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.)
[IMG]

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 ><;;

[NarikoStar]

Jewery / Accessories:
For all the accessories thus far I've used wonderflex with a mixture of clay on top. (Honestly if I was to do this again I would probably choose a different kind of clay... if not opt out of this clay all together and possibly use a worbla base or research a different method. I'm fairly confident this wasn't ideal at all but I had a pretty short window of time to work with and had to get the jewelry started so this is what I ran with.

Some other tidbits I learned:
Lol I was pretty cheap, I started using my hair dryer to heat the wonderflex. Then about 15mins into the project I just went NOPE NOPE NOPE. And made the hubby run out to home depot to get me one of these sick babies <3 A heat gun lol. It's much faster than my blow dryer.

(The glove thing is a heat resistant 1/2 glove that actually came with my curling iron for those wondering~)
Other than that I got my heat gun, my wonderflex, and went to work on making patterns and hammering out the designs.
White ravens! A must for us Legacy players!~




Drying after Gesso'n it up~

Bengals!
I actually ran into a problem with the lower Bengals for this outfit. My wrists are pretty thin, and I can't get them to grasp my wrists and still fitting over my hands. So While I believe the design is actually one whole piece there is no way it will sit the way I'd like it to on my wrist without it being unclasp-able. Because of this I had to postpone this piece for now, since I had to get a decent amount done before Anime Cali. And do some more research on exactly how I'll construct the clasp to re attach and de attach while still keeping its form.




Pendant Gems + Other accessories,
- Aside from buying a sewing machine believe it or not this stupid pendant was probably the most costly piece in comparison to size for how small it was. I think where I'm located (LA) just for the gem startup costs were around 60$ between the cast, catalyst, resin, popsicle, polish.

- While it's not all that hazardous.. funny side story about resin:
I was attempting to open the resin can but I couldn't because it was on pretty tight- so I passed it off to my husband and I had just finished explaining how we needed to make sure all the doors and windows were open before we pour / cast the resin because the fumes and I didn't want our kitties being over sensitive to it- but as the words are uttered from my mouth he pops the top off the can pretty roughly with a lot of pressure and resin ooze flys all over our kitchen @_@; Literally it was on the floor, kitchen sink, stove top UGH it was a mess. Fumes immediately kicked in, windows weren't open. Terrabad. We frantically had to move our cat's into the bedroom open all the windows and clean up the mess, I still have a drop of resin I can't get off my cutting board so if you have the space I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you do any sort of part like this outdoors / in a garage if at all possible.







For the jewelry buildup I tried to put as much wonderflex under to build up and not have an extensive amount of clay / weight added on. After that I did the fine edges just sculpting clay by hand to get the shape I wanted. As I stated above- if I was to do this again I would definitely get a different type of clay this wasn't that good to work with for what I needed. Dried faster than indented I had to keep applying moister to keep it from cracking before I was done sculpting each piece and smoothing it out.

At this point we added a base coat of a high shine silver before we went into sponge coats / dirtying it up








At this point, the broach still needs the small clasps on all 4-corners of the gem to elude that it's really sitting in place. I planned on attaching it after the fact but ran out of some time and wanted to test for Anime Cali, also, the fasteners on the back are just simple button fasteners and suspender clasps.
The button fasteners are for the coliseum hood, while the suspender clasps are to attach to the bikini top.

[NarikoStar]

Gonna go ahead and post some of my Sewing WIPs I had. I have the least amount of pictures of the sewing process. Mainly because I was extremely rushed for time so before during the early summer I was only working on this over the weekends since I work 9-6 on weekdays but since I was crunching for time to get this stuff ready for my test con, I had to come home work for 1-2 hours then hop on for coil at 9pm, so--- needless to say I didn't waste as much time taking WIP pictures but I tried to get as much as I could in the process.

Fabric Selection, I took alot of in game screenshots of this Coliseum gear, various lighting, times of day, weather effects trying to get a good idea of exactly what went on. I wrote myself and my friend some pretty extensive notes on details I noticed what should be looked at when making this- I won't post all of them but my notes often looked something like this:





Based on this, since I wanted the material to be somewhat authentic I wanted the Shawl/Skirt/Bathing suit parts to have different textures, I ended up with a Lycra/Spandex base for the suite/tights, and a Rayon light knitt for the Shawl Hood / Skirt, while one of my two creative decisions that I wanted to change was also I thought it would look slightly cooler if the inside of the shawl skirt was more of a satin like material rather than as matte as it is currently, so I took a creative liberty and made the inside fabric have a higher specular. All of my fabric was 4-way stretch with the exception of the purple liner which was 2way

I'll be honest I'm not as good at Weaver IRL as I am in game, I was lucky enough to have taken (and remembered/retained some information) from a home ec class a good 5-some + years ago in high school my senior year. So I had at least /SOME/ idea and memory on how to use a sewing machine / threading a bobbin / stitch types. Basically, lol only the basics. I watched a lot of tutorials on sewing, probably a good week of just going through videos on topics I thought I would need, using elastic, stretch fabrics, looking at machine types, etc.

I used to own a machine but it was still back on the east coast with my parents and shipping would have equated to the same amount to buy a machine out here. I went with a fairly cheap model but I actually regret going with a cheaper model, not that this model sucks (I have a signer traditional) but after a weekend of pulling my hair out wondering why my test fabric worked wonderful but my actual fabric wouldn't sew correctly, thread tension being extremely iffy on this machine I wonder if a pricier machine would have helped aid in simple fixes. Needless to say, biggest things I learned:

-MAKE SURE YOU USE THE RIGHT NEEDLE AND ITS SHARP
Who knew there was an actual needle for stretch fabric? Waaahhh universal needles don't just work automatically? ~_~;;;
I wasted a good 6 hours, literally I started working around 11 pm and found myself up at daylight trying to figure out why my fabric wouldn't bunch or would bunch. Or my thread would get jammed. It was horrible. I thought my machine broke I was so frustrated. But nope! 8 hours later, and a bajillion youtube tutorials later I went to my fabric store in the morning picked up a ball-point needle AND stretch needle, switched it out and BAM everything worked. That. Simple. so dumb.
-Thread Type
I was originally using a heavy thread and sometimes my machine with the fabric I was using wouldn't work well with it. So I'd recommend if your starting out to get a average thread size, not super heavy and wonder what on earth is going wrong.

Anyways, I learned alot, the other alteration I made was my husband DEMANDED that the leggings be converted into stockings, So instead of leggings, my tights are stockings, otherwise I made my own patterns and based them off clothes I already had for proper sizing~


The stockings- oh god, I had my hubby pin my leg in the fabric because I didn't have a mannequin leg to practice on then we'd slip it out. It was an annoyance but honestly in the long run didn't help. My biggest problem was my test fabric was much stretcher than my actual fabric, so when the size I ended up going with on my test fabric made my real fabric far to small. I wasted a lot of my final product fabric on this, so it might be a good thing to take into consideration when running tests, if your test fabric is less malleable than your actual fabric or vice versa~





Another thing that helped, was on my test passes of the garment I used white thread instead, I wanted to see the seams clearly and understand where it looked good, where it didn't, did I need to make adjustments. It was just a preference I had- I'm sure any color is fine I just liked being able to see the seams on my test pieces before hand.

Bikini Bottoms- I based off a bikini bottom I owned already, I just folded them in half, drew on a piece of cardboard paper, cut it out and tried a test run of it. If something was too big/ didn't fit I adjusted it, and did another test. I didn't use my final fabric until I got the test fabric working properly on my body shape since this outfit is pretty conforming. (SRY ;( these were constructed during the AM's from like 12am - 11am so I really wasn't in the mood to take wips @@ was sleepy)




Skirt- This was probably one of the easier pieces along with the hood, the hardest part was because this skirt pretty much defies gravity in game, I piped a heavy jewelry wire through the lining since there is already decorative stitching around the boarder, so I can bend / mold the skirt how I'd like it so it gets that stick out curved look and is easily hidden by cute stitching (since it was lined I used a black top thread and purple bottom thread so it's not that noticeable on the inside~)




Hood: The hood was super simple, I think I did two test passes of it before making the real one (most the other items I made 3-5 times before making the real one with correct sizing) similar to the skirt, I wanted the hood part to have some volume, so I have a 1 1/2 inch elastic band just for good weight measure to give a bit more umpf in the lining. For the pattern I pretty much just looked at my hoodies seams to see where / how, and a few video tutorials / forum threads on making hoods for costumes and went from there! I sewed the other side of the fasteners on the inside so the hood curved outward how I wanted when attached to the broach. Lastly the hood is totally working and could be worn as such, but when I have my wig on with the ears sewn it it makes a tough fit ><!




Welp. That's pretty much where I am currently! Andddd its 3:40am here so-yeah~

Still need to finish up the remaining top part / finish painting the accessories. Make some final adjustments based on what I learned walking around all day in the outfit at Anime California this weekend then making the second one for my friend. And mayyyybe make a cute SCH Novus to go along with it ;3


I learned a ton from this, and thus far while at time's its been frustrating and wanted to just throw my machine out the window the experiences I've had thus far with this cosplay have been great and I hope to have alot of fun with this and see you all at fan fest in Vegas!




EDIT:
Ahh! One last thing, this was actually the VERY FIRST THING I had ordered for this cosplay, it's unfortunate that the hood covers it up, but as a proud legacy member I wear this <3 to Con's / E3 / Gaming events now. (I simply made a vector for it and ordered it from StrayTats)

[Roeark]

Holy smokes; Does your friend accept commissioned work? I've been on a mad hunt for someone that can make a Thyrus Staff.

I got my camera in so here are some pics. Ill be honest a friend of mine made it for me so im not a hundred percent sure how she made it. I believe its an led inside the ball at the top and some led strips for the fire. The battery is hidden inside the head of the staff and there's a switch on the side that turns it on.

[Yukina_Kori]

Were you at Anime Expo becuase i think i saw you there. I was the black mage in the full get up. I think this is you.

[Yukina_Kori]

Holy smokes; Does your friend accept commissioned work? I've been on a mad hunt for someone that can make a Thyrus Staff.

Let me ask her if she is ok with that and i will let you know.

[NarikoStar]

Were you at Anime Expo becuase i think i saw you there. I was the black mage in the full get up. I think this is you.

Yup! That's me! (Except at the time I only had my wig/hair/tail done) /panic

I'll assume this BLM is you?


Anime Expo had a good turn out for FFXIV, I was pleasant surprised (This was @ the Final Fantasy gathering, but I saw a lala couple waltzing around and a party of all race RSE the day before!


Also- I had thought you walked up with the SMN, was she the one who made you the staff ;O? (I saw SMN again at Anime California but I didn't see you- or at least- I do not think I did >_>)

[Yukina_Kori]

@NarikoStar

Yup that's me and no she did not make my staff lol. Actually that's the first time seeing that smn, great cosplayer though. I'm actually pretty far from Cali so i can only make it to Anime Expo each year. I also got some pics of the RSE group they looked awesome. I also agree that AE had a pretty good turn up for FF14 cosplayers.

[Sirloveless]

bumps for updates?!

[Remnance]

http://adonteon.deviantart.com/gallery/

Can't make it to the fan fest, but went to DragonCon 2014. Plan on updating this costume in the future. So if others have questions about Wonderflex, I can help.