Korra Cosplay

So it's carnival season again (and a short one, at that) and I wanted to make a new costume. Some time after New years, I got the idea to make a Korra costume (of Legend of Korra. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out, as well as Avatar - The last Airbender, its predecessor). I really liked her season four look, especially since i'm wearin my hair short right now, so this is what I went for: (Source)

With finals coming up, I did't have too much time, plus I didn't want to spend too much money, so I got an XL Men's turtleneck from the store, cut off the arms, put it on my dressform and pinched and pinned the sides until it was tight-fitting. (Also I've literally never made a shirt out of knits, but pssst, don't tell ;) )

I marked the pinlines, took it off the dressform and to the sewing machine. I sewed the entire costume with a standart zig-zag-stitch, by the way.

 On to the details! After adjusting the armholes a little, I cut an old white t-shirt into strips and bound them.

I also wanted the princess lines to show, so I put the shirt on my dressform again, marked where they went on the wrong side of the shirt and sewed along a thin fold.

The chest detail is just sewn on and the neck opening is bound like the arm holes. For the sleeves I cut off the sleeves of one of my dad's old shirts and sewed them tighter.

The bracelets are made out of what I cut off the neck part of the turtleneck.
Well, and here's where it gets tricky, because I didn't take any more process pictures. Sorry, I guess... I'll just try to explain it as good as I can ;)
I had some old sports pants (technically only used as pyjamas) in blue I could use, so what I needed was the skirt  & the boots.
On the same trip when I got the turtleneck, I stopped by a fabric store and bought the remaining stock of some unidentifyable, brown, stretchy fabric (about 1m x 1,50) and the smallest amount of fake fur I could get (10cm x 150cm).
I made the skirt by wrapping the fabric around my hips (1m length was perfect) and cutting it to a width that seeed right, about halfway down my thighs. I made two darts to shape it to my hips and then eyeballed the points front and back. When the shape looked right, I used it as a template to cut the strips of fake fur (note: when you trim slightly curved edges with fake fur, you can't just cut  straight strips of fake fur. Luckily I noticed that before cutting ;) ) and sewed it on with a zig-zag-stitch along the top edge. For the belt, I used the same shirt I took the sleeves from. (Yay, got a picture! :D)

It is actually sewn to the wrong side of the skirt, so that drapes nicely. I decided to ignore the belt-buckle because I still have no idea a) what to make it out of and b) how to attach it. So I just tied a knot and it worked perfectly ;) I used the same fabric for that  weird little triangular piece of fabric she's wearing underneath her skirt, just pinned it to my shirt so I could still go to the bathroom while wearing it.
Since this blog post is getting rather long and I still haven't taken any proper pictures of the boots I'll wrap it up for now and talk about the in a later post.

All in all I'm pretty proud of my costume! I've already worn it twice and got recognized 4 times in one evening, which is a pretty good amount considering that the third season is set to premier on february 16th in German TV ;)