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cosplay (fifth in order if we count the first version of my OC Yuuto, which was a closet cosplay back then) and I originally made this costume way back in 2011.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!

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.