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2018 unpublished WIP photo of the starting materials.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

AC Black Flag – Edward Kenway Whaler Outfit cosplay WIP [part 1]

Arr me mateys!

Yeah I know, I have a lot of unfinished cosplays lying around and yes, I'm starting a new one. Thing is that as I study sewing and fashion I have to do various garments in school and why not incorporate cosplay into it? :D 

So my task was to make a shirt – normally this should have been like a collared, standard buttoned shirt but that's boring as fuck so I decided to make a 1700s pirate shirt instead. More exactly the shirt that Edward Kenway wears on his Whaler Outfit (it's an alternative outfit in the game) in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. I gotta admit that I haven't been able to find a single cosplay of this particular outfit and so I suspect I might be the first one to do this. *puts on hipster frames*

This post is long and photo-heavy as it covers the whole shirt WIP from start to finish.

Reference image taken from the Assassin's Creed fandom wiki.

 

Now I had to do a lot of research into historical fashion before attempting this project and while I'm obviously not making anything 100% accurately hell no I ain't handsewing everything lol because then I'd have to omit all the pattern making parts and that would basically disqualify me from using the school project for the creation of this cosplay lmao. Also, I spent a good amount of time staring at Edward in the game and a bunch of details that should, historically speaking, be on his clothes were not there (sleeve gussets etc) so I don't feel too bad with selectively choosing methods lol.

The hard part with this outfit is that I was unable to find any kind of concept art or such and thus my only references are literally from the game, and that makes things a bit hard as there's no way to, well, undress Edward. xD Most of the shirt is hidden because of that brown vest and all the weapons piled on top, but thankfully I found a video on Youtube where someone had managed to pull off what I assume is a glitch to get Edward unarmed (it shouldn't be possible) to get a slightly better view on the outfit and yes, this video was helpful for me because when I paused at a few super specific frames I could see the lacing on the front which is normally hidden by the guns.

Rough model reference.

 

So the first thing I did was to figure out what I'm actually making, so I scrambled together a rough draft of the shirt model and some details about what it looks like. Those seams on the upper half of the sleeves were hella confusing for both me and my teacher for the longest time – what are they?? 

I had plowed through historical fashion articles online for hours and not found any mention nor example of what those seams were for and not a single photo of a recreated nor intact survived garment had those. So I came to the conclusion that it's got to be some Assassin's Creed bullshit that just looks cool. xD But more about this later!

I ordered a fabric swatch through the school from this one big wholesale online store in Finland. I originally wanted a full linen fabric but settled for a cotton and linen blend as it was what was available and might be a bit easier for maintenance. Maybe.

Test fabric swatch! It was literally perfect. Just what I hoped for!

 

So I ordered like 5 meters of the stuff and played the waiting game. I don't remember what the price was but it was a lot cheaper than I thought, that's for sure. Meanwhile I waited I started working on the patterns, and because this was done in school I couldn't just take a close-enough ready pattern and modify it – I had to make it from scratch.

I'm unsure what it's called in English but whenever you start sewing any piece of clothing you have to make a "peruskaava" (literally translates to something like 'basic pattern') of your own measurements that you then modify to look like the model of the intended garment.

Drafting of the basic pattern before any modifications.

 

Before doing this pattern in natural (aka big) size I had to do a miniature twice to learn how to do it, first with the measures of a "perfect model" for practice and then with my own measures. I hate doing patterns oh my god. Drafting patterns is by far my least favorite aspect of sewing and my weak point. I'm horrible at math so that's probably one of the reasons why...

My fabric arrived!

 

Around a week or so later my fabric arrived. I was still in the middle of finishing my patterns so I let it be for a few days while I was busy modifying the base pattern to look like Edward's shirt. Modifications included for example widening and straightening the whole thing including sleeves, changing the neckline, lowering armholes, lengthening it and adding slits to the sides for easier movement. Can't be a stiff assassin!

Pattern modification in progress, aka "kuosittelu" in Finnish.

 

On the photo above you can see what modifications I did and how. The sleeve is the one furthest away. I basically cut every piece (front, back and sleeve) in two parts to add width in the middle, this is to keep the rest of the dimensions from being screwed up.

Made a prototype from the modified patterns.

 

As soon as I had finished modifying the patterns I cut out the pieces from a cheap cotton fabric to do a test mockup. Wouldn't want to cut straight into the real fabric and notice that something's horribly wrong... :)

Meanwhile I did that I had also crammed the whole real fabric into a washing mashine to shrink it. It didn't come pre-shrunk and because we're in a proper learning environment (höhö) we actually have to bother with this part. I have sinned and gotta admit, I never did it at home. It honestly feels pretty bad when you pop in your whole bunch of fabric and then watch it magically shrink and become wrinkly and you sit there and think "I paid good money for this fabric that just literally disappeared". xD It's kind of a bummer but something you have to deal with and yeah, because this was a cotton and linen blend it shrunk a lot. Oof.

Shrunk fabric drying. #wrinklyforlife

 

Well, at least it's gonna look worn with those forevermore wrinkles lol. I tried to iron them away but they just wouldn't go. I kinda don't even mind, in fact I was considering throwing in a tennis ball to make the fabric look naturally weathered. But I didn't.

Mockup test wear, sleeve poof edition.

 

Once the mockup was deemed good I cut into the real fabric. I decided early on that I wanted to eliminate visible seams as much as possible, especially finishes like zigzag. This made me decide on doing French seams (aka bag seam or reversed seam) on most of the construction. It makes progress a tiny bit slower than normal but it's worth it.

Always start by sewing the shoulder seams together.

 

For every seam that I did I pressed them open to get a cleaner finish and make the next step easier. I'm pretty sure I had done a mistake on that photo above and had to rip it up because yeah, when you do French seams you have to put wrong sides together instead of the usual right sides together. xD It messed with my head the first few times until I got a hang of it, lol.

And now we get to the part I told you about. Namely those weird-ass seams on the sleeves. 

Snapped this screenshot from the game, for reference.

 

What is their purpose?? I was dumbfounded, I don't even know what I'm looking at. My original guess was that it's some sort of supporting seam to alleviate strain or something as Edward is a working man (I mean he was a moderately poor farmer's son before he became a privateer-turned-pirate) and the outfit in question is called whaler outfit. But when I googled like 18th century whalers I found nothing about their worn clothes and, if I did, it looked nothing like what Edward wears. So my next plan of action was searching for what sailors and pirates wore during that time period and even there I found no such mention about a sleeve seam like that.

So after getting no historically based results I rounded it up to being artistic liberty from the game makers and decided that I can create it however the fuck I want, as long as it looks the part. I mean, there is some room for different interpretations but I ultimately settled to make it not a seam but like a decorational band that runs on top of the sleeve.

Placement testing.

 

So I cut out these strips of the same fabric, around 5 cm wide, and folded in the edges. I test-pinned them on top of the sleeves to find the correct position. This took some testing with me running back and forth into the fitting room and pinning myself with needles. I eventually found a placement that looked reasonable and was at the same assumed height as Edward's, except on my body.

I baste stitched the strip in place to keep it from moving while sewing.

 

It's a bit hard to explain how I did this part as I wanted to avoid visible seams on the strips save for the one in the middle that separates the soon-to-be-added "fillings". So I had folded in the edges, after zigzaging them of course, and I intentionally ironed them so that one side was slightly longer than the other so that there would be a slight overlap. I then baste stitched one of the ends to the bodice of the sleeve by hand, to keep it from moving, while I then sewed a straight stitch just at the fold line.

Like this.

 

Rinse and repeat for the second sleeve. One tiny lil' problem though, I had to get the same curvature on the second sleeve as I had on the first. Luckily there's a solution to everything.

Life hack! Pin trails to the rescue.

 

With the sleeves sewn up to the same point I had to start wondering about what to use as "filling", if anything. My original idea was to just keep the strips flat but the more I thought about it, the more boring it felt. I wanted to add some dimension to it, make it stand out a bit – make it a bit more 3D I guess. I figured I'd try with some leftover cord the school had lying around.

This was my method of pulling the cord through.

 

It gave some additional thickness albeit not a lot. And there wasn't enough of that cord for both my sleeves anyway so it only worked for a test and yeah, for the real deal I needed to find something else. I quickly remembered that mom has a ton of cords in different colors and so I sent a text message and asked if we happened to have one in this natural white color. Turns out we did so she would bring it some days later. 

Also, on the photo above you can see that I had done the middle, separating seam to turn the strip into two "tunnels". The thing I mentioned earlier about the edges overlapping is also the reason why, once I did the middle seam, the strip was actually secured because the overlap got caught under the seam and thus attached. It's hard to explain but on the cross-sectional views I made (it's at the end of this post) it is easy to make out what I mean. ^^"

Meanwhile I waited for the cord I worked on the neckline instead. I basically just added the facing. Nothing special here, I just ironed on some light interfacing, cut notches to make it fold over nicely and yada yada.

Facing added.

 

One thing I did do slightly differently was doing that one uniting (err idk what to call it) seam on the facing's side so that when you turn it over there's, once again, no visible seam on the front.

This kinda shows what I mean.

 

Soon enough my cord arrived, the whole roll of it. I wriggled the cord through the passage once again with the method shown above, which basically means I attached the cord's end to some thread and the thread I tied to a safety pin which I then pushed through the tunnel using my hands. This method was not fool-proof though as the thread did end up breaking once or twice because it got stuck and I pushed too hard, forcing me to start over.

Umm... not what I had expected but okay?

 

Once I had the cord inserted I noticed that it somehow pushed the other side of the strip up towards the sky. It looked really wonky and even more so when I tried it on. I had not accounted for that but thankfully it was a pretty easy fix.

Hand-sewing! These stitches only show if you look from above.

 

I hand-sewed the upper side of the strip down, to keep it from protruding, by sewing sneakily on the underside. This method once again saved me from a visible seam. Of course I did this after having inserted the cord into both sides.

Cleaned up model drawing.

 

With those weird sleeve things out of the way I could finally focus on the cuffs. Now everyone knows that 18th century shirts often had poofy, ruffled sleeves gathered at the wrists. And Edward kinda does too. But the thing is that back then elastics weren't invented so I couldn't just do the easy "add an elastic and call it a day" approach but had to make it the, well, proper way.

I stared at my references and figured that the tightening systems have to be on the underside of the sleeve. My only option was to use some kind of cord, leather strings or such but before I decided on that I had to create the passage for the thing to pass through. This was very easy, I once again made a strip of some leftover fabric I had, zigzaged the edges and just simply sewed them on at the edges. Now I of course got visible seams but that's pretty much unavoidable and on the game model there definitely is a seam or two going on there anyway.

Placement prepping for the sleeve gatherers.

 

My original plan was to use leather strings for the job because it would feel rather authentic. I will return to this later because there's a reason I say "original plan", haha.

Yep, I really wanted to use leather at first.

 

So with those passages done I started to actually attach the sleeves to the bodice. I don't remember exactly what happened here but there was something with the sleeve being too big in regards to the armhole, I think. Whatever it was I had to lower the armhole to make up for the difference before I could attach them together and make it look reasonable and not like a dumpster fire just unleashed.

Modifying on the spot. I cut off that curve you see sticking out from the bodice.

 

Next up was sewing the sleeves closed and continuing all the way down the sides. Of course I left the lower ends unsewn because I would add slits later.

At this point I ran into the single most frustrating part of the whole project in terms of sewing, namely that those weirdass upper sleeve things were being annoying little bastards having the cord ends peeking out when I tried to sew that side seam closed. >_> You see, I intentionally left a little bit of extra length for each cord that I inserted, so that they would not disappear into the passage while I was putting glue on the edges to keep them from unravelling. Yeah, because the cord was cotton I couldn't simply just burn them to seal the edges. So this extra length wasn't much but it was more than enough to cause trouble once I got to that point while I was attempting to close the side seams. The thing is that I needed to tuck the cords away from the path of the stitching and this was extra hard to keep track off because, once again, I only did French seams.

I almost got it but then this lil' son-of-a-bitch
poked his head out and I had to undo. ;_;

 

I had to redo the same sleeve at least three times because the "tucking allowance" was so minimal and there was almost no room for any error, aka slippage of the cord. Even harder it was because the French seam had to keep a specific, consistent sewing distance (to not exceed the seam allowances) and it was a battle of like a literal millimeter or two to keep the cords from not poking out. I'd be lying if I said no perkeles escaped my lips. :))

Test fitting once I finally got the sides closed.

 

I could see the end, I was almost done! Now I only had to finish the slits and add the lacing to the neckline and I could call it mission complete. But it wasn't that easy as I had to do a quick test again on cheap cotton fabric to be able to wrap my head around how the heck you make a slit while you also have a French seam. And my teacher wasn't any wiser either so a test it was. xD

This was the test conclusion on how it should be done.

 

Once you could visualize what you had to do it wasn't nearly as much of a headache as it first seemed. In fact it was quite easy – you just cut into the French seam at the intended beginning point of the slit and then fold the edges accordingly to the sides.

And here's the slit on my actual shirt.

 

But because I cut into the fabric I created raw edges where there weren't any before, and this meant that I had to secure these somehow. Using the sewing machine wasn't really an option because it was such a small area and those folded edges were already sewn in place, which meant that once again I had to hand-stitch. To get the best finish and most security I did buttonhole stitches.

Sadly I noticed at this point that the leather strings for the sleeve gathers I worked at earlier did just not work as smoothly as I had envisioned. The leather kinda got stuck (likely due to the surface texture causing friction) and it felt like it would snap if I applied force. It should be noted though that these leather strings were old ones my teacher had originally bought for some jewelry projects that she forgot about, possibly like 30 years ago. xD So that might be a reason why lolol.

So with not much else to choose from I went back to the trusty cord my mom had brought me. At least I don't suffer from bad conscience because the cord is actually full cotton and not polyester, which is the norm lol.

Omfg it works! :DD

 

I changed the leather strings for the cords and went to do another test fitting. Gotta admit that I was nervous, would it work? I pulled the ends and the sleeve gathered sooooo much smoother, bingo! The difference was pretty whack, using the cords it just slid through with little effort and felt really solid. Only thing is that I will need an extra pair of hands to help me tie the cord ends together every time I wear the costume out. xD It's stupidly hard to do yourself lmao.

With that done I only had the lacing left to do I had already hemmed the sleeve edges and the bottom of the shirt previously. I wanted to do the holes for the strings to run through without damaging the fabric and so I decided on using an older method, the same one used for Finnish folk costumes (or that's what my teacher said). So to start with I of course had to mark out where the holes would be. By watching that video earlier I could make out that there's at least four guaranteed holes and that's what I decided to go by as I wanted it to look simple.

Holes marking and one hole in progress.

 

You see that huge metallic thing on the photo above? It basically looks like an oversized hand-sewing needle and that's the specialty tool I used. It forces a hole into the fabric without breaking or damaging any fibers. After I got a hole I had to enlarge it somehow and for that I used those orange scissor things in the back of the photo; I basically pressed the blades closed, so that they wouldn't cut anything, and used the scissors as a sort of drill to carefully dig the hole bigger. I repeated the process for all four holes and, once that was done, I took out the hand-sewing stuff again and buttonhole stitched around the edges super tightly.

I had planned to use the leather strings as the lacing (I wanted some use out of them) but I noticed after pulling them around that they actually colored the fabric! It wasn't the end of the world as a worn look wouldn't actually be bad for this particular costume, but I decided on using something else just to be on the safe side. I was worried if it would bleed during rain, for example. 

And then I remembered that shiny cord I had used for the test on those weird sleeve things... and lo' and behold there was enough of it to use for the lacing! But before I decided on using it I wanted to make sure what it was actually made of – you see, I did not want to use any chemical fibers for historical accuracy's sake. 

So, umm, I took that bit of cord with me home and did a burn test to determine material. I'm gonna admit that I was expecting it to be chemical so yeah, when I stood in my kitchen with the lighter and lit it on fire I was not prepared for it to flare up and burn so effectively that I had to drop it in water to get it to stop. xD I legit thought I'd start the fire alarm because it smelled awful for the next couple hours (even with the windows open)! When I soon after touched the burnt surface the ash crumbled in my fingers into these tiny tiny particles – it was silk. I could use it. 

Thanks for reading this far, below's the completed shirt:

Shirt front.

 

Shirt back/side.

 

This was a fun project, somewhat challenging but not too hard. In hindsight I feel like maybe the facing made the neckline look "too clean" but my teacher insisted on that it's a must-have sooo, whatever. *shrugs* I'm not sure how it would look nor behave without facing but Edward's neckline is very sloppy and just rather shapeless, lol. Oh well, I'm not sure if I can remove it later because I am worried that, without the added support of the facing, the holes for the lacing would potentially end up damaging the fabric or some such (the holes go through both lacing and bodice and are hand-stitched together by the holes).

The product paper, incl. cross-sectional views.

I have already started work on Edward's pants so that's gonna be what part 2 will be about. Stay safe and have a nice day folks! Thanks for reading.

~ Shiro Samurai out.