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The Hero’s Closet

09pauldron10

Published on December 19, 2020 at 900 × 900 in 09pauldron10

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finished pauldron on dress form with mail vest

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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!

Spent my snow day finally making some progress on

Spent my snow day finally making some progress on the breastplate detailing. This is mostly me elaborating on the concept art to try to capture that Monstress look, so it’s all self-inflicted agony, but as always I underestimated just how long I can spend fussing with even a single pair of spirals trying to make them symmetrical. (They’re still not symmetrical and it’s also not done but I got tired okay)

There’s more of this sculpted detail on the pauldrons and hip armor, and I feel like I should continue it down the legs as well but also I want to finish this someday. We’ll see how long the really essential pieces take!

I ended up having to rework the attachment for the pauldrons, so those little shoulder tabs are unfortunately obsolete and will have to be replaced at some point. I was hoping to use swimsuit hooks, since they’re sturdy, flat, and easy to attach, but they seem to need quite a bit of tension in the strap in order to hold securely and they kept slipping out as I moved around. I’ll probably do a tab with heavy-duty snaps instead, but it might have to go on by hand since I’ve sewn all kinds of other junk to the vest in the meantime.

@worblana provided the Worbla’s Black Art for this piece!

#cosplaywip #worblaarmor #worblasblackart #cosplayarmor #cosmaker #cosprogress

The payoff for my satin stitch hell on Ciri is now

The payoff for my satin stitch hell on Ciri is now I can dash off a pair of these little jerks in about three hours (give or take another hour of nitpicking the symmetry.)

This is one of those cute little details that some game artist probably thought nothing of and nobody in their right mind would EVER design on a real garment. See how the little emblem crosses a seam? I don’t do a lot of machine embroidery but I bet a lot of them would just outright choke on the differences in thickness there, and in any case you’d have a hell of a time hooping it because it has to be done on the almost-complete garment. If it was all on one piece, the embroidery could have been done flat, before assembly, and made everyone’s lives a little easier. As it is, the only other way to do this would have been to embroider a patch and sew it on. Which is not what it looks like in the art!

Of course, this is me, so I require very little prompting to dig out the hand embroidery needles. Seam lumps aside, this was a pretty straightforward little design without any additional padding or anything. The main trick was transferring the tiny design, and I ended up printing out a vector version and glue sticking it onto wax tracing paper. Then I used cardboard shims on each side of the seam to level the fabric enough for a clean transfer and cleaned up the result with a gel pen. The hardest part was maintaining symmetry, since the lines are so tiny that a tiny little difference in interpretation can significantly change the look of the result. They’re not perfect, but after some ripping and tinkering I’m calling them close enough!

#tifacosplay #cosplaywip #handembroidery #handsewing #cosplaydetails #cosprogress

Armor update! I’m doing the back and lower torso

Armor update! I’m doing the back and lower torso in leather, hoping to strike a better balance of weight and flexibility than my last full armor costume. I’m building it around a little canvas vest that I made with steel bones for a smooth foundation, and I prepunched all the leather plates before dyeing so it should only take an evening or two to stitch everything on. Hoping to get to that this week, once everything is dry and has been buffed and polished a bit!

The detailing on this part of the armor is a little vague in the art, but the visual style of Monstress is all about elaborate ornamentation so I took the opportunity to play with tooling a little more. Although the nice natural shading is lost since I had to dye the whole thing black, I hit the designs with a leftover bit of the paint I mixed for the sword hilt, and I really like the way the faded gray-gold picks out the detail without highlighting the irregularities too much.

#cosplaywip #cosplayarmormaking #leatherarmor #cosplaycraft #cosprogress #cosplayarmor

Apparently it’s #worldembroideryday so I guess t

Apparently it’s #worldembroideryday so I guess that merits a post even though I have been very lazy about the socials lately. Almost all of my projects involve handwork of some kind or another, so here’s a selection of mostly wip photos from recent, upcoming, and unearthed-from-the-archives projects.

In order: blouse detail for my perpetually upcoming Shaman Empress build from Monstress, banners from concept art Warlord, skirt emblem for Tifa, Ciri’s skirt, Scarlet Witch (Wada version), and the coattails from AC2 Ezio which was my very first big build. Looking at these, my tastes clearly skew toward the minimal and monochromatic, so I’m going to renew my challenge to myself to use more color in my upcoming projects. And probably do a lot more projects in black/white/gray/gold because who am I kidding really.

#handembroidery #cosplaywip #cosplaysewing #cosplaycraft #satinstitch

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

So Tifa is nearly there except for a bit more leat

So Tifa is nearly there except for a bit more leatherwork and the gloves, and the Empress is still simmering along (currently waiting for a mildly obscene quantity of embroidery thread to ship.) But in the meantime I have NEWS my friends because my Monstress obsession cannot be stopped

A few months back when I turned THAT page in issue 28 and frightened the neighbors with my shrieks, I reluctantly tucked the Warlord’s battle gear away in the’ someday’ file because I am but a small underemployed costumer in these perilous times and a colossal armor build was RIGHT OUT.

But then along came the fine folks at @worblana with their sponsored build program, and now I’m delighted to announce that heavy armor Warlord is a GO. As soon as I got the news I started sketching, so here's a whole mess of me trying to plan out specific shapes and construction details so I can start making the patterns.

I ended up not going for the sci-fi-flavored on-page version, but for one of the concept sketches included as bonus material in the trade collection, as I think this one will lend itself a little better to being sculpted by hand. Definitely making the sword though; it’s basically the ultimate in over-the-top fantasy sword nonsense and I haven’t done any props in this style yet.

The Cosplay Supplies lovelies are providing Worbla’s Black Art that I’ll be using to build the sword, armor, and helmet. Since this is a sponsored build I’ll be doing a couple of detailed tutorials for the Worbla site in addition to my more informal documentation here, so this is your chance if you’ve been wanting a closer look at how I work with the stuff. I haven’t done a full armor build since Maika, and I’m hyped to apply some of the more detailed sculpting methods I acquired making Ciri’s bits and pieces. Plus, you know, keeping busy does a brain good. Hope you’ll follow along with me!

#worblasblackart #worbla #cosplayarmor #monstresscosplay #cosplans #cosplaywip

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Why I Draft my Own Patterns
The Problem of Categorizing Cosplay
How I made Ciri’s Boots
Building Ciri’s Sword and Scabbard
Ciri’s Armor (Pauldron and Poleyns)

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