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The Hero’s Closet

G_owl

Published on October 23, 2014 at 280 × 427 in G_owl

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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!

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

Spent the weekend building Tifa’s heavy-duty sus

Spent the weekend building Tifa’s heavy-duty suspenders and I’m pretty pleased with how they came out! The straps are veg tan leather, dyed with water-based dye so I could do it at midnight in my living room. The wider tabs are a thin goatskin garment leather, with light buckram glued between the layers for stability and wool felt shoulder padding. There’s also a hidden bit of elastic in the shoulder so the rigid leather straps have some give to them; hoping this makes them a little more comfortable to wear and also helps them stay put with movement.
Still have to work out attaching them to the waistband/belt; I want them to be fully removable for convenience/washability but still accurate to the art. I think I’m going to make the belt next so I’ll have it for testing when I come back to these.
#cosplaycraft #tifalockhartcosplay #tifacosplay #cosmaker #cosplaywip #leathercrafting

So I nearly forgot to talk about this at all in pr

So I nearly forgot to talk about this at all in prejudging (thanks @pitchforkcosplay for the timely reminder) but I’m actually really happy with how the new scabbard turned out and I don’t want it to get overshadowed entirely by the boots. This was my first real attempt at tooled leather, using a medium-weight veg tan leather from Tandy (don’t remember the exact thickness.) I created the pattern by wrapping the sword in tinfoil and tape, drew out the design by hand, and transferred it to the leather by rubbing a soft pencil on the back of the pattern. Then I etched the whole thing with a swivel knife and opened up the lines a bit with a modeling tool to make them more pronounced. I actually carved the whole thing twice because I wasn’t thrilled with how it came out the first time.
I cut a plastic template for the finished scabbard shape and stitched the center back seam closed over it, then slid in a dowel that I’d shaved into a point to force it into the oval shape while it dried. I also added some scraps of cardboard to ensure the finished shape would be open enough to fit the sword.
Once the scabbard was dry I re-wet it lightly and dyed it with water-based leather dye ordered from @sorrellcustomboots , then finished it off a light wax coating. I adore how this dye worked out - there’s no separate antiquing or painted weathering going on here, just the dye itself and how it settled into the tooling.
The end caps are worbla painted with metallic acrylics, and the straps are just scrap leather lightly painted with the same stuff. The upper clasp hooks into my armor strapping, and the lower strap attaches to my belt to keep the scabbard from swinging. I’ll probably do a blog post a bit later with all the wip photos, but the folks who’ve been following my stories have seen most of it already.
#leathercrafting #cosplayprop #propmaking #witchercosplay #ciricosplay #thewitcher3wildhunt #zireael

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

It’s been a whole year since my big bootmaking p

It’s been a whole year since my big bootmaking project and apparently I forgot just enough of the misery to decide to tackle creature feet. So yes these are also boots, but designed to look like weird toes in a little sandal, and yes I built them completely from scratch because I enjoy suffering, apparently.

The upper part of the boot is constructed pretty normally, with leather outside and a cotton canvas lining (but suede for the toe and heel where I needed to shape it around the last). The toes are 3mm wool felt covered in wool interlock knit, with loose wool fiber needle felted over the top to hide the seams and give the illusion of fur. I hand sculpted the claws in worbla, with a little knob on the back to insert in the toe seam. I stitched the toes to a separate leather lining before attaching them to the uppers, then stretched that over the lining and stiffeners like you’d normally do for a shoe. This is a mostly cemented construction due to time constraints, but with a lot of creative use of water-based glues which will probably be fine considering these are...for extremely occasional wear.

I’m not feeling quite brave enough to take them off the lasts yet, so we’ll see how they actually perform at some later date when I’ve summoned up the necessary fortitude.

#shoemaking #monstermaking #cosplaywip #cosmaker #cosprogress #freyacrescent #finalfantasyix #finalfantasy9

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

Recent Posts

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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