Progress!!!

I did a little math the today and realised that I only have 6 non-work days before St Louis.

Then  I began panicking.

My to do list is 47 points long. I still need to lose some more weight. And six days isn't even a week. 

So instead of giving up and crying in the shower (which, believe me, was incredibly tempting) I went into hyperdrive. And now I'm ready to share with you my progress on one of my most exciting current cosplays. Link Auditore.

I saw this fanart a couple of months ago and thought it looked totally awesome. Pretty much right away, I saw a few attempts at cosplaying it, but for the most part... it was just Ezio with Link's weapons. So I decided to give it a go. 

The first thing I did was sculpt and cast the resin belt bling. I'll do a real tutorial on this at some point (when I stop being lazy). I actually did this a few weeks ago, because I was really really scared that it wasn't going to work and I would have to abandon the whole project.

And yes, that's an instagram. Instagram is where I post all my best progress pictures, so you'll probably see quite a few pictures like this. 

Anyway, once I decided I could handle the costume, I went out and bought the fabric. I'm making it green and gold, not green and red, because I don't want to look like a christmas elf (although it's causing me physical pain not to stay super true to the original design). So I got that magical fabric. And sat on that fabric for a while. And then I worked on Vanille until I suddenly realised that I either had to get into gear or give up. 

(My face when I saw how much fabric past-me had bought)

Anyway, I killed most of the sewing tonight. The hardest (most labor intensive, at least) part was the lace. Ezio has this lace on his vest that I somehow never noticed until I started working on this costume. Fortunately, I already had all the lace (I have a serious lace problem) so I just pulled that out and got to work. I started by cutting out and sewing together the coat and vest (and their linings). Before moving on, I stuck the lace on the coat.

(I guess this part is kind of a tutorial) I started by drawing lines on the fabric where I wanted the lace. Then I sewed the two small lace bits onto the fabric facing away from one another, so that it would fan out from the ribbon. All of the lace that I have is either not wide enough or WAYYY too wide, so I kind of used two pieces to make one for this. Finally, I sewed ribbon down the middle, being sure to sew in as wavy of a line as possible, because I hate myself. 

Achievement unlocked: Lace Up. 

I got the point of the hood to stick out by ironing interfacing into both the fabric and the lining of the point before sewing it together. Eventually, I'll embroider a triforce there, but for now I'm calling it quits on that. I've started doing some of the "embroidery" around the edges of the coat. 

Obviously, I don't have the time (or patience) to embroider a design around the bottom of the coat, so I've started painting one on. 

Because I'm self-sabotaging, I decided to do this free hand.

Note to self: you're an idiot. Anyway, it's been arduous, but the two sides now mostly match and I've got about half of it done. I'm way too tired to do anything more on that, so I'm just going to have to work on that tomorrow.

Also to do tomorrow, I need to finish the gauntlets. Leather is expensive, so I bought a $7 jacket from Goodwill (which turned out to be real leather!) and cut off the sleeves for my gauntlets. Then I trimmed and hemmed them and tomorrow I will be hammering grommets. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am. 

(pictures of my bad sewing and how it looks on my arm kind of!!!!)

In later news, I've started serious work on my weapons for this costume. Or... the shield, at least. I used foam board for the base and now I'm building onto that with cardboard. I'm going to go over the cardboard with papier mache tomorrow to smooth it out and I might go over that with bondo or paperclay. I'm totally playing this one by ear. Progress photo: 

Blammo.

I'm going to bed now. I hope your night is going well, Moon of my Life. Post pictures of Lightning soon!!!! I'm super excited!!!