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The Hero’s Closet

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Published on December 10, 2014 at 512 × 512 in Large Blog Image

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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!

Mobility was a major goal for my Tifa build becaus

Mobility was a major goal for my Tifa build because her athleticism is such a defining trait, and the practical skort is one of my favorite things about her new look. While I may be more craft gremlin than gymnast these days, there's enough juice in these old bones to pretend for a few minutes. (Though I'm still working on her chin-up record).

Oh, and the handmade gloves and shoes held up better than my knees did. 😅

Thanks @cornettocosplay for the video!

#tifacosplay #tifalockhartcosplay #finalfantasy7remake #ff7cosplay #ff7remakecosplay #cosplaycraft #cosmaker #handmadecosplay

Fancy abs! Officially checking off the lower torso

Fancy abs! Officially checking off the lower torso armor for this costume. The leather plates were wet-shaped, tooled, dyed, and highlighted with gold paint, then sewn by hand to the steel-boned vest. The worbla breastplate will attach on top with a combination of hooks and magnets, and I wanted to finish the base before starting that piece so that everything would match up perfectly. So that’ll be the next step now!

I also finished the undersuit, which has been sitting around half done for about a month now. The fabric is a coated doubleknit I’ve had stashed for a couple years - I think it actually came from the much-missed Paron Fabrics - and I added gold leather piping on the collar to help tie it into the armor. The pattern is my own, based on the jumpsuit from the book but modified to remove the side seams for a slightly cleaner line. All the seams are pinked and topstitched as well, to keep everything as flat and smooth as possible, and it closes up the front with a heavy-duty invisible zipper.

#cosplayarmormaking #leatherarmor #cosplaywip #cosprogress #cosmaker

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

Vambrace complete! This is my first real armor pie

Vambrace complete! This is my first real armor piece in leather, except for the elbow bit which is sculpted in worbla. I used a medium (6oz?) veg tan for the base layer and decorative red plates, and odds and ends of other things for everything else, including some leftovers from the boots. You can’t see much except on the top binding, but there’s quite a bit of hand sewing in there to hold things together because I don’t fully trust rivets or glue.

My favorite bit is probably the pivot at the elbow, which I worked out through a long series of paper mock-ups because I wanted to preserve as much mobility as possible. What’s the point of cosplaying the pull-ups champ if you can’t move in her costume?

#cosplaywip #cosmaker #cosplayarmor #leatherarmor #ff7cosplay #tifacosplay #peeressofpullups

It’s not that this project exactly demanded nast

It’s not that this project exactly demanded nasty sharp pointy teeth,but I wanted to make them and so here we are. Loosely based on opossum teeth, i.e. I did several hours of hilarious image research but then sat down and sculpted from memory because it’s a fantasy creature and I don’t need exact accuracy.

I started with a wire frame and wrapped it in muslin strips, which solved the problem I’ve encountered previously where the wire retains heat and cuts through the hot worbla as you shape it. Then I laid down a strip of mesh worbla because I knew it would grip the muslin well, and black worbla on top for the sculptability. Finally I hand shaped the teeth and set them into the jaw one by one, working from front to back and making sure the jaw still closed well each time I added a new pair.

The head these go into isn’t quite ready for prime time yet, but she’s looking less cursed every day so she’ll be along soon enough!

#cosprogress #cosplaywip #worblasblackart #worbla #handsculpting #monstermaking #cosmaker

The women of Monstress fascinate me because they’re unabashedly terrible most of the time (well, except maybe Kippa.) The Warlord is exactly what you would expect from her title: brutal, remorseless, secure in her power and willing to use it. The series resists easy hero/villain categorizations, and it’s not even clear to me that she and her niece are necessarily enemies, but they’re not likely to get along either. As of last issue they’re finally in the same room and the tension is off the charts so if you’re looking for a reason to binge through five volumes this is your gentle nudge to hop to it.

I like how this picture shows off the sculpted detailing on the armor, and I’m hugely relieved at how well the worbla and leather components blend. The gloves I actually made a couple years ago for something completely different, but I felt like they fit the theme and was happy to have a reason to dig them out again.

Worbla’s Black Art for the armor was provided by @worblana , and the build tutorial is coming soon to their site. The Warlord is a concept art variant of the character from Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s Monstress.

#cosplayarmor #armorbuild #worblaarmor #worbla #worblasblackart #leatherarmor #monstress #monstresscosplay #imagecomics #cosmaker #cosplaycraft

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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