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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!

Tifa’s sonic strikers done! I wanted to do somet

Tifa’s sonic strikers done! I wanted to do something different from her default glove set, and I happened to have bits and pieces of all four leather colors in my stash already. I also love the weird lines and padded details on this pair, which made for a nice little patternmaking challenge and construction puzzle.

These were started back when I did @kathleenconahan’s Tifa costume about a year ago, and when I finally dragged them back out last week it turned out there was only about a long weekend of work left in them. The entire pair is assembled by hand with lapped seams and bitty little backstitches, because hand sewing is relaxing and wrestling tiny little pieces of soft leather through my machine is not. I still have to give my spiffy new wheel-style roller foot a try, but that’ll have to be the next weird little project.

#finalfantasy7cosplay #ff7remake #tifacosplay #cosplaywip #cosplaybuild #glovemaking

Swipe for full length!

I recently reminded mysel

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

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

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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