Amira's boots

Amira boots were part of the costume I knew was going to be challenge but I was waiting for it.

At the beginning after some research and googling it was clear for me that I have to make them from the scratch. I could not get similar boots nowhere so.. making my own boots. How hard can it be? Honestly, it was hard but it had so many rewarding moments and some of it was easier than expected.

So, first step. Getting the materials. I got nice and quite thin black artificial leather that looked stunning and seemed to be durable. I could not find right kind of blue leather so.. I got some much thinner weird blue color artificial leather and painted it with blue, black and white acrylic colors to get the right tone. Using kitchen sponge was better than brushes :P And spray bottle with water. In the end, I painted a lot of this blue leather as I also needed it for the quiver.

The pattern was done on "tiral and error" method using kitchen film and brown tape. I actually did three tries. The first one was just over my leg and it felt very small afterwards. Then I did another one where I tried to leave more space and last one was me actually wearing boots. The last one was the one I used.

 

Then I cut tape/film and turned it into a pattern and made the mockup to be sure I can put the boot on and take it off.

 

 It was clear for me from the beginning that I have to make the central seam before I can do anything else.. Felt little risky as I could not fix that later but it was fine.

I thought I will leave a lot of extra spaces but actually I should have left more at the back as I realized later that leather does not behave as well as he mockup made of fabric and I had some space to maneuver with seam but not much.

I think in this point I read very helpful online tutorial about making ballerina shoes. I sadly do not remember where I found it. I googled it and I think it helped me to get my head around how shoes should be made. It definitely explained to me how to deal with inner and outer soil and what to sew where.

Okei, I had my main base, time to decorations. First the blue main things. I cut the main two pieces - for the upper part and the bottom blue things. I later also added a third piece to the heel.

I did small stitches on the sides to keep them on place. I will later hide that with embroidery.

For the base of the elements/decorations I used the same felt as for the base for the flowers. I made the patterns, traced them on felt and cut them out.

 

 

On this point they looked SOOO good that I was slightly worried if I can do embroidery that will as good as it looks now with just felt. But embroidery was they way to go.. so..

I started adding details to the bottom blue things..

It was very time consuming and I started to realize that the elements may be too wide to have nice effect with covering embroidery. So, in some places I had to make the embroidery narrower and not wrap around the base. And the.. there was undoing all the hard work:

It was not symmetrical and I saw it way too late :'(

Then when this was done, another problem arose. This blue leather was quite thick and the sides had to be turned back and it was messy.. I then tried what if I paint the black leather with blue and skip the extra piece:

MM.. it did not worked.. the blue was not right color and the color did not wanted to stick.. so.. back to the extra pieces. With lot of care and time I did the bottom sides with hand stitches (no machine could have survived that thickness). And top side was able to be covered with embroidery:

Then the top parts.. I actually ran out of the mouline and I went to the shop.. It was the same company and exact same number but the color was different.. I had actually done one of the tops with old mouline and one with new. I was so desperate and I was willing to take it all apart but it was like 2 days non stop doing embroidery and I did not want that.. I think then someone told me that unless you know to look for it, no one will notice. And weird thing, when I ordered the mouline from the store using online order, I got exact same tone as I had before.. so the ones they had available in the shop had changed colors? but when ordering from them online they took the mouline from warehouse or? I have no idea.. I never have had this kind of weird adventures with colors changing tones.

Anyway.. after many days of embroidery during summer holidays. If you look carefully, the left one is lighter than the right one at the top.

So, next steps: back seam and the elements for the heels:

Basically same as before with lot of time consuming hand working - the embroidery and the sides handsewn. I also overlooked the bottom edges and now it was for the soles.

Back to the materials for the second. For the outer sole I had two options - very strong leather or rubber. I had trouble finding that strong of leather that I could use for the sole, so I went with soling rubber. At least that was the term I found.The problem was I had hard time finding the material. US web stores had it but the price and shipping were way more than I would have liked. Then I found someone from Etsy who actually sold it. It was more reasonably priced. The problem was the texture. I understand that probably people want nice grip but I wanted matching pattern for the manga.. so I knew there will be a lot of sanding.

When the soling rubber arrived, I just got to soles and then started to sand it and built the heel. On that time I actually discovered that we had really neat workshop area in university I had walked pass all those years. That was brilliant as it had nice things to hold my soles while I sanded them and I could make a mess there (and clean it up, ofcourse later) as summer had passed and I was back in the city and my poor apartment would have been horrible place to sand anything.

Holding it all together after cluing the heel on

Final result

The heel is built with two extra layers of rubber. I had to sand them too to make sure they stick as with any pattern left unsanded, the clue just did not stick. I sanded the top and ends of the soles. The front as it will be visible from turned fronts and the back for cluing the heel. Sanding the rubber was hard.. It made a lot of small black dust and it took forever.. even with dremmel.

The inner soles were made of very thick felt. I clued the base of the boots to it and I sew it for extra step.

 

 Cluing the soles was quite time consuming as i only had limited number of those clips. and I wanted to be sure the clue is well dried before I continued. So I think it took like 3 days just to clue it.. ofcourse I was able to do other things in the same time. Boots, like the jewelry, was this kind of constant thing I did through months.

Then: cluing the self made soles to the boots.  I managed to find those clipping things from the workshop that were brilliant to hold the pressure while the clue was drying (and there were so many of them - with different sizes). I have no idea what they are (the workshop is mostly used for electronics.. I wonder if anyone ever walked into the workshop while my boots were drying there and wondered like.. who in our department is building.. boots..) :P

Anyway.. soles were finished and they hold.. juhuu.. then just the top embroidery and done:

 Then I realized I did not try them with the trousers but luckily there was enough space to get the fabric in:

And then I went to the con. And the outer soles were not sticking as well as I needed.. I clued myself quite a few times. Also, the artificial leather was not as durable as I hoped. The poor cured tops and the sides suffered horrible damage. So I decided to rework the shoes before eurocosplay.

First thing: I got myself real leather. I have no idea why I was afraid of it before. I thought it is hard to work and it is expensive. It was but so is artificial leather. But the real one was... just.. pure magic. It was very thin but it had superbly nice texture and it did not suffer at all when I sew it or wore it in EC. So.. when I am making shoes next time, I will get the real leather.

So, I redid the tops. I cut the old leather around where the blue things start and added the new pieces and used the seam there to connect two sides.

 

 So I had this mess here. Oh, and the seams I made on the base to inner sole.. That made taking it all appart so much harder.. the inner sole was working brilliantly but I needed to take this all apart. I finally managed and managed to put it all together too and it looked so much better.

To deal with the sides of the outer sole where the clue was not holding. After visiting special shoe museum in Budapest (another great find while traveling for work.. just after local qualifiers), I got the idea that the sole and the base could be sewn together.. Very logical but I did not thought about it before.

 

The rubber was soft enought to sew through and it actually looked super neat when it all was sewn together.. super happy with that idea. After that I had no trouble of sole falling off or with the pointy tips. I managed to do the photoshoot with very rough surface and survive EC without any trouble. The top of the leg part.. the leather was cracking there but replacing it would have meant redoing all the top decorations and I just did not had time for it.

So, the final result - the most comfortable boots I have ever had.. and I like that the center of the boot around the ankle is falling the same way as in manga.. :D I wanted to make it like that but I was not sure it will work.

I am very proud of the boots. I mean - I had never even tried anything like that and they came out brilliant. I learned a lot of and I realized it is not has hard as I first imagined. Plus they look great :D


Posts:
*Getting started
*Underwear
*Skirt and trousers
*Blouse
*Coat
*Jewelry
*Boots
*Accessories
*At Animatsuri
*At Eurocosplay

Amira's jewelry

I think the jewelry was probably the hardest part for me in this whole project. I know the embroidery took ages and there were many challenges but I felt I managed to conquer them. With jewelry, I am  not sure.

Anyway. I started looking at the jewelry from the start of the project and it was always constantly happening in the background. The first step was dealing with the coins. The costume has really nice set of coins in different elements. My original plan was to find one nice coin and use it as a master for molding. I ended up finding antique bracelet of coins so I used that instead of making the coins myself. (The coins actually came from correct region. The were slightly newer than Amira's time, the first half of 20th century.. )

The first piece of jewelry I did, was the red necklace. The main challenge was figuring out the size of the red pearls and find the right color. Using wood pearls came from my research. My first idea was that they were probably metal. Then I read that metal was common in jewelry but not in big elements. Then I found an article that was taking about wooden elements and I think it made sense. So, I tried to figure out the diameter for the pearls and then I found French online store that had right diameter. I had no idea how many of them I need, so in the end I got twice the numbers. Happens.

Anyway  the necklace itself was very simple - color the pearls, put them in a wire with coins and add closing at the back. Most modern day jewelry use those clips? I am not sure how they are call. Again, nothing like that existed back then as the jewelry was also "simple" as patterns in the area (when I say simple, then the construction. The details were breathtaking). So, I found this round closure thing that worked nice.

Somehow I never took a picture of this part of the jewelry while making. This was done much later when I was afraid that I will ran out of coins and was molding them.

Here is a better image of me actually wearing it

Anyway.. This was the first jewelry I did, I think on the same time I was working on the blouse. So quite early. Then, I was off to earrings and the locket in the other necklace. First it was figuring out the shapes. The common problem - they never look the same in manga. So, this was probably the step I went with the front cover and tried to copy them from there. Then I made the design in Photoshop and printed it out in many sizes to find right propositions.

It was easier with earrings but little trickier with the locker. In the end I had my "choices" and then came the modeling - clay! Again, haven't used clay for ages and it was harder than I thought. I think I came out with nice options, then I backed them and molded but getting the new versions of of mold and keeping them in desired shape was not easy. Some masters were done using termoplast. I had this weird little bag of very small pieces of termoplast that could be heated and then modeled. The problem was that when they were heated, they stuck to everything and they cooled down very quickly.

I think I played around with those pieces of jewelry for months. Just trying to figure out how to get nice shapes.

The locker was trickiest. I managed to see real historical locker (I am not sure if it actually the right name to call this central piece but I think I saw it somewhere called like that) in a museum of Islamic art in one of my work trips (the good part of traveling lot due to work - going to museums. Honestly. After I started this project, whenever I was somewhere, I googled around to any museum in the area that could have something from similar time and region on display. Sometimes it was museum on something else but they had small display on right kind of items. So, I saw some national costumes in museum in Athens. And jewelry also in Islamic museum in Athens. Shoes and boots in Budapest. Some more clothing and jewelry in Italy. Something in UK. I mean.. thanks to museums a lot of stuff has been moved around the world and I did not had to go to right region to see things. I think the clothing museum in Athens was very eye opening (the same way the shoes exhibition in Budapest). It cured me from my misinformation that ribbons could be used on clothing. Yes, in Ottoman Empire but not in Central Asia and in woman costumes) and it (locker) was hollow from inside. That makes sense and metals were expensive and you would not want to spend much on the jewelry for girls. Also, the weight! I knew from the beginning I will not be able to make it hollow. Also, I found from my research that the jewelry making technology in the region was different from europe. So you cannot see this kind of clear smooth surfaces as in jewelry in europe as they used "cold processing". It means things were worked after they had cooled down making the surface "scratchy"/"uneven". (I am very thankful for that as I would have never managed to make it as smooth as it should have been).

The first locker was done with mold of half. I used my printed guideline and modeled the one half. I made the side pieces separately and also modeled the "stone holders".

 

 

Then some molding and baking and the first result:

To say slightly, it was not what I expected. It was something but.. much less than I expected. It wasn't round as putting the two halfs together was hard.

So, I did my second try. I made round "base" from clay and added details with worbla. Never used worbla before. I always wanted to attend worbla workshop in Animatsuri but never made it was the one time it was ran and I was attending, it was on Saturday. I only managed to arrive on Sunday as I was flying back from a conference and when I got to Tartu, it was Saturday very late :( I was waiting for the workshop this year but it did not took place. I think I have lot to learn from that material.

 

It was slightly better but I was not totally happy either. So I made a third try but it was worse than second, so the second remained. Priming, coloring.. the rest. I had the locker.

The stones. I used craft pieces that were in totally wrong color. The ovals were white and the circles where.. weird red. So, I painted them using class colors. They are actually meant for class and you need to "cook" them but I could not do that as I had plastic bases. But they were fine. They add this kind of "membrane" over the base so painting them on paper (using newspaper as a surface cover) was not the best option as getting them off was hard but using kitchen film? (that transparent thing you can cover things.. some people also like to wind themselves into it to make patterns with tape?) it was quite easy to remove those stones.

this was not the smart thing to do

This as better

I was painted them quite flat (covered everything with red) but then I realized that they should have some dimension so I repainted most of them and after Animatsuri, when I redo some aspects of the jewelry, I redid most of the stones also, covering them with stones where highlights and shadows were painted to the stones.

Rest of the pearls. I used pearls from shops. I ordered tons of different shapes, went over the manga, trying to find what kind of shapes were used. I needed to make one of those pieces myself as it was clearly visible and I couldn't find suitable pre-made pearl. In the end, I just looked how the jewelry looks on the main image and tried to copy it with pre-made pearls sprayed silver.

Just spray, no weathering yet

Second necklace with color and stones

The earrings took few tries too. Figuring out how to handle different materials. First I tried air-drying clay on pvc. Clay cracked and did not stick to pvc. Then I used pvc and worbla for master. Better.

Clay of PVC

Worbla and pvc, the master used in the end

Baking different pieces

Putting the earrings together

 Then the paint. I actually broke one of the earrings while sanding :S They clay was not as strong as I expected and therefore I had to put some horrible "strengthening" clay at the back to fix that one and I was not able to sand was much as I would have loved.

The major problem I had with earrings was that they were heavy. They felt light but as I do not have holes in my ears, I had to use clips and they just tended to drop off over time. I actually planned to clue them to my ears during the competition but did not. And I lost an earring during the stage show :P They were fine all the other time. I managed to catch it so it was hardly noticed but yeah.. having holes has advantages but I wasn't going to do it just for this costume :P

The bracelets. PVC with worbla.

 Took some time to figure out how to with it. I also learned that using graphic knives works very well with pvc. The material is soft enough for the knives to handle. So, all the small details were added with knives.

 And then random beer bottle ended up being the "base" for heating.

colored result

So.. in the end, I think they are "something" but not as neat as I would have loved. I feel I just do not have the skill for worbla :(

After animatsuri and before eurocosplay, I decided to redo the jewelry. At least part of it. I kept three of the bracelets and redid  the second one from the bottom that I felt was the weakest. I also got a really good hint about glading wax for better silver effect from one of the judges. So I got the wax and tried to work with it :S It was a mess. I ruined some of my stones.. I did got slightly better shine than before but not what I hoped for. I think the problem was that I did not had so "smooth" surfaces". Also, I felt after covering the jewelry with gloss or sealing wax, the shine actually dropped. Without it, I could not have left it as it was "leaving silver marks" on everything. My hands were more silverish I think than the poor jewelry, I think.

Trying to protect the stones from glading wax

 So.. I think the jewellry was now slightly better than before. I was very happy with the new bracelet despite it giving me so much trouble. The last one was built on pvc base and then worbla was used to add the dimension. Now I build it from two layer of pvc but I had some trouble cluing them together. And i the end, it was allright.. until the evening before flying to eurocosplay.. I was practicing my stage show with real bow (as the costume was was packed.. and I actually own a long bow..).. and I was just readying the bow for shooting the eagle.. and I felt I did something wrong as my arm started to hurt.. When I let the string go, I had gazed my hand.. I had some blood as the real bow has a lot of strength (and I mean, I have actually very weak bow, in average standards..)  and when I looked on my wrist I saw that the bracelet was broken.. I was shocked.. I had to actually look around in the room to find where the piece had fallen.. Damn..

So.. I should be sleeping but.. I just used some superclew and that granul termoplast inside to fix it..I wore this when I met judges but I planned to use the old (not so nice) one on stage.. in the end, I dropped two bracelets on stage as two were enough trouble to handle around on stage :P

In the end, I think they came out alright but I do feel there is lot of room to improve for me.

And did I mention how I lost earring on stage on local qualifier? Mm.. I never lost in anywhere else.. expect when I was on stage in Eurocosplay.. during my performance.. and.. when I went on stage to get my price.. like.. it was a curse.. One of them only dropped off on stage :P

Posts:
*Getting started
*Underwear
*Skirt and trousers
*Blouse
*Coat
*Jewelry
*Boots
*Accessories
*At Animatsuri
*At Eurocosplay

Amira's coat - chyrpy

The first challenge with chyrpy was the pattern. In real life the chyrpy looks slightly different than in manga. It is much more wider in manga and the sleeves are bigger.

Original/historical chyrphy (image I found from pinrest. Sadly I could not track the original author of this photo)

I constructed the pattern in multiply steps. The first one was the bodice. Getting the right shape. This time, as chyrpy has totally different fit than blouse, I went slightly different direction than with blouse. The main motivator was the bottom part. As I can clearly see a cut at the back, I decided I will use two pieces for the back and use slight curve in the back seam to make it fit better. For the front, another two pieces. Thanks to the fact that it has large opening in front, I did not needed any triangles and was able to do the front in one piece too.

Basic pattern drawing

Back front and connection to sleeves

Mock up in progress

First mock up over the rest of the costume

When I was happy with my bodice mock-up, I looked on the "skirt" part of chyrpy. It was very wide and "flying"/"floating" in manga.. Always having nice flow when Amira is moving. Therefore it had to be wider than in real life. I just added more width and did a mock up. I was worried that it will start to look weird on the sides as the folds are going to gather there and the front, connected directly under the bodice will not have any big folds. I was considering doing the skirt and bodice in separate pieces but I think they should be one (as in original chyrpy). I think I managed to figure out how to divide the width and make it look nice. The volume of the skirt also helpes a lot.

It was slightly wider in the end

Few more mock ups and in the end, I was happy with the pattern:

 I ran out of that horrible stupid pinkish fabric I used for mock ups (I really hated myself when I brought it for Lucrezia as it did not fit at all with what I needed. The really good thing about non-desired fabrics is.. you can use them to make mock ups :P). So.. the final mockup for chyryp was done with nicer silver fabric I originally got for Fullmetal Alchemist costume but decided to be silverish and too shiny for the costume. It does look little weird over this costume :P

I did not figure out the sleeves at the beginning. It was totally mayhem with them. The look so nice on manga but in reality it is not very easy to do the pattern. I have the idea of dividing sleeves into two parts and do it like that but at first, I just wanted to do some embroidery as I knew it will be horribly time consuming.

This time I was smarter. I knew there will be errors and I learn a lot during the process. As I would be using mouline instead of machine embroidery thread, I did first few test runs on the "ribbon". I am not even sure. It does look like ribbon in some manga drawings but I found nothing of using ribbons in chyrpy or any other that kind of "coaty" piece of clothing. There were some ribbons use in Ottomon clothing but they looked nothing like this and ribbons were very narrow. So, I still assume it is the embroidery. Looking on the chyrpy, I thought this should be the Turkmen stitch. I did few trials and found it to be not very nice looking. Maybe I did something wrong but it just did not hold its form they way I saw it in chyrpys. I tried, again, to find more on the stitches used but nothing new or enlightening was found. So, I decided to go with three lines of chain next to each other.

Stitching in wool was nightmare! When linen (both the nice white one I used for skirt or the red for rest of the clothing) were quite stiff, wool was not. After first frame of stitching and removing it, the fabric was left wavy, stitches were constricting and pulling..oh, not nice at all. I undid everything :(

So.. second try. I went with stabilizer. This time, as mouline was much stronger thread, pulling the thread when tearing stabilizer off was not the problem. It looked slightly better but not much as you can see from below:

Then it was my sister who gave me the best idea ever - use adhesive fabric. Sounded like a win. As I have previously overdone the adhesive fabrics, I was very careful not to choose too thick adhesive fabric to keep the nice flow of the wool. I went with almost the softest one I could find and got a lot of it. In the end, I think it was slightly little too weak.

So, I undid everything and started from the beginning, first covering all of the fabric with adhesive on the back side:

I mean, the result was definitely better than before but it still had problems. First of all - adhesive fabric was coming off all the time so i was back and forward doing the ironing over and over again. Also not all of this "waviness" was ridiculed, so the best option, that I used for the project in the end was using both machine embroidery stabilizer with adhesive fabric. That actually worked nice but it was still ironing after every frame that seemed to be the key.

Some of the waviness is still there at the beginning when I did not had the stabilizer. The later part is much nicer

  For the flower embroidery (I think they are flowers. They should be from my research - many young girls in the area had a lot of flower embroidery on their clothes) I used pieces of felt as the base of the flowers. I used round paper cutting tool to create those circles. The poor device was not able to handle felt, so I broke it down and used scissors to force the top part free after pressing the imprint to the felt. Then, carefully, with scissors I cut free the parts that machine failed to cut out.

 It took me few tries to figure out the most "thread effective" way of doing those flowers. I mean, this whole thing was swallowing mouline like hungry shark..

Black is the thread on main side, greyish is thread on back side

I could have done all those lines in a row to save even more thread but it felt that doing this kind of "divide-and-conquer" made sure that the result is more even.

Flowers and ribbons in process

The main thing was that I tried to have reasonable length threads so that I should not merge them all the time. But on the other hand,it meant, that at the beginning, I usually had huge mess, like this:

First, as I had learned, I did the back parts' bottoms before moving to the front:

 

So, I first finished the bottoms at the back. Then I took the front pieces. Did a bottom for one of the front pieces, sewed them together from bottom to waist and did the embroidery over the connection. Doing the embroidery over the connection was hard and messy. First of all. There is the seam. I tried to move it one way and another on the frame and used needle to get the thread through it but it was messy.. And then.. I realized that the embroidery at back is wider (and much nicer.. the black lines clearly visible) than in front. Damn. I slept on it (and had nightmares of bad embroidery :P) and the next day I took everything I had done in the front apart. It took me 2 hours to undo work of a week. Luckily I could salvage the flowers and I was faster when redoing it, so.. 3 days..

Then I did the line up to the waist on the connection seam. Again.. I needed to flip the seam as I worked.. so, one line up.. switch the seam.. another two lines..

So, at this point it was middle of June. My husband actually started to really worry about me and the work I still need to do. He actually tried to convince me not to undo the first front but I did some math and realized that if I do a lot of embroidery each day, I can make it.. so, for a week at this point.. every free moment has gone to embroidery. There has been progress but yeah.. I think that point I was really having doubts that I have taken on something too big. The amount of work I put into this is not going to be worth it.. and yeah.. so.. a lot of doubts.. (I tried to lower my stress by working on jewelry)

So, after all of the bottoms were done, I started to move "up" with my embroidery, ending somewhere around "waist" and then doing the sleeves. I had not figured out the sleeve pattern at the beginning as it was so much trickier than I expected first. So, now I had to deal with it. I went back to the drawing board (I mean, the floor). More mock-ups until I got the sleeve figured out. I used the same pattern in the end as for the main blouse, cut it the other way (to had sewing line in top), made it larger, modified the fit so that it would be more "closer to neck" than blouse sleeve. Then some math on paper to get the right widening at the top.

The only problem (or suggestion) I could think of was that the mock up should also have been made from stronger fabric as the nice light one was dropping much better than the much stronger wool.

Then, it was back to embroidery. I think the neatest embroidery is on the sleeves. They were very easy to work with - nice straight lines (with small curves) and for that time I had so much practice that my style was very neat and continues.

After the sleeves were mostly done, I went back to the bodice and started to combine the pieces together. As the wool was very "stretchy" and the constant ironing was hurting a little bit, the lines were not there anymore where they were supposed to. So to sew everything (4 pieces) together was a nightmare. In the end, I just made sure the bottoms are correct and then tried to make the top fit.

Lesson learnt: embroidery on stretchy fabric is a nightmare all possible ways. I also discovered that I had made a mistake - the side lines.. one of them goes all the way to bottom line, the other.. finishes with top line. Ups. I did correct it later!

When I had managed to make everything fit, it was also first time for me to actually try it on. (This hand sign was apparently how to take selfies with my tablet :P) It felt amazing. Months of embroidery finally had some result.

Then, working on the back! As the back had a curve, it was hard to make sure the tambour had straight fabric only. Also, some small areas were tricky. And as I was in country most of the time, I had very old iron there that I was afraid (ala it will burn the thread, leave marks...)

During my summer holiday, I was non stop working on the embroidery. I woke up, I started watching ER and doing the embroidery. I did took a break for lunch (or jewelry) , continued till late hours of the night. Like really. That was the whole month! I was so sick of it in the end but I forced myself to keep going. It was specially hard when there was such a nice weather and I was just indoors. And sometimes it was so cold that my fingers were like non-responsive and had to light a fire to get some warmth (it was horribly cold this summer). And some of those elements took so long.. I think those squares at the back.. to do one took 2 whole days.. :( Non-stop... I am glad I was watching ER. It has 14 seasons. Hard to run out of episodes :D

In the end, I had the parts I could do without sewing things together done. The thing I learn from the blouse was that if you have to have embroidery in connecting areas, sew them together first, then do the embroidery. It will be trickier but the result will be nicer. So, next step - sewing sleeves on and doing those embroideries. It was so slow dealing the the lines.. I could only use small tambourine, the fabric was so thick there that it did not want to fit inside the tambourine.. it kept poping up.. etc.. I had  screwdriver as constant tool I was using in embroidery as this was the only way I was able to handle the thickness and tambourine.

And then it was the top and some other small things. I actually redid the front top lines as they were slightly off. I redid something in the back too. Just making it all fit when the fabric is stretchy.. I do not want to do that ever again.

In mean while, the summer past, it was end of August when I finally did the last small stitches and corrected the side line. I think I really did the last stitch on the last day of August making the whole coat take exactly 4 months!

And then there was the lining I left to the last minute before the con. I just had to do it but I was so afraid of it. In the end, two days in the evenings after work.. hand-sewing the lining. Adding eyes and hooks and then it was done.. all of it.. :)

Photo by: Eugene Art Photography

Posts:
*Getting started
*Underwear
*Skirt and trousers
*Blouse
*Coat
*Jewelry
*Boots
*Accessories
*At Animatsuri
*At Eurocosplay