Cosplayers for XIV fan fest assemble!

[NarikoStar]

Hello ^^! Wanted to drop in here and give a bit of progress on my costume for FFXIV Fan Fest (I'll be attending the Vegas gathering).

Quick background since this might be a rather extensive post with lots of pictures/ramblings.

I'll be attending the festival in Vegas in this costume with a friend (@@; I'm making x2 of these costumes), we'll both be wearing the Coliseum Shawl set walking around enjoying ourselves in Vegas and doing the battle challenges and such with many members of our FC / static, Feel free to stop us and say hi and whatnot, I'd love to get pictures with all of the cosplayers attending this year.

I've been playing FFXIV since 1.0 alpha stage 3 and all the way up till now. I consider myself a pretty hardcore player, I log on pretty much every day whether that is 15mins to garden on my off days or 3-8hours+ to do coil, savage coil, dailies whatever it may be currently! So needless to say finding time for this costume + managing my full time job and time with the hubby has been quite a challenge.

This is actually the first time I've ever done a cosplay and it's been such a learning experience of do's and don'ts. I wanted to share this with others who may also be first timers and run into similar issues I did, or to those who may be veterans and have experienced some of the pitfalls I've had/ran into and get better ways to deal with it for future cosplays. Online tutorials help A TON. I consider myself quite a crafty person, and I work in the visual effects industry out here in Cali so I've always believed I could pull off making a costume that wouldn't just fall into pieces but never really ever mustered up the time / effort to do so. (And I won't lie, having the means to do so (money/funds) never hurts) BUT, this game means a lot to me and I really wanted to give some sort of homage to my favorite gear set in game so here's what I've been working on. ^^ Hope to see you all in Vegas!


THIS ALBUM is a huge bulk of 100+ pictures of WIPs that I plan on updating as I complete the upper half of this costume. I'm happy to share, I'll post a decent amount of them below but to keep low clutter I won't be posting all of them. (Apologies, most of the WIPs are from my cellphone, so quality might not be ideal) Enjoy~

Current Progress:
Wig/ears: Complete
Tail: complete
Shawl Bottoms: sewn / Complete
Shawl Tights: swen / Complete * Need alterations due to slippage!
Shawl Gartr: molded/sculpted/ painted Complete
Tail clasp: 1/2 complete sculpted/ base paint
Shawl Bangels: 1/2 complete (need lower cuffs)
Shawl Broach: complete
Shawl Hood: complete
Shawl Undershirt: not complete
Shawl Bikini Top: not complete
SCH Book: pending / not sure if get any time before Vegas since I'm making x2 of everything above. @_@

I attended Anime California this weekend as a 'test run' for Vegas (I really didn't want this thing popping off in Vegas ><!) My main goal to see how comfortable this thing would be walking around or problem areas that didn't hold as well as I might have liked. Costumes are great and all but if I'm not going to enjoy myself at Fan Fest I don't want to wear it! So I went this weekend a 1st year con to get a good gauge on things that I might need to adjust for Vegas in October. Additionally- I didn't think it would bother me at all walking around pretty exposed. But since this was my first time ever doing a cosplay I wanted to make sure I was 100% comfortable being decently exposed walking around other people / posing / talking pictures. Thankfully my husband was there in the even any creepers came around. It was a great test run since there was a pool party and this costume is made out of lycra spandex so it /is/ able to get wet / go in the pool. Since I'm still completing the top of the Shawl (bikini top / undershirt for it) I just picked up a black bandeau swim suit top from Victoria Secret to wear at this convention to test the rest of the outfit- so the top seen will obviously be changed to what the Coliseum shawl's bikini top is.



I started this costume with the wig, ears, and tail. (My husband really wanted me to wear this to Anime Expo to test the wig out a few months ago so this is were I started first!)

I decided going with Arda wigs, I looked into cosplay.com wigs / amphigory wigs / some random sellers on ebay/amazon) But my big decision on going with Arda opposed to amphigory wigs was the FORUM SUPPORT IS OH-SO-HELPFUL. I mean endless forum posts from users and staff members on just how to dye their wigs, what dye's work best for them, color swatches with various Rit and idyd colors was such a time saver. I knew since I would have ears sewn into the wig I would realistically need to dye the wig and the same time I did the ears to keep color consistency so I choose pretty early on to go with getting a white wig and creating the color myself to match the ears/tail. (Also since I was attending Anime Expo since Arda was attending there and selling there wigs, I could always purchase another one in person on site if I ended up making any major mistakes on the cutting/styleing/dyeing.)
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Some little hiccups I expereinced and wanted to touch upon. TEST TEST TEST. before you commit- and even then.... You may need to re-do. I originally tested swatches for how long I should dye my fur to match the wig. I ended up dipping my swatch in literally for a second and pulling it out immediately and rinsing it in my bathtub. But when I dyed the actual larger piece of fur... it turned out way different in color due to the size amount that I was throwing into the mini cooler, so I had to actually cut my dye swatches that I planned on making the tail / ears out of smaller just to get dye consistency. to match my swatches. I dyed about a yard of fur fabric thinking it would turn out fairly light but as you can see below it was way to saturated and ended up having to dye a second yard.
(Since this was my first time I luckily accounted for myself making mistakes along the way so I had bought extra fur fabric but I can't stress enough that extensive testing is a lifesaver!)




Again... I had some leftover fur from a plushie project forever ago. I just used the fur to test the ear pattern/shape with this. I saw Siren pop in here a few posts ago, and I must say this pattern was designed keeping your ear quality in mind. My husband and I both agree you've set the standard for miquote ears, we wanted to emulate this and and take it as far as we could with quality and authenticity to the Mi'quote as much as possible, (geek out we love your work Siren!)





Some little didbits about the ears/wig attachment.

-Make sure you always cut your fur in mind with the direction its going. Look at most animal ears, their fur grows up the ear towards the tips~ (one of the test pictures has this mistake in it, where the fur is actually growing down the ear lol ><)
-TEST. I have a bag full of 6 miquote ear's before I actually set on the perfect design for my final one.
-I'm sorry I don't have any pictures of me sewing the ear's into the wig, honestly this was one of the hardest pieces of the whole costume thus far. It was difficult to me because I felt there was no rhyme or reason to why it worked and it was a horrible hot mess flipping the wefs of my wig up and over pinning them down then keeping the ears consistent on both sides. Even so one of my ears is slightly lower than the other to which I'm sure if someone looked hard enough they could notice. But I think I ripped those ears off the wig a good two times before I settled on final placement. I used a simple heavy duty thread literally pinned the area of the ear I /thought/ looked correct with corresponding to my character's ear placement then went at it. And it was quite a time consuming process. I'm dreading this part the most when I dye / sew in my friends ears to her wig, but believe me this from what I've found is the best quality looking ears to match miquote's that you can find. While clipping them to hairpins is fine and much easier, I find this to look much more natural matching to the characters ears.

Tail:
Tail was pretty strait forward. I did make 2 very short tail tests for the end of the tail, my character's tail tapers off near the end, so the test was really just getting the right angel for the pattern. Other than that it was pretty much make sure the fur grain was going the right way and hand basing it before so it didn't slip around on my machine~
-I'm right around 5'4 ~ 5'5 and I made my tail length 37 inches. This set the tail right near floor length / touching it but since I knew I needed some slack to work with when attaching the tail I made it a few inches longer to play with.




-Originally I tried stuffing it with cotton, lol I didn't have much luck with that. I then switched to using extra long pipe cleaners which actually worked quite well and I was able to model the tail slightly for posing which was awesome.... unfortunately when attempting to attach it to the bikini bottom I quickly realized that because there isn't much fabric with the Shawl bottoms, the tail became too heavy. So for now I have it un-stuffed. I'd much prefer using the pipe-cleaners but the weight won't work as well with this outfit.



Continued in next post... 21 image limit ><;;