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I have been so good! I actually managed to organize and pack our costumes more or less properly out from Yoki’s old room. Not few of them, but every single costume we have worn this year had been shoved there. But that is not the reason I’m writing a post, even if I feel that my effort is worth to mention. The true meaning of this is upcoming Desucon Frostbite, which is only seven weeks away. I think our convention season has never started this early!
To fit the time of the year we are trying to finish our Snowtroopers to be the primary costumes. But because of certain restrictions the costumes have, we thought to have secondary costumes as well. We haven’t had ones since 2007, when we wore Sasori and Deidara for the first day of convention and Mayuri and Akon for the second.
There are at least two reasons for this rare event. We are going to Lahti by car, so we can stuff it full of boxes and suits. The other is the program. Usually there are just few things we want to see, but Desucon Frostbite seems to keep its promise of interesting and high quality content. Snowtroopers aren’t the most convenient costumes. It’s hard to sit comfortably and you get tired rather easily. And then there is the thing that you don’t see too well or hear much either. To avoid utter exhaustion we reasoned that changing during the day would solve some problems.
We have toyed around an idea of making Disney cosplay at some point. Even if Desucon Frostbite is anime convention, we decided that now that we had the opportunity, we would use it. The duo we are going to construct is from Beauty and the Beast with big personalities; Lumiere and Cogsworth.
We are going to make the costumes based on their human forms. I’m going to exercise artistic freedom to make the costumes look interesting and for the sake of my sanity, to bring them to the same century. Really, I don’t know what they have been thinking while designing the look for the character. It’s like Lumiere is partially from 1500s as Cogsworth is from the late 1700s.
Even if I mentioned of bringing them to the same century, I’m not going to pinpoint the costumes to any era. I’m just going to balance the pieces of the costumes to coherent look. This week I tried styling the wigs for the characters. They still need some attention, but I'm getting there. I’ve also have drawn the patterns and bought fabrics for the costumes. I also have the shoes and some accessories ready. Now I’m going to sew… And sing “Be our guest” all along.
Yoki has always had some sort of weird habit to sympathize and pick characters who don’t look, act or anyhow resemble normal, so I wasn’t that surprised when we ended up brainstorming a human squid. What I really like about Yoshi and Ivy is that as a project it took place after we had become familiar with different kind of techniques. It didn’t take long before we had chosen the methods to use and how everything would be constructed.
With Yoshimitsu’s mask it was quite clear that we would vacuum form it. The only thing that caused some unnecessary work was preparing the mold. We had started to carve it from insulation foam with Yoshimitsu’s shoulder armor. Then we realized that we couldn’t fit it before it was vacuum formed from plastic, so it was very possible that it would not fit or that the proportions would be off. Excess work didn’t sound too appealing. Carving a block of material while visualizing a form inside of it, is lot harder than actually building the shape little by little.
We took a shortcut from making a cast from Yoki’s face, we bought a plastic mask from Punanaamio. Actually we bought two different models. After trying those on we would see which one fitted Yoki better. Having options is never bad, especially when you work with objects that don’t apparently go through quality control. The other masks had eye holes with one centimeter height difference.
After choosing the mask and making some sketches I sat down and started sculpting. I used DAS modeling clay and four days to get the mold done. It took some swearing, confrontations and almost two packages of clay to finish, but it was all good. The mold looked nice and after Yoki finished it with putty, it was ready to be vacuum formed. And that, if something was stressful! We really wanted the mold to work, but with different levels and details we were really worried that we would get wrinkles or holes. To add to the stress, I finished the mask mold just a week before our costume debut, so there weren’t too much time to redo it.
The first take… it was perfect! I might have yelled one well-known Finnish curse word pretty loud when the plastic got sucked into the mold. Later Yoki told me that she first misunderstood my expression of joy. She thought that we had failed based on the volume. Last thing for me to do was to get the mold out of its plastic pocket. I think I used about thirty minutes to an hour to that alone. Then I happily realized that my work with the mask was done and handed it to Yoki to paint.
Yoki painted the mask with the same color as the mechanical arm, but probably because of different base material the tone wasn’t quite the same. The mask turned out lot darker than we would have wanted, but because of the limited time we decided to roll with it.
We had to get the mask done before I could finish the headpart with the decorative panels. Earlier Yoki had printed the pieces for me. The five days I had left to work with the costumes, while Yoki was back at school I struggled to get the whole thing together! I say that it’s pretty hard to make fitting alterations by yourself. With pieces of clothing it still works somehow as long as you have flexible arms, but with a huge blob covering your head and face… It’s a different story.
With the head it was pretty much trial and error method both in patterning and construction. I had to seam rip a lot and many pieces, but in the end Yoshimitsu had a head.
The mask is attached with Velcro to the pouch thing. Inside the pouch there is a foam crest on top of the head to give it more height. To the foam crest I sewed a piece of rubber band that goes below the ears and behind the neck. The tightness is the only thing that keeps the head in place. The pouch itself has two layers. The first one is the inside, which is sheet cotton with plastic boning. The outer crest is made from craftfoam and metal studs.
If you are sharp-sighted you might have noticed that we left out the ear-parts. We made them, but because they were done in a hurry and they didn’t quite fit on the first try, we decided to skip them.
We chose foam to be the main material on Yoshimitsu’s tentacles. It looks solid, but is soft and flexible to allow movement. I started by making a sketch of the tentacles opened based on references. Then I purchased a piece of foam from Etola, where you can get any shaped or sized piece you like. And if you are lucky, you might find a suitable piece with many cut outs and get discount, because they are just happy to get rid of it!
After I had determined which tentacle overlaps the other, I drew the shapes on the foam and cut them out. I rounded the edges and carved the curls on the tentacles. Then I assembled the pieces and glued few seams together. The red fabric is interlock tricot I found from my fabric storage. I stitched it on the foam by hand, because it would have never fit under the presser foot. The first layer of fabric pulls the foam down and smoothes down irregularities.
The second layer… or actually three, gave me a nice rollercoaster ride of madness. I first started covering the tentacles with the same material as the head pouch. Then I realized that it didn’t stretch enough. I seam ripped. I decided that I need tricot. So I purchased some in light beige and dyed it. I knew it was little off, but decided to stitch it on. This was two or three weeks before the debut. After we had finished all the other pieces of Yoshimitsu’s costume, we laid them on the floor to see how they matched. The tentacles didn’t.
I still had to do the mask and the head pouch, so I kind of pushed the tentacle issue aside. Even Yoki settled with it, because she also realized that it was more important to get the costumes to presentable condition. I had gone through the local fabric stores few times already and hadn’t found anything that would be suitable, but then our mother made a discovery in form of pale colored interlock! Somewhere in between I dyed the fabric orange and finally finished the tentacles in the car on the way to Tampere.
The tentacles attaches to the vest with Velcro, hiding the support structures of the sashimono as well as Yoki’s waist line. The studs on the swirls are fabric covered buttons. The opening under the right arm is closed with small hooks and rubber bands, which I rolled in orange yarn. In the future we have planned using silicone or latex to give the tentacles more squid-like surface. Also airbrushing them to resemble the references more has crossed our minds.
Huge post! And I even left some things out. If you’d like to know more about a certain part of the construction, feel free to ask. Next I’m going to write a post about all the miscellaneous stuff from shoes to Ivy’s pretty hat.
I asked Yoki to send me photos from the making process of our Ivy and Yoshimitsu costumes, so that I could refresh my memory before writing any construction posts I’ve been planning. While I went through them, I found myself huffing! Boy, what a workload we survived!
If I calculated correctly, our Soul Calibur III cosplay project required at least twenty different stencils for printed details. Only four were used on Ivy’s garments. The rest decorate Yoshimitsu’s pants, shirt, vest, head and also the flag or sashimono. For printing we used products from EMO-tuotanto. For the stencils we ended up using a clear plastic fabric, which you would use to make toilet bags. The stencil method has it limits, but we are pleased of what we were able to achieve with it.
Printing was actually one of the first things we started after I had finished patterning the garments. I think that drawing the stencils, cutting them and finally printing wouldn't have taken more than a week if we had worked continuously. Yoshimitsu's head part was actually done only five days before the debut of the costumes.
First little something about fabric printing: When you are printing with light color on a darker fabric, you need to have a opaque color which means a paste based covering color (peittoväri). When you are printing on light fabrics you will be using sheer colors (kuultoväri), which are mixed with emulsion base. Naturally the covering colors will set little stiffer than the emulsion based ones, because they are thicker in consistency. The colors we used are set with heat by ironing them, usually from the wrong side.
I'm not sure if the terms I'm using are the right ones, so if you see a obvious mistake here then please, feel free to correct me.
We started with Yoshimitsu's vest, which has different twirls and flower and leaf themes. We basically composed the print for the vest ourselves, but took some notes from the reference. It would have been almost impossible to make a exact copy with the given time. We just made sure that the flowers where on right places and then started to add the twirls. The color we used was ready mixed covering gold.
While Yoki worked on her vest, I moved to Ivy’s weird tailcoat corset. I started with the middle panels and then moved to the pink parts. The edges I printed using tape. First I had thought about sewing ribbon on the side, but then I ended up with printing because it would have looked bit confusing to have two different techniques in black in one garment. I mixed black pigment and base emulsion to strong, full color and added few extra drops because satin isn't really the most optimal fabric to print on.
Next I printed Yoshimitsu’s shirt and pants for which we had prepared five different stencils. One was a vine grid, two were flowers and the other two were leaves. I used the same stencils to print the base on the sashimono. For both of them I mixed covering and sheer colors in yellow to get slightly translucent outcome.
Yoki continued working on the sashimono by printing the crisscross pattern on the tentacle shape. She created the crisscross by making a stencil out of tape and printing with the same gold we used on the vest. Surprisingly, the gold ended up looking rather pale. This was because of the different fabrics; the vest was wool mix while the tentacles were synthetic. The colors we were using are meant to cotton and cotton mixes.
Yoki also drew the stencils for the squid head and the… stringy-parts. She printed them with gold with a tiny bit of yellow covering color to avoid the washed out result of the sashimono.
I don’t know does the hilt of Yoshimitsu’s sword count as printing project, but it was “painted” still. I made the figures by freehand with markers based on reference and under Yoki’s watchful eyes. Yoki embroidered the yellow parts after I was done.
That was all I had in mind about fabric printing on Yoshi and Ivy. Next I think I will move to the interesting pieces, like Yoshimitsu's squiddy waist tentacles and mask!
