Taboo Cosplay: Vest

     This year has definitely gone off the rails. Initially, the gentleman and I were planning on going to a comic convention in California in May, but then the pandemic happened, and plans went out the window. Initially, my plans for the year were to do Valkyrie as a full-on, heavily involved costume for the local con in October, and another travel-friendly cosplay for the con in Cali. The travel-friendly one has gotten more complex, however, since I am no longer constrained by the May travel date, so Valkyrie might get pushed off to next year.

     Anyway, after the success of the Thor outfit, the gentleman was intrigued by cospaly as well, and started putting together a costume of one of his favorite characters: Backlash, from a group called Wildstorm that was somewhat obscure even when it debuted back in the 90s. Backlash's female companion/ partner is Taboo, a character that I find interesting, so figured why not make that my "quick, travel-friendly" costume? The gentleman is doing a militaristic take on Backlash, so I figure I could do similar, starting with a vest. Using the same pattern that I did for Valkyrie, I threw together a vest out of purple canvas (just under 10 hours), and made some "stripes" to be the armor bits.

     I needed the "armor" bits to be somewhat flexible, though, so Worbla wasn't going to work. Found a store on Etsy that sold leather scraps by the pound, and bought 3 lbs, figuring that would probably be enough for the main bits. I glued those pieces to the vest using Loc-tite Flexible adhesive, which worked pretty well. The glue delayed things a bit, because it is absolutely vicious, and I have to work on it outside and with a serious mask on, so weather was an issue. Eventually, though, I got the results I was after:

     Taboo's got an interesting, animalistic spine down her back, and some of the joins on the back leather bits were a little obvious, so I played around with adding something else there. After finding some good shapes, I cut some them out of Worbla, covered them in leather, painted the undersides black to keep the color scheme, and glued them to the vest. To my delight, they actually stayed very well, and looked pretty dang good:

     I didn't want the glue potentially bleeding through the canvas and onto my sewing dummy, so I used teflon sheets to ensure the glue stayed where it was, hence the brown bits sticking out from under it. The spine took a fair bit of doing, clocking in at 18.5 hours, but definitely worth the time.