Taboo cosplay: Belt, bags, and tail part 2

      With the tail functionally made, I needed a way to attach it. I asked a couple cosplayers I know, and they suggested a climbing harness, which looked way too bulky for what I was after. I figured a belt might work, however, and it would also give me a way to carry some bags for con essentials (and break up the boring waist/ thigh area which looked a little bare after everywhere else being armored up). I still had the thick leather from making the Thor belt, so I trimmed that pattern down a bit and made a belt with loops to attach thigh pouches. 

     I'm not big on buckles, so I figured I'd make it lace closed on the side fronts, giving me a front piece and solid back half. After some tooling, dyeing, buffing, slicking, and hole-punching, I had a reasonable belt base, fitted fairly snugly to my waist and hips. 

     With some input from the gentleman, I grabbed an electrical junction box lid and drilled a hole in it, then threaded the wire from the tail through the hole and bent the rest of the metal into a figure 8 on the other side of the plate. It seemed to make a fairly sturdy base, so I cut out a leather "pouch" and wetmolded it to the plate shape, then sewed it to the belt. Handsewing leather is a pain in the fingers - all of them - and works much better if all the holes line up. Turns out thumbtacks are a great substitute for pins: they keep both pieces in place, don't move around when you're hammering, and allow the base piece to stay flush with the hammerable surface.

     I'll once again spare you the cursing and grumping that goes with handsewing, and just say that it worked out quite nicely:

     I purposefully made the pocket tight, so it takes some doing to slide it in and out - shouldn't be any problem with it accidentally coming out while being worn. With the wire figure 8 behind the plate, the tail is held firmly in place and doesn't bounce around too much, and the belt being well-fitted keeps it lined up well with the spine. I glued the wire to the metal plate, which meant all that was left for the tail was actually attaching all the bone pieces. 

     Still had to solve the "joint" problem on the tail though. The pieces were pretty flat on the ends, so if I bent the tail at all, you'd see the wire. I checked out washers and grommets and even beads, but they were all too stiff - I needed something that would allow the tail bones to flex. On a random whim, I ordered a $2 set of foam hair rollers, and it turned out they work perfectly - cut them down to about 1/4" long and even without gluing them down, they looked like decent "cartilage." 

     With that problem solved, I cut the top piece down to make sure that the first tailbone visible below the vest was a spiky one, and that the tailbones didn't disfigure the vest too much, then went outside on a not-too-horrible day to glue it all together. 

     It took some doing, so I got it all nicely bent into a more natural shape, and everything turned out really well. Only one thing left - bags!

     I waffled for a while on how sturdy to make them, and eventually went with leather that was thin enough that I could sew it carefully on the sewing machine. Two simple bags with lacing along the bottom to keep them against the legs. 

     The narrower one is sized exactly to my cell phone, and the larger one is for keys, makeup, safety pins, etc.: emergency stuff. There's no hardware to close them, because they're not meant to attract the eye, and they're level with my hands, so I don't expect pickpocketing to be a huge issue. I sewed some snaps to the leather laces to keep them attached, then looked at how to attach it to the belt. I had some random extra leather strapping lying around, but it was too narrow, and I didn't have enough to make both bags with the straps doubled up.

     I ordered 1" leather strapping for that final piece; once that comes in, I'll cut it to length, add snaps to connect it to the belt, and sew it to the pouches. After all the fittings and tweaks, it turned out that the belt was a little too large, so I cut about 2 1/2" off the front piece and redyed and tooled it. Once that dries, I'll burnish the new edges, and this outfit will officially be DONE!

Taboo cosplay: Pauldrons and mask

     The costume is starting to come together! Got the vest with spine, the legs, and the bracers done; ordered a pair of black boots that I happen to know are super comfy, as well as a black underlayer shirt, and, well, we're still ignoring the jeans/ pants issue. Shhh. I'll get to it, eventually. Next up, shoulders and a mask!

     Taboo's "outfit" goes through a fair bit of change between when she starts out in the Wildstorm series and where she ends up, as a fully-armored, bat-winged vampire lady (of sorts). By the time I started the shoulders and mask, the convention in Cali that I was initially making this for had been cancelled due to the pandemic, but I'd still like to have a fairly transportable cosplay for any future travel plans, so I'm still trying to keep her fairly low-key. That means no bulky items like huge, spiky shoulder pieces or a big mask, so I kept it simple. 

Taboo cosplay: Greaves and bracers

     The vest and spine (previous post) was a good starting place for the Taboo cosplay. It gave me a centerpiece and a style to build off of. I briefly played with making a tail, then realized I couldn't do that until I knew where the waistband of whatever pants I'd be wearing was. Put the tail on hold and finally got around to trying to make jeans, but it went a little sideways. Literally - I though I'd tweaked the pattern well, but after washing, the fly was off to one side and they were huge. Frustrated, I set the jeans and the tail aside, and went for something I knew I could make: leg and forearm armor. 

     Some googling led me to "The Armor Archive," really meant for actual metal armorers, but hey, good enough for me. Downloaded a copy of the greaves pattern, then played with it til it was roughly the shape I was after. Ran into a hang-up, of course, on what color to make it. The character has a purple base layer with black armor bits, but dang if I could find either a reasonable pair of purple pants, or even purple denim. Finally decided to just wear black pants, and make the greaves and bracers both black and purple, to break up the unrelieved black color scheme. Since I still had purple denim left over from the vest, I just glued that onto the greaves first, then cut out leather bits to glue around it, giving it a 3D look:

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.

Fun with leatherworking: lightsaber holder

     Had some free time today and decided to try making a lightsaber holder for the Jedi outfit. I ran out of time on the original outfit and just braided twine together, made a slipknot, and hung it off my belt that way, but it wasn't really solid and looked kind of silly up close.

     Since I've gotten some experience in leatherworking with the Thor costume, I figured I could at least make an attempt at a nicer holder. I'll skip the obvious fails - where I learned what thickness leather to use, why fabric snaps don't work on thick leather, and that metal snaps scratch up a metal lightsaber handle - and stick to the winning learning process. Started out with a paper pattern, made sure it was long enough to loop over the thicker-than-average Jedi belt, then added arms to wrap around the thinner areas:

Thor cosplay: Leathercrafting

All Thor posts can be found here.

     When I started working at my current job, the entire department was a mess. Things were tucked into random hiding places, nobody knew exactly what we had for office supplies, and there was tons of stuff laying around unused. Being the minimalist organizer that I am, I set about inventorying and cleaning up, and discovered a huge (3' tall, 7" in diameter) roll of thick brown paper that no one knew the purpose of. I didn't want to get rid of it, in case it turned out to be useful later, but I did cut off about 50' and take it home for crafting purposes, and it has been absolutely indispensable.

     One of the occasions for its use was the belt for Thor. The character has a wide belt that is clearly shaped to fit closely at the top and the bottom; a belt made from a straight piece of leather will not do that on a curved body. Since my hips are 14" larger than my waist, I've generally just not worn belts in the past, but this outfit required it, so... break out the brown paper! I tried several curves and front shapes until I found one that looked and fit well, and then had to decide what to make the belt out of.

     Many of the cosplays I've seen have made the belt out of pleather or stiffened fabric, and to my eye, it detracts from the overall look. I have never worked with leather before, but, I figured, how hard can it be? Don't get me wrong, the super fancy, fitted, articulated, tooled stuff must take a heck of a lot of time, but one belt? Can't be too bad. And for once, I was right.