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The Hero’s Closet

08carve

Published on March 14, 2020 at 1200 × 1200 in 08carve

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Hey there!

I’m Gillian, a cosplayer, writer, editor, and occasional illustrator with an unruly fabric habit. I love patternmaking, fabric manipulation, embellishment, and big, ambitious projects.

My book The Hero’s Closet is available now!

So this is what happens when I attempt a moderatel

So this is what happens when I attempt a moderately ambitious superhero build in one month. I end up with no brain cells left to get a decent picture of the thing while I’m wearing it 😓

Regardless, I thought I’d at least share detail shots of some of the pieces I made. The top and pants are heavyweight ponte knit detailed in leather, which was a little softer than I wanted (thus some wrinkles) but gave me the opaque high-contrast look I was hoping for. The armor is worbla (normal and mesh versions) with some oaktag for structure, strapped together with Chicago screws hidden underneath the spikes. The spikes are also oaktag, reinforced and glued on with kobracast, with some extra worbla sculpted around the base of each one to give them a textured crudely-welded-together look.

I didn’t get to finish all the details I wanted for the boot covers, but they’re a medium-weight garment leather backed with canvas for structure and glued down on a platform sneaker base. My favorite thing about the boots is that they’re held together entirely by stitching and water-based glue - no solvents required. To accomplish this I sewed a strip of leather around the base of the faux leather shoe, which gave the glue something to stick to so I wouldn’t need to crack open the death snot. They held up totally fine for a long convention day with lots of walking, so I’d definitely use this method again!

The sword was the major crunch casualty, and didn’t get lights or the level of finish I put into the other pieces, but it was close enough to complete the look and didn’t fall apart. It’s made of thin plastic, frosted glass effect vinyl, a layer of tracing paper to finesse the opacity, cardboard, oaktag, and an embarrassing amount of worbla just kind of piled on there until it didn’t wobble anymore 😬

Not perfect, but it was a good palate cleanser between competition builds and gave me something new to wear to nycc (which I love dearly even though it’s a crowded exhausting capitalist nightmare.) Now it’s time to get serious about my Empress build and see if I can’t bash it out before C2E2.

#cosmaker #cosplayarmor #magik #illyanarasputin #marvelcosplay #cosplaycraft

Okay, heck, this is the coolest dang thing. I deci

Okay, heck, this is the coolest dang thing. I decided I’m restarting the boot project, because the leather I originally picked is too soft and I don’t think it’ll hold up well or look good when worn for real (note lots of wrinkles, awkward lump over the ankle of my jeans.)
So this means I need to get them off the lasts in order to start the new pair, which means I can TRY THEM ON, and hot dang if it isn’t a rad feeling to put a boot I sewed from scratch on my actual foot.
The good news: It fits! These lasts were an etsy find, and I was pretty astonished to have found my bizarre size at all, so it’s great to have confirmation that they’ll do the job.
Someday maybe I’ll come back to these and add the sole and heel so they’re actually wearable, although I don’t have high hopes for their durability - now that they’re on, they feel about as substantial as my wool socks.
Still, an awesome learning experience and an excellent practice run for what I hope will be a much more functional final pair!
#cosplaywip #cosmaker #cosprogress #learningnewskills

Apparently I like making swords now? Baffling. I’ve been working on Utena for AnimeNYC and was worried about getting the Sword of Dios done in time, but then I just sort of went ahead and ground the whole thing out in one ten-hour binge.
I used basically the same method I used for my Ciri sword, but slightly simplified since this one doesn’t have a silly cutout in it. I started with a 1/8” kite rod core, and made the blade with creased oaktag backed in kobracast. I bulked up the hilt by wrapping the core in cotton string, then wrapped it in worbla and sculpted the details on top. The stone in the hilt is crystal worbla pellets colored with liquid watercolor (which was a bit awkward to work with and dyed my hands green) and a little bit of metallic powder pigment. I finished it with a rose-shaped bead for the pommel, held on with a loop of wire and a scrap of kobracast. Just needs priming and painting now!
#cosplayprop #propbuilding #worbla #utena #utenacosplay #swordofdios #animenyc #cosplaywip #cosprogress #cosmaker

Stealing my own thunder a bit but holy heck dudes

Stealing my own thunder a bit but holy heck dudes check it out. My sister @kathleenconahan commissioned me to make a Tifa for her as well, and while mine’s still in progress hers got shipped out at the beginning of this month. She just sent these photos of the whole thing (which are way radder than anything I can get while holed up in my brooklyn cave, lbr) and I’m beside myself with glee.

Kathleen made her own earrings, materia wristband, and gloves, with hand-etched aluminum plates. I made the skort, tops, leather vambrace, belt/suspenders, socks, and arm warmers. 📸 by @jeremysilvertongue

#tifacosplay #tifalockhartcosplay #ff7cosplay #ffviicosplay #finalfantasycosplay #leatherarmor #cosplayarmor #cosplaycommission

SheProp Challenge day 12: favorite character. This

SheProp Challenge day 12: favorite character. This one deserves a real post, yes? Maika is my favorite character I’ve cosplayed for a lot of reasons - her toughness, her resilience, her gradual process of making peace with an internal demon that periodically sneaks out and eats people.

I based this armor on the cover of Monstress issue 13, which I adored so much that I completed most of the build in the two months between when the cover was revealed and the issue actually came out. It was my first big go at worbla armor, and you could call it my first attempt at monster building as well. (I want to remake Zinn at some point, but it’ll probably be a new version for Empress rather than a revisit of this one.)

I wish I could bring Maika out more often but she’s also by far my most difficult costume to wear, between the ridiculous amount of worbla and the floppy unbalanced demon arm. I can manage maybe two hours before I have to go lie down, so she’ll probably never make it to NYCC, for example.

I’m perpetually astonished that Monstress doesn’t get more cosplayers; it’s a glorious fantasy epic with the kind of detail-rich visuals that most of my friends salivate over. I’m about to dive back into my Shaman Empress build, so there’ll be lots more monstress content around here pretty soon, but more people should join @pitchforkcosplay and me in yelling about this series.

#shepropchallenge #monstress #monstresscosplay #worblaarmor #worblasfinestart #cosplayarmor

It's the shoemaking wrap-up post! Making Ciri's bo

It's the shoemaking wrap-up post! Making Ciri's boots was a goal from pretty early in the project, and I made the pattern and my first attempt at sewing the uppers way back in fall of 2018. Then I sat on them for a good 10 months while working on other things, and only came back to the project briefly and unsuccessfully in July of last year. Finally at the beginning of February I decided to go for it for real, and this is the result.
The entire process of building the boots is documented in my story highlights, and I'm planning a build diary post as well, so I'll just do a quick summary here. I used a lightweight but fairly stiff buffalo leather for the uppers, pig suede for the linings, and super thick veg tan insole and sole leather. The uppers are assembled with lapped seams, glued and then hand sewn in topstitching thread with a saddle stitch. The lining is the same, but sewn by machine because it's mostly not visible.
For safety reasons I don't use solvent-based glues at home, and standard cemented shoemaking uses a lot of them. Instead I decided to attempt a traditional hand-welted construction for the soles. In this method the insole is carved out and pre-punched with stitching holes, then hand sewn with the uppers to a welt, which is a strip of leather that's then stitched down to the sole. The technique is pretty much only used for very high-end and custom work today, but might be pretty normal in the kind of fantasy-medieval villages Ciri traipses through. It also probably added 40-50 hours of physically demanding labor to the project, so that tells you roughly how deep my hatred of barge goes.
The heels are stacked leather, assembled with nails and water-based glue, except for the rubber end cap which I glued in the fume hood at work. I wore these to C2E2 with the natural soles because I ran out of time, but now they've been finished off with the sole dye and polish as well. The whole thing is probably a little rustic looking for any fine shoemakers who might come across this, but this is the Witcher after all.
#cosplayshoes #cosplaycobbler #witchercosplay #ciricosplay #cosplaycraft
#cosmaker #leathercrafting

Recent Posts

How I made Ciri’s Boots
Building Ciri’s Sword and Scabbard
Ciri Chainmail
Embroidery Purgatory
Ciri Build Diary – An Introduction

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