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2018 unpublished WIP photo of the starting materials.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.

Area 88 Shin Kazama costume progress [part 1]

Hello geeks!

Around winter 2016 I started to work on my future Shin Kazama cosplay from Area 88. I don't have a set deadline for this costume so it might or might not be a long-time project, depending on how much trouble I have sourcing some of the military equipment for it etc.  

Note: I had this post saved as a draft for over a year and I had completely forgotten to publish it when I originally wrote it, oops. Thus most of the progress on this post (and all writing, except for small edits to make it clear that this was done on last year, not this year) were done during summer 2017!!

Earlier I had an incredibly lucky strike and managed to find a suitable fighter pilot helmet that I could use for Shin's iconic helmet. I haven't continued with the helmet yet but instead I managed to find some perfect military surplus leather gloves! These are actually replicas of gloves used during WW2 by American paratrooper soldiers and in the original light brown color to boot – and thus pretty awesome for Shin.

This image shows of Shin's gloves pretty well.

And here's the gloves that I bought:

It's real leather with that vintage smell.

I bought these from Varusteleka. I highly recommend their shop
if you need any military gear!

After Christmas (note: Christmas 2016!) I stayed some extra nights at my mom's and decided to make use of the time there and draft the patterns for Shin's flight suit. I checked through mom's old patterns and managed to find some sort of 80s overall pattern and, on first look, it seemed to be decent to use as a base but then I noticed that I'd get some issues with some details and so I decided to draft another one that I found in a sewing magazine. Even this pattern needed some modifications to work (mainly the collars) but at least it didn't have some weird shoulder tucks... or be ridiculously generous in size. I mean, I appreciate loose fit and all but when it's roomy enough to double as a sleeping bag for two, then I'm not sure if it's so flattering to wear, lol. xD It was easier to just use the pattern from the magazine as a base and then alter it, even though it was originally a jumpsuit pattern.

So yeah, I cut out the pattern pieces and saved the modification process for when I bring out the fabrics.

This cosplay progress was on halt until 11th April 2017, when I went back to mom's to celebrate Easter. While staying some extra days there I decided that now is a good time to continue on my cosplay!
I had already picked out some proper overall fabric called Enstex, or something really similar to it. Mom told me that she had bought this fabric roll personally from Finlayson back in the days when she had her own fabric store. Yes, this totally means I didn't have to pay for it! So yeah, this fabric is not the exact same color as Shin's flight suit, a bit more yellow-ish in tone. It's just that color that drives you crazy when you try to decide on if it's more yellow or more orange, lol. I thought it was close enough to work for Shin (I mean, this type of fabric doesn't come in many colors normally; the color I have at hand is already rare enough to find), just the right fabric type to give the legit "workwear look" and so I went with it. Besides, it's water and dirt resistant – hella convenient for conventions, especially outdoor cons like Närcon, where I currently plan to debut this cosplay.
By the way, I went to check for the same type of fabric in a local store, just to check the general color choices and yeah, it was mostly black, red, white, a really unflattering neon yellow (think safety vests) or that kind of prisoner suit orange, the really vibrant ones. Both of the latter ones would look like shit on me so yeah, suddenly mom's yellow-orange fabric seemed ten thousand times better, even if the color is not 100% accurate. :D

Okay so, I started to cut out the pieces that I needed from the fabric. I think I used about 3 meters of fabric, more or less. I also needed to modify almost all of the patterns to make them wider because it turned out that especially the sleeves and legs were narrower than I first had thought. Then again, this jumpsuit pattern was originally supposed to be made in a stretchy fabric and obviously Enstex isn't elastic and won't give in at all. So yeah, I needed to widen the patterns to make sure that I could fit into the costume and sit in it without any unwanted surprises. I also had to modify the neckline and add a collar to it (there was none on the original pattern). The collar pattern that I started with was just an ordinary dress shirt collar.

Fabric cutting.

I cut out all the pieces, save for the collar, which I'll modify and cut out later on. I also went to dig in mom's zipper boxes and found two fitting zippers for the suit – now I'll just need to wait and see which one is better, the 45 cm one or the 60 cm one. Couldn't find one in the exact same color (not a surprise) but at least I found a yellow one that would look okay with it.

All pieces (except collars) cut out. Both zipper options visible.

A few days later I zigzaged around all the edges and then I started sewing the pieces together. I started with the pockets and yes, I added pockets because why not? It's useful if I need to store small stuff during a con. This was my first time ever sewing pockets, lol.
During the sewing process I got a few shit strokes because at least a couple times the sewing machine suddenly just shut down in the middle of everything! It never did it before and of course I panicked because yeah, I feared that I might have ruined mom's expensive sewing machine. D: Luckily it was just the power cable not being properly plugged in...

There's not so much interesting to say about the sewing process itself – everything went rather smoothly, except that the fabric is kinda hard to sew. I had to rip off and replace the pockets with bigger ones though, because the first ones didn't align properly with the pants (since they had been widened and not the pockets), oops. I had some problems fitting the sleeves nicely so me and mom made a deal – I peeled the potatoes for the Easter dinner and she sewed on the sleeves for me. Win-win!

Early try-on. I still had to add the zipper and hem
the sleeve/leg openings. Collar is also missing.

Soon enough it actually started to look like something wearable and mom joked around and said that I looked like an escapee. Stepdad said that I looked like a smurf instead... I have no idea where he got that from, lol. I wanted to say that I'm supposed to be a fighter pilot but oh well, let them have their fun. xD
At first I was worried that I accidentally made the suit too small but turned out that it was really big once I could actually try it on. Unflatteringly big in the torso area, to be precise – I looked like a tent. Jälleen kerran yliarvioin omat läskini. Then again, it's safer to make it too big at first than vice versa since this fabric has no stretch mercy and I can always just sew in the excess, which I'll most likely end up doing.

I continued by hemming the leg openings. It was kinda annoying because the fabric would always wrinkle in the end and yeah, the end result wasn't the prettiest. Good thing I'll wear boots over so no one will ever see them, lol.
Hemming the sleeve openings was even worse; I had to redo it twice and still it came out fugly. I ragequitted. The problem is that the sleeve mouth is too narrow to be threaded into the machine, once I take out the bigger part of it. My explanations are glorious, I hope you can understand what I mean. :'D But yeah, because I couldn't thread it to the machine it made the whole sewing complicated and just... fffffffffffuuuuuu.

Welcome to bunch kingdom. Yes, that's the sleeve opening.

Omg I hated this part! The fabric was always in the way and I had to make sure that I didn't accidentally sew the sleeve shut on the other side and... blergh. I can't explain. It sucked major balls!

You shall not pass. 8C #wrinklelandia

I left the sleeves unfinished for a couple days and then, on my last day at mom's I suddenly realized how to do this shit. I just had to bring out the seam ripper, open the sleeve's seam a bit (starting from the sleeve mouth, of course) and then stitch/hem the mouth and finish it up by sewing the sleeve seam closed again.

I've partly opened up the sleeve seam (top, notice the hanging thread) and stitched the mouth
hem in place. Time to sew the sleeve seam back in place again.

I've come to notice that this particular color is a bitch to photograph. It gets overexposed easily, even in indoor lights on a sunny day (and it also looks vastly different in different light conditions). I will probably have to be careful where I photoshoot this cosplay, haha. One thing's for sure though – I'll be easy to spot at whatever con I wear Shin too – or, as stepdad said, you can see me even in a dark cave. Well, at least my con friend's won't have a hard time finding me!

Notice that I've attached a slip to the front opening, on one side.

As you can see on the photo above I had cut out some slips, or whatever you call them, to support the front zipper or whatnot. I also cut the collar opening deeper (incl. the slips) to make room for the big collar, which would be sewn on later. Or well, not actually deeper, just a bit more V-shaped.
Of course I sewed on a slip on both the right and left side of the front opening, the photo just shows the process when I had only sewn one on. :D I turn them to the inside of the suit and ironed them so that they'd stay inside. Next I'll have to attach the zipper itself, which is gonna be interesting because I've never had to sew on a zipper before...
Oh and yeah, I know that the suit looks humongous on the above photo but it's actually just spread out on a small sewing table and part of the suit (mainly the legs and other front half) are actually hanging off the table, but because of the awkward photo angle (taken from above) it's hard to notice where the table ends and so my suit looks like it's a size fatass.

This costume was on a small pause until approximately a month later, on mid May 2017 or something. Meanwhile I was working on another cosplay project I continued with Shin's collars while the other project was drying. To make Shin's huge collars I started with an ordinary collar pattern from a dress shirt that I modified to make it bigger.

Modified collar parts cut out.

I zigzaged the pieces and sewed them together to get full pieces, creating a seam in the middle of the back on both parts. I added interfacing fabric on the inside of both the upper and the lower part of the collar.
But when I started test pinning the collars in place I noticed that they were a bit too long and, also, that the front opening of the suit was not identical; I had to go in and change the curve so that the front openings would be as similar as possible. I also realized that I couldn't put the zipper starting from the very top of the suit as then it wouldn't look right, seeing how Shin's suit has that V-shape going on. So yeah, the original plan to use the 60 cm zipper got changed into the 45 cm zipper.

Fixed front opening more similar, to make collar
attachment easier.

Top part of the collar with interfacing. Ready to be sewn on.

I must say that this whole costume process just makes me incredibly happy. I know it's kinda cheesy but I can't help it and yes, I'm smiling like a mofo just by putting on the helmet! You know, that kind of almost childish excitement and joy – that's what I feel when I think that finally I'll get to be one of my childhood figures. It's an incredible feeling. ♥ Every cosplayer should do at least one childhood cosplay one day. Words can't describe how stoked I am for this project! This kind of nostalgy cosplays are of the best kind, really. Because you know the inspiration will not flicker.

I'll end this progress post here as it's getting pretty long by now. ^^" A second part will come later where I finish this suit and start making the harness!

~ Shiro Samurai