Proof that I haven’t forgotten AB is next weekend! Spent some time yesterday touching up my Maryam wigs and making my adult-Maryam horns taller and a little thicker, because I wasn’t happy with them at Katsu.
And Kanaya’s skirt is nearly done, it just needs a waistband. Also, I never fully conceptualize how tall I am until I actually put my dressform to my actual height and then it’s like ‘wow uh that was more unexpected than it should be’
Beforus Kanaya, now with less things being held together with pins and better photographs. Turned out I needed more buttons than I had bought, though, and we were snowed in today.
Also, finished painting my armor for Dolorosa! Tomorrow’s big task is making a harness to mount it on. This was my first piece of complicated armor and it was…. a learning experience, we shall say. But overall I’m pretty pleased - the raised, painted trim looks great.
Cosplay WIP - Beforus Kanaya
This is what I’ve been working on all week instead of posting (well, along with my other two Katsu cosplays). Shitty phone cam picture, but I am tired, I’ll take more tomorrow when I actually finish
I actually started basically a week ago and given the amount of sewing I’ve been doing on things, it feels like a really long time but objectively it isn’t.
Tomorrow: finish everything.
Dolorosa WIP
I said there would be real photos AND LO, THERE ARE. The armor is actually starting to look good and not like some terrible DBZ knock-off, though I still need to finish doing trim on the back and sides, and make the collar portion. Then… filling and sanding. So much filling and sanding.
Also, the laziest wig and make-up test - mostly I wanted to make sure the wig would hold its shape when I took it off the wig head. I have literally zero skin products on and am just naturally undead-looking, though the black doesn’t help.
My big goal was to try and get Katsucon costumes done by the end of my winter break, which was technically was Monday, though we had a snow day so actually today. Surprising nobody who actually knows me, I did not actually accomplish that (though I did pretty well). Project statuses:
Dolorosa
-sewing virtually done
-armor… half done?
-need to make horns
Wonderland Seishirou
-Everything done but the coat
-Coat is probably one day of work (goddamn gold trim everywhere)
-Decided I don’t really need the giant pocketwatch for Katsu because I don’t hate myself that much
Beforus Kanaya
-I have a bustle?
-And part of a skirt draft?
On the upside, I have a mock-up for Kanaya’s red skirt (for Anime Boston), and dyed a whole bunch of silk (for Anime Central stuff) and once I actually drape this dress I can reuse like 90% of the pattern for a dress for Teslacon.
That’s it, I give up. The universe clearly wants me to work exclusively in silk and wool.
The striped olive green fabric? $22 for the fabric, $6 in dye, most of my afternoon. The forest green? $7 of fabric, $5 of dye, four days. The blue-green? $5 of fabric, maybe $10 of dye, ten minutes. I’m so mad. (I may end up hitting it with a little more green to keep from going too teal, but we’ll see how the black look first)
The wool was $19/yd (sob sob) and took me two and a half hours to dye but I’m not sure it’s actually possible to get a more exact color match for that fucked up shade of light salmon.
This is what four days of failure looks like. And why I haven’t been posting any cosplay work, I’m still too angry at this to want to do anything else. And I spent the weekend basically being a zombie, which didn’t help.
BASICALLY. Tried to cold-batch dye black stripes on, and then overdye in green. The stripe edges look great. The color? Nooooot so much. With the black, some of it was me working too slowly - that’s why it’s noticably darker at one end than the other. The mix starts reacting as soon as you mix it, so by the time I’d worked my way down a lot of the dye had already reacted and didn’t bind to the cloth. Also my house is freezing, and they recommend temps above 70F at least to get the best color. And black is hard no matter what.
I’m still not 100% sure why the green fucked up so badly - dye bath might have been too hot? Rayon doesn’t like dye? I DON’T KNOW. I wish I did.
Ultimately I bought some 1” black/white stripe cotton knit and I’m going to get Jacquard iDye in green because while it’s not as wash-fast as fiber reactive dyes, it’s less fussy.
Cosplay WIP - Dolorosa wig and mantle
AKA yes I did actually hand stripe two yards of silk organza because I hate myself. I’m pretty happy with the results - didn’t come out perfect (my tape lines weren’t all amazingly straight and some bleed a little), but it looks really good.
The wig is kind of… me playing with things, because both Kanaya and the Dolorosa have weird spikes of hair at either side and the ancestor hair is generally kind of… bigger. It looks a little 50s with the curls at the end of the spikes, but I think it works.
Cosplay WIP - Dolorosa & fancytier Aradia
I was going to go fabric-shopping and then remembered I have no money right now so I came home and worked on stuff. Finished dyeing the red silk for my shirt for Aradia, which, lined up with the others, is making me even more ‘ehhhhhh’ on the overdyed wool. Guess I’ll do some looking around.
And then I made the tunic and belt for Dolorosa, probably making this costume look easier than it’s going to be by doing all the simple parts first. Tunic was loosely cut out based on a t-shirt that fits me, serged, twin-needle hem, broke one of the needles, had to take out the sleeve hem I’d done and do everything with a wider twin needle….
The belt is a big stretchy loop because I have stretch fabric and I’m tired of having to secure sash-ends in ways that always look lousy. I did manage to sew it into an unending tube and a mobius strip, which is maybe a sign I should pay better attention to orientation.
Cosplay WIP - Dolorosa
…Okay not actually super-exciting, but I cut it out at like eight last night and now it’s done, so there’s some pride to that. Got a nice quarter-inch black/green stripe stretch rayon, and then cut both tiers out on the bias, using a long stretch-knit skirt I had as a template. Serged the sides together, hemmed both with a twin needle, and then folded a strip of fabric around some nice wide elastic and serged that on too.
(and I actually have space to put the dressform in the sewing room now! Just barely)
So I’ve been 3/4ths zombie this week and the only creative things I’ve gotten done is fabric dyeing. This stuff’s for my fancytier Aradia, based on rumminov’s design.
The velvet, lace, and ribbon all started out white, and were dyed with Jaquard’s iDye Natural in Crimson (all the dark red fiber-reactive dyes looked like they pulled really purple).
The light red is a poly-wool gabardine blend I dyed with iDye Poly in Red - it started out pink (underneath the dyed fabric in the first photo). It’s certainly a change, but it’s kind of lacking the color intensity I was hoping for. I’ll see how it looks once I do the shirt fabric and can put all of them together.
(this has kind of been my problem with iDye Poly every time I’ve used it - the saturation is lousy)
Finished objects from today! My shirt and vest for Wonderland Seishirou, and my Echolaria shawl I started back in July. The shawl still needs to be blocked, which is why it looks like a tiny balled up frumpy mess, but I need to find sufficient space to do that here.
The shirt and vest are pretty much done-done, though. Hand-stitching done, buttons sewed on, edges finished, etc. The only reason the cuffs are pinned is because they’re double-barrel French cuffs and I don’t have cufflinks for them yet. In retrospect I maybe should have done bound-buttonholes on the vest, but they’re such a pain. If I end up feeling really strongly about it later, I can take out the inside finishing seam, rip out the current buttonholes, and add them. We’ll see.
Tomorrow I think I’m going to finish one of my repair projects (probably Jedistuck Aradia or Phoenix) and maybe start in on Rufus’s jacket….
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