Saber Cosplay

This post would have been about my Harley Quinn dress, but I haven't gotten round to uploading the photos yet... so I decided to do one about another past outfit. This was my first ever cosplay that I actually made. All my other cosplays have been bought. Saber, from the anime Fate/Stay Night is my favourite character pretty much of anyone ever, so it was worth the effort to make her outfit myself. And here's the final product!

You need to ignore the wig, because the correct one didn't get delivered until the day after the con, so this was a normal blonde one that I tried (and failed) to style. Still, I look snazzy, right?

The outfit, although designed by the creator of the anime was patterned and made entirely by myself. This was one of the first times I did a proper mockup of something in cheap fabric as a test. I think I used the lining material from some old curtains. The white you can see in the skirt is actually an entire underdress because, even though other people couldn't see it was there, I needed to make the outfit as authentic as possible, and the character occasionally doesn't wear armour, allowing me to figure out that it was a separate white dress.

I tend to be fairly detailed orientated/a perfectionist, so all round the bottom of the white dress is that weird ziggy pattern with the yellow detailing, because that's what the character has, so even if no one sees it round the back, I was not going to risk that, or let it not be as perfect as I could.

There were so many bodged bits of this outfit, and 'make do' bits. Like when I ran out of gold ribbon the night before the con, and so used green for the rest of the edging then painted it gold...

This all taught me a lot about starting early and not wasting time. It was alright for cosplay to have only the look of the thing - it was only ever worn once, but for actual clothes I realised I'd have to do a lot better.

The armour was made following a tutorial which can be found here. It's a really brilliant tutorial that I would definitely recommend to anyone looking at trying to make their own cosplay armour. Foam is easy to work with comparatively to some materials, and if you follow the tutorial properly (which I did not) then it ends up looking amazing.

The tassets (skirt armour) made it highly inconvenient to sit down, and the breastplate was a nightmare with all the fiddly bits. When I redo this outfit, I will make a full breastplate out of black foam, then do the silver over the top, rather than trying to attach silver armour pieces to black fabric.

The gauntlets were awesome though, and came out looking so brilliant and made me super happy and proud. Though the finger armour was weird and ended up being sewn piece by piece to black knitted gloves. The look worked, but it was tedious.

The boots were supposed to be armoured too, but I was running out of time, and had no money to buy a second pair of boots that could be sacrificed to the gluegun. The plain boots looked alright though.

So, what were the flaws in my armour? Well, as usual, I was rushing to get it all done,and ended up not having enough days to properly seal the foam, which made it harder to spray paint and more flimsy than I would have liked. That meant that two years and three moves later, it is all completely destroyed. Which is sad. It did look awesome on the day though.

This was actually the bit of my cosplay I was most proud of. I like making cosplay swords, and Excalibur came out looking amazing! The sword is pine, with airdry fimo for the detailing. Seriously proud of it :)

In Summary:

I need to start things a LOT earlier to make sure I have time to finish things properly

It's always best to make something as durable as possible - imagine you're making it to be worn every single day for the next two weeks - it's not enough for it just to look pretty for one day. It has to survive life, and be comfortable.

I can do this whole patterning thing. It will just take a bit more practise

I love making swords. I want to make more swords...

Making mistakes is good - I learnt a LOT from all the mistakes I made with this outfit. And very few of those mistakes are ones I have repeated. Which is good.
Next time I make armour I will try out Wonderflex. Which is apparently amazing and awesome and creates very pretty things.