So, this isn't much of a post because I'm taking short lunches all week so I can leave early for pre-reg badge pick-up on Thursday. But what the hell.
While it will be many more blog posts until all the information is up, I have finished my Haruhi costume. And 4 days ahead of time! Hurrah.
Wow. That was...daunting.
There was a point in time this Friday night as I struggled to finish the top that I wasn't sure I was going to make it this time, that I'd set my hopes too high and the costume was beyond my ability to make not look like fugg.
A dark time, since a detail-oriented obsessive personality like mine usually means I've planned every last detail (or tried to) before committing to a task. But there you are.
Still, I bucked up because really--what else was there to do? Not finish? Give up and accept a bunked-up result? Hell no.
This was by far the most difficult costume I've ever put together. It is leaps and bounds the hardest sewing project I've ever done. But it's completed now, and the rest is candy.
Bring on the candy.
~Raiphin
Monday, March 29, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
This is how the magic happens, people. Pay attention.
I've been sick, which was super-great. It's now one weekend until the convention and I still have some serious work to do, not my favorite place to be. But I'm at work on my lunch hour, so while I can't catch up on that I can get started with how I made the top of Haruhi's outfit.
As you can tell from my pictures about the straps, I'm basing all this on that bra. BUT I want the top to be bigger than the bra, so I had to draft out how I wanted it to look. I put the bra on me, for starters, and took a look at where my curves are--waist, and such. In most of the pictures available Haruhi has the world's LONGEST TORSO EVER and, well, I don't.
I do, however, have a lovely hourglass figure and I want to use it to the max.
As such, I wanted the end of the top(ruffle bottom included) so stop high enough above the smallest point of my waist that the difference would be visible. Reference pictures seem to put the top just at her waist, or at least where it would be on me--but that makes me look stumpier than I need to. *
*a point of philosophy, if you will: One of the rules I have in cosplay is that I will modify the proportion of a costume in order to better suit my body. I think this gives a more purposeful, realistic feel than if I tried to be 100% accurate. On your own costumes, you make the call.
One of the things to note also is that by making the top shorter than the reference pictures, I had to change the number of criss-crosses in the front of Haruhi's top to avoid having the area look scrunched. I'm doing 2 crosses instead of three.
So, in the mirror I gave a good hard look at my bits and pieces and came up with about where I wanted the top to end. Then I put the bra back on my dress-form and took bits of muslin and pinned them all around where the top would be. I then cut away the exess muslin and drew in where I wanted to put seams on the top. The result looks like this:
The result is a bit hap-hazard, but not bad for my first attempt, eh? If you don't have a dress form you can get someone else to pin & draw, just be careful not to stab or be stabbed. You want to get a close but not TOO close fit--this is to get an estimate, and you need to be able to breathe. You should probably use one long piece of fabric for this rather than bits of pieces, but either way it works out.
After cutting the muslin down to size & drawing on the seams, I un-pinned the fabric and cut along the seams to make separate pieces of fabric to start my pattern.
As you can see, it's all rough right there. I labels the pieces to helop tell them apart--(Right Center Back, Right Back, Right Front, Right Center)
You only really need 1 set of the pattern, it's not like your right and left side are all that radically different from each other. AND it helps prevent wobbly boobage, which is not the goal.
Then I did some MATH.
I looked at the pieces and measured out (to the nearest .25", anyway) how big each piece was. Then I added .5" to all sides to account for seam allowance. Usually you do 3/8" for seam allowance, but who wants to measure that out? Bleh. So I get 1/2".
I then got a DIFFERENT piece of muslin and cut out the pattern AGAIN. Isn't this fun? It looks like this:
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/37157244@N03/4418676882/" title=" by raiphin, on Flickr">
Lovely. I sewed those pieces together to make both sides of the top (but am not sewing it together in the back. I want to use the bra clasp for security & a zipper or snaps or something over the top of that.) I then pinned the result to the dress form.
And that's when I noticed 2 things.
1) part of the front is sewn the wrong way. Make sure you know, really KNOW which side you're working on, because they look very, very similar if you're not careful.
2) Gap-age. There are gaps. Why are there gaps?
Ah, that'd be the hourglass figure I mentioned. Unfortunately--where sewing is concerned--I am not shaped like a tube. It would be a whole lot easier if I were, but there it is.
So. Now what? Now it gets interesting.
What I did was veeery careful put the whole concoction back on myself, and stare at the mirror again. Then I pinned the top on both sides in as close to an even manner as possible. It was also jutting down in a weird way, so I grabbed a Sharpie and drew where I wanted the bottom to end.
This is all a bit fiddly, I realize. I have a good eye for proportion & knew exactly what I wanted to achieve. If you have problems with this step, take a deep breath and figure out how what you've got differs from what you want and work from there. It'll take time and pain, but will be worth it.
In the end I got this:
You can see the sharpie lines, and how some of the edges are now curvier. I ended up straightening the seam that's under my arms from a curved seam to straight after this step, and that seemed to work fine.
Then, FINALLY, I cut my fabric. I used the black suiting I like so much at first, but it was too stretchy and I went back and got a nice easy black peachskin fabric instead and used that. After all that work on the pattern, I didn't *need* the stretch.
Whew. After all that, draping the white part should be a piece of cake right?
Right?
~Raiphin
hint: wrong.
As you can tell from my pictures about the straps, I'm basing all this on that bra. BUT I want the top to be bigger than the bra, so I had to draft out how I wanted it to look. I put the bra on me, for starters, and took a look at where my curves are--waist, and such. In most of the pictures available Haruhi has the world's LONGEST TORSO EVER and, well, I don't.
I do, however, have a lovely hourglass figure and I want to use it to the max.
As such, I wanted the end of the top(ruffle bottom included) so stop high enough above the smallest point of my waist that the difference would be visible. Reference pictures seem to put the top just at her waist, or at least where it would be on me--but that makes me look stumpier than I need to. *
*a point of philosophy, if you will: One of the rules I have in cosplay is that I will modify the proportion of a costume in order to better suit my body. I think this gives a more purposeful, realistic feel than if I tried to be 100% accurate. On your own costumes, you make the call.
One of the things to note also is that by making the top shorter than the reference pictures, I had to change the number of criss-crosses in the front of Haruhi's top to avoid having the area look scrunched. I'm doing 2 crosses instead of three.
So, in the mirror I gave a good hard look at my bits and pieces and came up with about where I wanted the top to end. Then I put the bra back on my dress-form and took bits of muslin and pinned them all around where the top would be. I then cut away the exess muslin and drew in where I wanted to put seams on the top. The result looks like this:
The result is a bit hap-hazard, but not bad for my first attempt, eh? If you don't have a dress form you can get someone else to pin & draw, just be careful not to stab or be stabbed. You want to get a close but not TOO close fit--this is to get an estimate, and you need to be able to breathe. You should probably use one long piece of fabric for this rather than bits of pieces, but either way it works out.
After cutting the muslin down to size & drawing on the seams, I un-pinned the fabric and cut along the seams to make separate pieces of fabric to start my pattern.
As you can see, it's all rough right there. I labels the pieces to helop tell them apart--(Right Center Back, Right Back, Right Front, Right Center)
You only really need 1 set of the pattern, it's not like your right and left side are all that radically different from each other. AND it helps prevent wobbly boobage, which is not the goal.
Then I did some MATH.
I looked at the pieces and measured out (to the nearest .25", anyway) how big each piece was. Then I added .5" to all sides to account for seam allowance. Usually you do 3/8" for seam allowance, but who wants to measure that out? Bleh. So I get 1/2".
I then got a DIFFERENT piece of muslin and cut out the pattern AGAIN. Isn't this fun? It looks like this:
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/37157244@N03/4418676882/" title=" by raiphin, on Flickr">
Lovely. I sewed those pieces together to make both sides of the top (but am not sewing it together in the back. I want to use the bra clasp for security & a zipper or snaps or something over the top of that.) I then pinned the result to the dress form.
And that's when I noticed 2 things.
1) part of the front is sewn the wrong way. Make sure you know, really KNOW which side you're working on, because they look very, very similar if you're not careful.
2) Gap-age. There are gaps. Why are there gaps?
Ah, that'd be the hourglass figure I mentioned. Unfortunately--where sewing is concerned--I am not shaped like a tube. It would be a whole lot easier if I were, but there it is.
So. Now what? Now it gets interesting.
What I did was veeery careful put the whole concoction back on myself, and stare at the mirror again. Then I pinned the top on both sides in as close to an even manner as possible. It was also jutting down in a weird way, so I grabbed a Sharpie and drew where I wanted the bottom to end.
This is all a bit fiddly, I realize. I have a good eye for proportion & knew exactly what I wanted to achieve. If you have problems with this step, take a deep breath and figure out how what you've got differs from what you want and work from there. It'll take time and pain, but will be worth it.
In the end I got this:
You can see the sharpie lines, and how some of the edges are now curvier. I ended up straightening the seam that's under my arms from a curved seam to straight after this step, and that seemed to work fine.
Then, FINALLY, I cut my fabric. I used the black suiting I like so much at first, but it was too stretchy and I went back and got a nice easy black peachskin fabric instead and used that. After all that work on the pattern, I didn't *need* the stretch.
Whew. After all that, draping the white part should be a piece of cake right?
Right?
~Raiphin
hint: wrong.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Strap in, it's gonna be a tough ride.
So, this is Haruhi's top. This image has the ruffles going up the sides of the black in the front, but usually it's just a solid line across the bottom--that's what I'm doing too.
First thing I did was get a strapless bra to base the top on. This was a Le Mystere brand "Shameless" bra in nude. It had a thin layer of nude spandex on top that I caaarefully cut away to reveal the underneath. Then I stuck guidelines on it with quilter's tape to help me get things even...this was mostly useful for straps and such.
You'll see I already added the straps on. Haruhi had two sets, one slightly longer than the other. I originally made the longer ones an inch longer, but .5" is probably better so that they don't just slide off your shoulder constantly.
Note that the straps are racerback in the front (more toward the center line of back than straight down.) This means you can't just stick straps where the strapless bra wants them. This is good, because that shit's almost always uncomfortable & gave me weird armpit pooches. BAD.
You can kinda see in that picture that where I have pinned the strap in the front there is a mark. That mark came from making a strap out of muslin and pinning it places in the front until it looked right. You can also see a small nude seam slightly further right which is where the strap originally went.
See how much sexier the racerback straps look, even just pinned like that? MmMMm. Make sure to get them even, and take the back of the bra into consideration--which hook are you using? Try to maintain as much stretch there as possible, you don't want it to pull on itself or get stiff. I did an up-down seam instead of left-right for that reason.
You can wait and sew in the straps after you do a lot of other things, just try not to stab yourself with the pins too many times. (Like I inevitably did.)
As for how to make the straps--I figured out the length and thought that I wanted them to be 1" wide at the ends and 1.5" at the middle, for extra sexy and because I like pain. I did a rolled edge hem like I did on the bottom of the skirt, but it was a lot harder and didn't turn out as nice. I'm not sure if rolled hem just requires more fabric, or what I did wrong. So be careful. I tried to go back and make double-sided straps, but sewing shiny/slick to shiny/slick was...unsuccessful, shall we say. You can also probably just use ribbon and sew the ends together, but I wanted some stretch to hold up, y'know, my bits.
Next up, pattern-making. If only we were shaped like tubes.
~Raiphin
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
The four horsemen of my apocalypse.
TOOLS. They are important.
Without these 4 things, I would die. And by die I mean screw up this costume royally.
1) A good sewing machine.
Are you serious about this? A lot of cosplay you can get by on just a straight stitch and a zigzag here and there. I soldmy car last July and dropped 600$ on a middle-line Huskvarna Viking Emerald 183(I think). I'd been using my grandmother's sewing machine, the one she used to make my skating costumes back when I was like, 10. That was a while ago. I knew what the machine could do, but no damn idea how to make it do them. These are the perils of being self-taught. (Grandmother is 83 and lives 2 time zones away. So I couldn't really ask her.)
Wow, things have come a long way since...the 80s, maybe? Early 90s at best. My new machine is lovely and automated and smart. It tells me when there's something wrong with it, and what foot to use with what stitch. Genius. Also, the JoAnns in Southcenter (Tukwila, WA for reference) had a Viking center--where I got the machine--which got me a complimentary hour of training on my new machine, and that hour has been PRICELESS.
2) GOOD SCISSORS. This seems easy. I got a spendy rotary tool this weekend and we'll see if it's that much better than scissors (it was 50% off due to a coupon, anyway) but good scissors make your life easier. Remember those child-scissors that bent construction paper all the time? And how nice it was to have scissors that could cut shit? Scissors aren't that expensive, get some good ones. Gingher is a good brand, but most that're 15$ or so should be fine for cosplay use.
3) Chalk pen. GENIUS. I'm very, very bad at cutting straight lines. I blame astigmatism. Anyways, my chalk pen (5$ at Pacific Fabrics, I think) lets me draw all over my dark fabrics and then I just cut along the lines! No more pinning my fabric to patterns, or weighing stuff down with books while I cut around them! We life in the future.
4) Disappearing ink pen. STILL GENIUS. This is the same idea as above, but for light fabrics. You can draw and make marks, and they just dissappear! I used this making button-holes for the top of Haruhi's blouse, and it is generally awesome.
Without these 4 things, I would die. And by die I mean screw up this costume royally.
1) A good sewing machine.
Are you serious about this? A lot of cosplay you can get by on just a straight stitch and a zigzag here and there. I soldmy car last July and dropped 600$ on a middle-line Huskvarna Viking Emerald 183(I think). I'd been using my grandmother's sewing machine, the one she used to make my skating costumes back when I was like, 10. That was a while ago. I knew what the machine could do, but no damn idea how to make it do them. These are the perils of being self-taught. (Grandmother is 83 and lives 2 time zones away. So I couldn't really ask her.)
Wow, things have come a long way since...the 80s, maybe? Early 90s at best. My new machine is lovely and automated and smart. It tells me when there's something wrong with it, and what foot to use with what stitch. Genius. Also, the JoAnns in Southcenter (Tukwila, WA for reference) had a Viking center--where I got the machine--which got me a complimentary hour of training on my new machine, and that hour has been PRICELESS.
2) GOOD SCISSORS. This seems easy. I got a spendy rotary tool this weekend and we'll see if it's that much better than scissors (it was 50% off due to a coupon, anyway) but good scissors make your life easier. Remember those child-scissors that bent construction paper all the time? And how nice it was to have scissors that could cut shit? Scissors aren't that expensive, get some good ones. Gingher is a good brand, but most that're 15$ or so should be fine for cosplay use.
3) Chalk pen. GENIUS. I'm very, very bad at cutting straight lines. I blame astigmatism. Anyways, my chalk pen (5$ at Pacific Fabrics, I think) lets me draw all over my dark fabrics and then I just cut along the lines! No more pinning my fabric to patterns, or weighing stuff down with books while I cut around them! We life in the future.
4) Disappearing ink pen. STILL GENIUS. This is the same idea as above, but for light fabrics. You can draw and make marks, and they just dissappear! I used this making button-holes for the top of Haruhi's blouse, and it is generally awesome.
Ruffles taste like pain.
So, sewing the ruffle layers to the tube skirt turned out to be a giant pain in the butt. Well no, I lie--sewing them to the skirt was easy. Sewing only the parts I WANTED to the parts of the skirt I wanted was a good deal harder.
Learn from my mistakes:
Do NOT use 4-way stretch material to make the pencil skirt. When you have sewn the ruffles to the skirt they add a lot of bulk, and this will stretch out and pull down the skirt. I have since added a band (from baby blanket ribbon, actually) around the waist to add stability.
Leave maybe an inch or two more at the top of the skirt, and cut it down to size after applying ruffles. I kinda needed to add a waistband because the skirt was falling below the line of the belt, which is silly and wrong.
Test the length of all your ruffles BEFORE you sew. Trying to cut more off/hem it after it's been gathered and sewn is needlessly painful.
After taking up the skirt several inches as I think I mentioned prior, I took it up AGAIN before sewing it all together. If you look, the second black layer of ruffles is actually the same damn length as the short layer--in the front center, anyways. I noticed this AFTER I'd sewn it all on so I got to go back and trim a bit more off, and then it hemmed a bit weird...I may have to re-do it if it keeps bothering me.
Follow my lead for:
Do run a line of thread along the gathered zig-zag before you sew it to anything. This adds stabilization.
Do run a line of thread along the raw edge of the gathered material...this flattens it and makes it easier to work with.
All I have left to do now is apply the velcro patches to the belt and skirt waistband, and let that set for 24+ hours. Whee!
Oh yes, and the top. I've actually done a lot on that, but that's for another post.
Learn from my mistakes:
Do NOT use 4-way stretch material to make the pencil skirt. When you have sewn the ruffles to the skirt they add a lot of bulk, and this will stretch out and pull down the skirt. I have since added a band (from baby blanket ribbon, actually) around the waist to add stability.
Leave maybe an inch or two more at the top of the skirt, and cut it down to size after applying ruffles. I kinda needed to add a waistband because the skirt was falling below the line of the belt, which is silly and wrong.
Test the length of all your ruffles BEFORE you sew. Trying to cut more off/hem it after it's been gathered and sewn is needlessly painful.
After taking up the skirt several inches as I think I mentioned prior, I took it up AGAIN before sewing it all together. If you look, the second black layer of ruffles is actually the same damn length as the short layer--in the front center, anyways. I noticed this AFTER I'd sewn it all on so I got to go back and trim a bit more off, and then it hemmed a bit weird...I may have to re-do it if it keeps bothering me.
Follow my lead for:
Do run a line of thread along the gathered zig-zag before you sew it to anything. This adds stabilization.
Do run a line of thread along the raw edge of the gathered material...this flattens it and makes it easier to work with.
All I have left to do now is apply the velcro patches to the belt and skirt waistband, and let that set for 24+ hours. Whee!
Oh yes, and the top. I've actually done a lot on that, but that's for another post.
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