So since Thursday I have been beasting out the cosplays that Ai and I are going to wear on Saturday of PAX Prime 2013 here in Seattle. We could only grab a one-day pass, but we’ve had FFXIII-2 planned for quite a while.
Since we’re both full-time students in our junior year though, summer quarter has been 100% dedicated to portfolio building and homework. Q___Q So uh… we pretty much started making our costumes 1-2 weeks ago. I was able to pattern my jacket in about a day, cut out the muslin for the test fit, sewed the test fit the next day, made some heavy alterations, drafted the second test fit (with much much much better success hahaha) and made some slight alterations again. Because Ai’s costume is armor-heavy with small sewing pieces, we’ve had to wait til a lot of our supplies shipped to us (worbla, suede dye, feathers). Right now we’ve been patterning her armor pieces, as well as bouncing back pieces between each other (my boomerang, especially) so it’s going to be an interesting week to see if we can pull off drafting up all the armor pieces and then painting it…. hmmmm. Keep your fingers crossed for us, guys.
Patterning day! I ended up not having to buy any main fabric for my Hope jacket! It definitely pays off having 2 bins of leftover fabrics from various failed/dropped cosplays. :p
Learned how to tie a tie~ Hummmm, tonight I got makeup on my tie though, and then I made the stupid mistake of applying vaseline to a SATIN TIE INSTEAD OF BAKING SODA WHAT WAS I THINKING UGHHHH. I applied a baking soda paste to the stain and I just washed it off after letting it sit so I’m praying… that it goes away or is at least barely noticeable but we’ll see. 🙁 might have to buy a new one… gg self.
Here are two (virtually the same…..) shots of the pants and base boots. I modified a $5 pair of size 12 Old Navy flared pants Ai and I found at Goodwill. I think I might slim down the lower leg area a bit more, but I can’t make it too skinny or else my legs will look really girly. I try to buy larger sizes of pants for crossplay because I have hips and thighs with big calves t.t does not work well with shota…..
Thank goodness for premade bias tape hahahaha. Here’s a shot of the sleeves! Trying to align the center strip as straight as possible.
A little sneak peak shot of the feather skirt. It took me about 8 hours to securely handstitch about 65 feathers. I stayed up til 7AM before passing out until 11 to continue working on cosplay stuff… didn’t touch this skirt again for a long time. LOL
The reason why I was handstitching the feathers instead of the (time-saving and easier) hot glue method was because hand stitching allows each individual feather its own breathing room, rather than being lumped together with a handful of others all hotglued at the shafts. I cut the skirt on the bias for its drape, and handstitching allowed the feathers to move along with the drape of the fabric, whereas hotglueing stiffens the fabric and turns the skirt into a straight, rather boring pelt. Because there are rows and rows of hotglue, the fabric is unable to drape naturally. In the end I switched to hotglueing but I left the area that drapes the most empty so that I can handstitch the feathers there. Since it’s a half-skirt the CF and CB sides don’t have a dynamic drape (since it’s laying against the leg and rear), unlike the sideseam area. This is all in theory though, I hope it works… it looks like it’s working so far! hahaha.
Made some modifications to the boomerang pattern, and had my neighbor cut out the pieces. It looks sooo beautiful, even though it’s unsanded and unpainted *^* I haven’t made a weapon prop for myself before (uh besides coke case shinai…..) and I was really worried but I’m so glad Ai is helping me make it hahaha. Thank you so much, I’m so excited!!!!! My life this weekend has been feathers. So many feathers.
At that point when I gave up sewing for the night…. It looks like so little progress but it seriously took me a loooong time!! Each feather felt like 3 minutes to sew on securely….. maybe I’m just really slow at hand stitching.
ahhhh man, she was too cute, so I was hotglueing the feathers on the other side, and just let her sleep next to me hehehe.
Here’s how the skirt is going as of 3:37AM (right now). I tested the feathers and they seem pretty sturdy…. spun around and snapped the fabric a little bit to see if any would fall off and all looks good! It’s actually pretty fun attaching all the feathers, because it’s like “how can I arrange this row to cover the shafts of the last row, yet make it look natural and random in a somewhat uniform way?” We ordered 3/4lb of turkey feathers (12″!) yesterday, so I hope it comes soon so I can finish the bottom layer, and add some feathers to the outside and inside edges to make it a bit more dynamic. The feathers seen here are duck feathers (about 5″ – 7″?), and this amount is about 1/4th a lb. There’s still half a bag left of these oh man.
After hotglueing the feathers for hours (still took a long time, but maybe half the time with way way way more progress? hahaha) I decided to style my wig and do a makeup test. Hope has a really fresh, ikemen face in XIII-2 so it’s important to keep eyeliner and eye shimmer to a minimum, with slight contouring.
Uh, but even saying thaaaaat… here’s my first attempt.
I think this test was OK. I need to work on thinner eyeliner (I definitely do not have precision hands… they shake too much. Even with practice, idk how some girls are able to get consistently flawless eyeliner ;o; ). And maybe a bit more contouring, because I just ended up looking like XIII Hope instead… I wish I’d bought contacts for him in time, but in daylight these contacts are much brighter — so it’ll be fine. 🙂 Concealer, BB Cream, foundation, contouring to make my brow a little more defined, I didn’t have nude lipstick so I just applied a thin layer of my BB cream ontop of a layer of vaseline (it works!), orange eyeshadow on my lower lid to offset the purple tone in my dark circles and make the eye shimmer less obvious (it looks like it helped a lot!) black gel liner, and then white eye shimmer in the inside corners of my eyes. I messed up the shimmer on my left eye though, so it’s just a white dot in all these photos ahhh jeez hahaha. I’m still learning a lot about makeup and catering different styles to different characters, but practice/fun selfie tests like these before-con are really good practice. 😀
I think I’ll go sleep now, though…. It’s 4AM, so I’ll probably wake up in a few hours to start working on hw for this upcoming week haha. Cause after class it’s straight to the sewing labs, or straight home to beast through more of Lightning’s armor…. @___@ good night~
