Backlash cosplay: Hood and wig

      The gentleman's Backlash cosplay is mostly done, barring - of course - the pieces that I need to work on. The character has a "mask" of sorts, that is drawn as just fabric. The gentleman, however, needs to wear glasses, so we had to be a little more inventive. The gentleman found a person online that makes custom masks, and had an option for glasses lenses, resulting in a pretty dang bad-ass looking mask:

      He then ordered a wig, since the character has white hair and that would not go over well at work. 

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!

Backlash cosplay: Pants

     The gentleman decided to do a military-style take on his cosplay for Backlash, since he's not super keen on the idea of spandex. I certainly can't blame him, I didn't want to do it for his partner, Taboo, either.

     Since the gentleman wears BDU pants for work anyway, he ordered a pair in dark blue as a base to start from. They were a little light, so I dyed them darker, then took off the cargo pockets, so I could add the white stripes. This is where I very much appreciate heavy fabric in general, and ripstop in particular - once you get a seam partly unraveled, you can just rip the two pieces apart, knowing the seam will go and not the fabric itself. 

     It took some doing to find white ripstop material, since most people want ripstop for tough wearing, which is not really synonymous with situations where white would be useful. I did eventually find a reputable website that had it though, and ordered the 2 yard minimum. Turns out it's good I overordered, because one layer of it against the dark blue looked kind of dingy. Two layers, though, looked pretty decent, so I cut out basic shapes to the gentleman's dimensions and sewed them on.

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.

Valkyrie cosplay: Design and vest

     Bolstered by the success of Thor, I'm starting not one but two slightly more ambitious cosplays. The second one (more on the first later) is the character than Jane Foster became after putting down Mjolnir: Valkyrie. 

     First things first - I am not going to wear a spandex onesie as a base, because a) I'm not that in shape yet, and b) bathroom reasons. I've talked to many cosplayers who have said they just don't drink or use the bathroom when they cosplay, but that's not really an attractive option to me. So - top and leggings, and bathroom-friendly. 

Thor cosplay: End result

Note: links to the post for individual parts are at the end of the post.

     I started costuming in 1996, my senior year of high school, when I learned there was a ren faire opening nearby and they wanted workers/ actors. We weren't wealthy, so when I was hired and took a look at buying an outfit (for a part-time job, mind you), I balked at the prices, thinking "I can probably make that on my own!" The first year's outfit wasn't anything fancy, but it worked and I was encouraged to keep going, trying for something better the next year. 

     I stopped working ren faires in 2006, but still made clothes and occasional costumes for fun. In 2017, I decided to take it up a notch and try my hand at thermoplastics, adding armor to my costumes. It took 2 years (while working on my Master's degree and other things), over 176 hours, and... well we won't talk about the cost... but I finally finished my first thermoplasic cosplay and debuted it at Baltimore Comic Con. I did not enter the costume contest due to scheduling conflicts, but if the number of times I (and my friend who came with) were stopped and asked for pictures is any measure of success, I'd say I made it. 

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: Fabric parts

All Thor posts can be found here.

     I started the idea of the Thor cosplay back in 2017, while I was still working on my Master's degree. The first piece (bracer) took about 4 months, and the hammer wasn't finished until the end of 2018, mostly due to time and prioritizing other hobbies. While several of the pieces overlapped at the end of 2018, it wasn't until early 2019 when I realized I wanted to actually get serious and finish the cosplay in time for this year's Baltimore ComicCon.

     Most of the things I've made start out with a base pattern and get modded along the way. I'd done a sketch of the Thor skirt and... tabard? Skirt tabard? Frontispiece? Whatever it was called, I wanted it to be on the same waistband as the skirt, because I hate layering things. I started with Simplicty pattern 8719, made a mock-up for the draping back, cut it down, made another for the front drape, cut THAT down, and then laid all three of the pieces out to make the final.