and just wouldn't stay upright. This was a look that worked for my even older Espeon gijinka (first set of ears I made) but it didn't work at all for Mightyena.

2018 version completed ears. Eww.

And here ends the 2018 mishaps and efforts and we jump back to the current year of 2024 when I decided that this shit needs an overhaul before I dare wear it out in public again lolol. 

Okay so after digging these wonky ears out of my wardrobe my first mission was to open up the base and remove all the stuffing. Once the ears were flat they were easier to handle and so I took a seam ripper in hand and started undoing the handsewn stitches that kept the inner ear in place – after all, one of the two big mistakes was that the inner ear was way too big. Once I freed the inner ears I measured and sketched out the amount I needed to remove on the backside of the fake leather (don't want visible marks!) and then I cut it off carefully. I shaved off like 1 cm from all sides except for the base.

First steps towards an improved appearance!

I had decided that for Gingacon I wanted to add a fluffy tail to my costume for more recognizability and to have it feel more complete and less like a closet cosplay lol. It still is a closet/recycling cosplay though. *screeches*
I bought some fur fabric from Eurokangas in Oulu, it's not a perfect color but it was like the only brown option that looked passable as canine fur and didn't make me think of a bear or moose. I would have ideally wanted a darker, more cholocate brown fur but I was really short on time and the options were very limited. It sucks that the fabric store in Kemi closed down and that the Eurokangas in Tornio also disappeared already years ago.

I worked on the ears and the tail simultaneously, swapping back and forth between the two depending on where I was and what equipment I had to use. The tail is a very simple creation; I just bought a roughly 35 cm piece of fur, the width of the fabric, and then I folded that in half and cut the other end into a tapering tip while leaving the folded, now upper half to be the base of the tail.

I was convinced the 80 needle would break but it didn't??

I've never sewn fur fabric before and especially not furry fur like this. It's quite difficult to keep the hairs in check and when I was cutting the end of the tail into a tip I had loose fur flying all over the place. xD Luckily my new rehabilitation place has a hobby room and there's a sewing machine there, albeit an old Husqvarna one. I was quite distrusting of the machine because there weren't anything but 80 strength needles and the fur I had was very thick – I was sure it would break or jam while I sewed the tail shut. Yet somehow the needle didn't break during the whole odyssean ordeal and I just sat there wondering if the sewing machine was secretly an overpowered Autobot on a mission to save my day or if I had somehow cheesed the law of unfortunate setbacks. GG needle, well played.

Tail edge sewn shut.

Sewing the tail took quite a lot longer than I thought it would because I spent so much extra time trying to keep the fur hairs away from the presser foot! I mean I had to constantly be there re-arranging the direction of the fluff and trying to move away as much stray hairs as possible to not have an excessive amount get stuck in the seam. It's an impossible mission to complete perfectly but I did what I could.

Turning the tail back out. It's so fluffy.

I left a relatively large gap up on one of the sides near the top so that I could easily turn the fur side back out and later fill it with stuffing to have it actually look fluffy and not like a hairy pancake.

I left the progress of the tail for a bit and jumped back into finishing the ears. For this I paid mom a visit because I needed some additional stuffing to fill the tail (the stuffing I removed from the ears was nowhere near enough) and I also wanted to brainstorm ideas for reattaching the faux leather parts onto the ears without having to undo all the seams first, to separate the front and back pieces, because that was a lot of extra work I didn't want to do and didn't really have the time left to do either. I mean now that the ears were already assembled I couldn't exactly handsew the inner ears back on because the stitches would show on the backside and that would look fugly.

Hello vliesofix my new friend!

Mom had recently ordered this material called vliesofix from Germany for her sewing/craft projects. It behaves similarly to interfacing fabric except that it has heat-activated glue on both sides with a peelable film on the other side.

So what I did was cut out a suitable piece and put the glue side down so that it would stick to the backside of the inner ears. My vliesofix piece was slightly too small to fit both ears but this was easy to solve by just using other scrap pieces to cover the missed spot; make sure not to have the edges overlapping because that might make peeling off the film more difficult.

Preparing the vliesofix.

I used an old towel to protect the ironing board from glue. You could of course just cut the vliesofix directly into the correct shape to minimize product waste and glue residue, but as I was already working with scrap pieces I didn't bother. I also made sure to protect the fake leather by folding over the towel on top, before ironing, so that the iron wouldn't touch them directly in case of damage (the iron was on a high heat setting). If you're working with delicate fabrics, or fabrics of which heat-resistance properties you are unsure about, you might want to sandwich them between another heat-tolerant fabric like cotton.
I gotta admit though that these photos were from my second try – my first try was a major oopsie because I accidentally put the glue side facing up (it's quite difficult to tell them apart on a quick glance) and when I pulled away the towel, to reveal my work, the ears were still there but the vliesofix had stuck to the towel instead and I had to tear it off. xD I has the dumb!

Successful attachment.

I cut tiny scrap pieces into the shape I needed to fill in that one corner that didn't fit into the block. After the first glue side was fully attached I trimmed off all the excess product and then peeled off the film to reveal the second glue side. This side I would then attach to the yellow part of the ear by ironing it again. I used the towel of course for extra security although it also meant that the vliesofix took a bit longer to fully stick. Despite my efforts it didn't fully attach itself (glue wore out or evaporated or something, I dunno) so I had to use some fabric glue on a few spots to finalize the attachment of the inner ears. For once in my life fabric glue actually seemed to work. I have so many bad experiences with fabric glue being absolutely worthless crap that just created a mess.

The last part involved using wire to get the ears to have some support so that they'd stay somewhat upright. I bought some cheap steel wire from Dollarstore and layered it like six or so times, after which I bent it to a roughly matching shape and twisted it to become more united and stronger. I used two wire frames like this per ear, except the second frame was half the length of the first one (so basically one curved and one straight piece).

Example of the wire shape before insertion.

After completing the wire frames I just inserted them into each ear and then I sewed the base of the ear shut and called them done. Done for now at least. Yes, I intentionally omitted the stuffing altogether for the remake although I did briefly consider other attachment methods than the safety pins. I mean, safety pins are an inexpensive and effortless way to attach something to a wig without it being semi-permanent, although it can be a bit cumbersome to set up as you need to make sure that the ears are on roughly the same height and position etc. I did consider buying a thin headband and attaching the ears to that for an easy wearable, but I saw no suitable ones in the stores I had time to check.

With the ears completed I could focus on the tail.
I stuffed it to my liking and then came the part that I kicked myself over – I had not paid any mind to how to attach the tail to my costume in advance. Or more like I had thought about options but I hadn't foreseen that yeah, it would be a lot easier to add belt loops or whatnot if you do it before sewing the tail shut on all sides except for that one gap. -_-
I decided to add elastic bands so that I could just thread through any sashes or belts to attach the tail. The hard part was sewing said elastics onto the backside of the base of the tail without losing my sanity along the way; all the measuring was just rough eyeballing and gut feeling because there was no way to really know where the heck any correct placements were because of constant shifting lol. Having one hand inside the tail (and locked to only one entrance direction) and one hand unable to properly keep things in place, due to how thick the fur was etc, made it really challenging to handsew the elastics in place. It would have helped had I kept two openings on each side of the tail because then I would have had more control to adjust once my hand with the needle went in. So yeah, the elastics aren't perfectly aligned but whatever, they do their purpose and as they'll always be against my back no one will really be staring at them.

The final task was to handsew the gap closed.

I finished the tail by handsewing that entry point closed (secure the stuffing!) and with that my Mightyena cosplay was upgraded ja minusta tuli virallisesti turri me thinks and a bit more complete than last time. I gotta say though that the handsewing was also done completely in the blind, the long fur completely hid my stitches upon doing them and I was impossible to even see where the folded edges waiting to be closed were, I had to go by touch only and hope that my needle poked through both layers on its way. Gotta say that these experiences make me appreciate and respect the fursuit makers even more than I already did, just handling the fabric itself requires so much extra patience lol.

Finished tail, it's honestly pretty stonks!

I would have wanted to try the costume on before Gingacon to see how it looks but I don't really have time for that anymore; I haven't even found the costume parts nor started packing yet and I'm leaving on Friday, send help. I just have to trust that they function as they should.
Oh well, I will try to get some cosplay photos soon so that I can put a link here that shows how these furry accessories look when worn!

Gingacon event summary will be up next, see you soon!
~ Shiro Samurai out.

Dota 2 Invoker cosplay WIP part.2

Hello hello!

I was checking through my unpublished drafts and found this progress post buried between the rest of the lot of forget-me-nots and well, last time I touched this draft was in... wait for it... January 2017. Jesus Christ, who ate up all that time? It feels like it wasn't that long ago I swear. ;_;

Nobody probably remembers but in the first part I said I had no deadline for this cosplay but was aiming for a summer 2017 debut? Well, as everyone now can see that totally happened. /sarcasm

Well, I still intend to finish this costume at some point although I have no idea if that group cosplay idea which spurred this creation in the first place still stands, lol. Anyways, I figured I might as well publish what I have made since the last progress post from... umm.. *counts*... almost 8 years ago. Yikes. Honestly I barely remember what I was doing the last time I worked on this project but I'll just publish this post as-it-was and then do a "current sitation" note at the end.

___________

I had previously finished serging the jacket's top and the skirt part (to prevent edges from fraying), which I had planned to later sew together to make things easier for me. The "skirt" consists of three fabric widths and I started out pleating it in big, wide pleats, of which every single one was to be 10 cm. It was quite a task to pleat all that fabric evenly...

Skirt pleating done.

It's sewn together and held up here just to show length.

I then sewed the skirt onto the main body of the jacket, aka the top half. I ended up with a miscalculation, because I got the numbers mixed up, but it was nothing that wasn't easily fixed by taking out the seam ripper and deepening one of the skirt pleats before reattaching it to the body. I also hemmed the edges.

Before sewing together the bottom half of the jacket (the "tails") or attaching the sleeves I wanted to make and sew on all those golden swirly details on them. For this I remembered that mom has this whole roll of some nifty golden fabric that doesn't fray and thus should be perfect for this kind of work.

Soon after I had done the progress I mentioned above I quit the sewing class in the school I was at back then, mainly because the only good teacher quit her job and she was the only one I came to terms with. The other two were not proper teachers and, honestly, most of the time it felt like I knew more about sewing than them, which is a kinda awkward spot to be in as a student. Not to mention but they didn't treat me all that well either so I ended up jumping off the class for more than one reason. So yeah, once the only talented and friendly teacher was gone my progress on Invoker was put on hold. Another problem was that the apartment I had back when I worked on this cosplay was ridiculously small and crammed; I had no space to lay out and cut the golden fabric roll into the shapes I needed. Not having a sewing machine easily available made it really hard to get motivated to continue on the project and yeah, it's been literal years since I last touched Invoker. Don't read that in a dirty way thanks ololol.

The current situation is that I have since then moved to a better apartment (space is still an issue though but for wholly different reasons rip) but some of my belongings and especially my cosplay stuff are still scattered in all kinds of different bags and places and, truth be told, I have no idea where my bits and pieces of Invoker currently lay hidden! I remember having them in a saggy white plastic bag at some point but I can't recall where I've last seen it. Yes, I'm not a terribly organized person. But I know I haven't disposed of any of the cosplay parts and once I find them I'm going to go through them and pick this project up again. I still won't put a deadline but I hope it won't take another 8 years before we see any news on Invoker again, that would be epic fail.

Yeah I know, it's not much for an update but now you all at least know that this costume isn't dead and buried. Not yet at least. It's kinda buried though, among unknown stuff. Now, wish me luck in finding the remains of my forgotten wizard...
~ Shiro Samurai says bibbidi-bobbidi-boo!

Kisuke Urahara cosplay WIP

 Hello frens!

I finally got around to compile the work in progress post of how I made my Urahara cosplay from Bleach, you know, the sus shopkeeper with the funny hat. Although I gotta say I didn't take very many photos of the process, partly because I forgot and partly because this was a last-minute rush project. We all know how real the con crunch can be so please cut me some slack lol.

 

Oh, and all the photos are taken with my phone's not-so-good camera so yeah, I'm sorry but the quality is a lot more shit than usual. I didn't have my SLR camera with me at any point while I was working on this cosplay, so no can do. Bad photos are still better than no photos and thus no WIP post, right?

Anyways, let's go!

Kisuke Urahara reference.

 

Okay so, this cosplay materialized in a very short amount of time. I had to finish it no later than one and a half week before Nekocon as that was when I left home with mom and stepdad to attend my cousin's wedding in the other end of the country, which meant my cosplay came with me to Gothenburg and from there to Kuopio on our return trip. I don't like doing anything with a really stressful time frame but stress is also a good motivator to get things done.

Because of the lack of time I didn't have time to visit a fabric store. Thankfully mom used to have a fabric store many years ago and what remains from it is in her attic, so basically there's a fabric store at home whenever I visit her. So I went and pillaged the sortiment and almost immediately found a perfect green cotton fabric and a sufficient dark green polyester fabric. 

I know, Urahara's haori is most often depicted as black but mom didn't have any black fabric (unless I wanted a really porno PVC haori lmao) so I had to use something else that seemed passable. My options were dark grey, dark brown or dark green but I found dark green first and decided to roll with it because the colors went nicely together.

Fabrics, check.

I immediately spread out the fabrics on the kitchen table and started measuring and cutting out all the pieces. Urahara's outfit consists of a samue (kimono-like top and pants) set, a haori, traditional geta clogs and his signature hat. I only used a pattern for the pants, the rest I just winged because kimono are basically just rectangles sewn together.

Fabric laid out.

Pants pants pants!

All the pieces laid out plus elastic, cord and threads.

That's all the progress I did on the first day, it was quite late. The next day I used mom's serger to go through all the raw edges. I have to be kind to it as it's as old as I am and if you go too fast it will squeak a lot. Poor thing has seen a lot of use but it's such a trusty, convenient lil' machine. <3

Saumuri goes brrrr

While I was working on my cosplay mom was using the sewing machine to do some embroidery gifts for the wedding and that's when the worst thing that could happen happened – the machine died! Like it would start up but it would not sew a single stitch and just make this infernal noise instead. It was panic galore. Like please not now, we literally don't have time for this! T_T

So I had to ask Sallukka for an emergency visit to their place so I could continue on my cosplay. Mom drove me home and I packed my stuff for the wedding trip. I also frantically searched for Urahara's hat because I knew I had seen it _somewhere_ but I had no idea where as it was literal years ago. I bought it many years ago at a con just for shits and giggles and now I needed to find it for some real use.

After rummaging through all thinkable closets and storages I found it inside a large black plastic bag that smelled like yesteryear!

 

Hat and wig found, wohoo!

I also looked through my shoes and low and behold – I had the perfect pair of geta clogs that I didn't even remember having! I can't believe my luck, I was ecstatic!
Also, I somehow found a suitable wig in my wig stash and no, I have no fucking clue what I originally intended to use this wig for; it was just existing in there. xD

 

Later on that same day Sallukka came to pick me up after they finished work for the day. I sewed the haori together in my friend's comfy abode in Kemi and did some paint tests. We also watched a bit of anime and had a good time.

 

One coat of paint, freshly applied.

Same single coat but dry. Insane difference.

On the photos above you see what a world of difference it makes whether or not the fabric paint is made specifically for dark fabrics or not. This is the same brand with ordinary white on the left and "for dark fabrics" white on the right. The ordinary white is hardly even visible after it dried while the other white is super opaque! I didn't have to think twice on which one to choose.

Mom came to pick me up from Kemi after she got her sewing machine repaired. It warranted a trip to an old gentleman in Oulu with 40 years of experience repairing all kinds of sewing machines.

Back at mom's I started to prepare for painting those salmiakit rhombic patterns. I wanted to make a stencil to guarantee that the symbols would be as identical as possible and for that I needed some kind of plastic or cardboard etc as a base. Mom had no suitable scrap cardboard available but my stepdad had a big leftover roll of 'rakennusmuovi' (builders plastic, construction plastic?) that he used while building the house they live in. It turned out to be just what I needed!

I made my stencil out of this plastic roll.

Stencil design measured and sketched.

I wanted to paint by hand with a pencil so I didn't do the usual stencil approach and instead used the cut-out shape as a measure, drawing along the outlines with tailor's chalk. 

It was quite a nightmare to figure out how many symbols I could do while having the space between each one as identical as possible throughout the whole width of the garment. I almost had a meltdown fr, it was so frustrating because it would never line up just right, no matter how logically you tried to measure and calculate beforehand and then you had to redo and redo and redo and yeah, I just wanted to cry lol.

This was my "spacing them out" approach. It was pain.

Finally got it to be as symmetrical as possible!

One coat of paint later.

The fabric paint was so good that I only had to do two layers to have an opaque, covering result. And this is on synthetic fabric, which I found extra impressive as the paint didn't even specify that it would work on synthetics – only naturals like cotton and silk etc.

Sealing the paint.

I let my paint job dry overnight and then heat-sealed it the usual way. I personally use baking paper for protection when sealing fabric paint on synthetics because the recommended heat-setting is usually "cotton strength" (aka three dots or max heat) but synthetics rarely can withstand that high heat without taking damage. Using baking paper as a barrier also protects the iron itself so it's a win-win in my book.

After that was done I went to try on the haori in the mirror. I noticed quite soon that my sleeves looked dumb as hell because I had apparently had a brainfart when I had sewn them and yeah, I had hemmed the edges the opposite way from how I usually do and I had completely forgot to factor in that the sleeve mouths are quite wide and so the fugliness of my flappy flap flap seam was very visible!

Fix that awkward mistake!

 

On the photo above you can see what I meant by hemming the opposite way of how I usually do. The left sleeve (which I'm correcting/sewing on the pic) is how I usually hem everything and the sleeve laid out to the right is the epic fail brainfart deluxe sew-it-together-in-the-middle-of-the-night abomination that knows no bounds nor decency.

After that hotfix my haori was done, this time for real. Now what was left to do was to sew together the samue. I didn't take any photos because it was really simple and basic stuff. The only thing I did that's worth mentioning is that I took some liberties with leaving slight openings at the armpits, this to make attaching a straight sleeve to a straight body of fabric as easy as possible and, secondly, to make the cosplay a bit more breezy – aka less sweaty to wear. I did the exact same approach while attaching the sleeves to the haori too. I figured it won't really be that obvious unless I lift my arms a lot and well, it's not like Tite Kubo followed many traditional kimono rules when he designed the outfits for the characters anyway so it's not like I'm comitting any terrible kitsuke police offenses here either by just making cosplay life a bit more comfortable for myself – by deviating from references ever so slightly.

Sleeve opening shenanigans.

 

I had originally cut out the okumi panel (the front "add-on panel") for the samue to get extra width in the front for overlap, but upon closer scrutiny I noticed that the okumi seam is completely absent on reference arts and well, Urahara wears his samue rather sloppily anyway and it only narrowly overlaps in the front so yeah, I decided to leave it out as I determined that the extra width wasn't needed after a test wear.

To add the little cords (the ribbon tie) keeping his top closed I just put the almost finished garment on my body, looked in the mirror to figure out the approximate placement, marked with pins and then sewed them on. Of course I acupunctured myself with the pins too.

The pants were super easy to do, just basic 3/4 length trousers with an elastic waist. I used a basic loose-fitting pattern mom had already cut out from a sewing magazine earlier and modified the pant legs a bit shorter and added extra length on top to make the channel for the elastic to reside in.

Measuring and readying the waist for elastic insertion.

And with that my rushed cosplay was finished. 8D Considering how ass-on-fire this whole project was it turned out pretty okay – luckily Urahara is not a very complicated costume to make so yeah, the risk of absolute unhinged disaster was low. I'm still happy I got it done on time as the cosplay turned out to be comfy and fun to wear and yes, breezy too. 

For photos of the completed cosplay check out this mini photoshoot I did during Nekocon. ^_^

Thanks for reading, stay crafty you nerds!

~ Shiro Samurai