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 ;)

Cat

Hey, you know what you need for Halloween? Black cats! Coming from an allergy-prone family, I made mine hypoallergenic:

But what's that? A zipper?

That's right, I made a cat purse :D
I didn't really get inspired for Halloween costumes this year until a friend of mine suggested going as witches. True enough, I have a hat and a short black party dress, so why not? But there's a problem with dresses, namely that they don't usually have pockets and I am a smartphone addict. Plus, a hat and a black dress do not a witch make, so why not kill two birds with one stone and stack up on accessories?
I had some black velvet in my stash and after some googling found this pattern. After that, it was pretty straightforward:

pattern

lining/bag

eyes to attach the strap

Unfortunately, I was too sick to have much fun at the actual Halloween party, but now I have an accessory for carnival :)

I know that it's closer to New Years Eve than to Halloween, but I had this post sitting around waiting for me to upload the pictures for the last two months, so here it is ;)
Merry Christmas, by the way :)

Natural form underskirt

I don't think I've mentioned this before, but I'm planning a natural form era costume. I'm not telling you what it's supposed to be yet, since that would be embarrassing if I never finish it. But it's definitely supposed to be a costume, so I'm absolutely okay with historical inaccuracies such as using the black polyester taffeta I once bought 10m of for 14€ ;)
 I used this guide, and basic math & imagination for the gored front panels.

Pictured: Basic math and imagination ;) You can see where I toyed with several options for the side panel. Construction is pretty basic, so I didn't take many pictures:

One fabric width (150cm) for the upper back panel, two for the lower. They were supposed to be 50cm high each, but at some point I lost 10cm in total from the back panels, which is why it's kind of asymmetrical in the picture. I ended up triming the 10cm from the front panels as well.

Trying out the pleating...

And setting in the waistband. I'm very proud of the overlapping closure, even though it took a lot of trial and error and still isn't perfect. Well, at 1,40€ per metre I'm okay with this being a test piece ;)
I did a simple double turned hem because the fabric was a little too stiff to work nicely with a rolled hem foot. I also cursed myself because I had to iron crouching on the floor, and at ~4,5m hem circumference my legs did not like me when I was finally finished. Something else I'm proud of: I actually finished all seams! Just simple zig-zag and one pinked, but I usually never finish seams (I might have mentioned I'm lazy).
And the finished product: (with an improvised bumpad, so it looks nicer:)

I will take pictures of me wearing it some time, but that might only be when I make some more pieces to this costume, we'll see. At least I'm finally motivated to sew again :)

How to enlarge sewing patterns using Inkscape

As you might have noticed by now, I kind of hate buying patterns, instead working with what I can find on the internet or my mothers pattern-making book. If you've read my post about the Stardress, you know how I usually enlarge patterns manually. But that's a lot of work, so recently I began to look at ways to enlarge patterns using my computer. What I found is Inkscape, an open source program to draw vector graphics. If you search for Inkscape on youtube etc, you'll find a lot of tutorials for all kinds of neat things, but I couldn't find a tutorial to enlarge sewing patterns, so here it is:
First things first, you don't need any fancy equipment for this, just the program and a mouse. I also suggest to watch one or two of the tutorials on youtube because you'll need to use the Bézier tool quite a lot and it's just easier to learn from a video. Ready? Here we go!
You'll need a pattern you want to enlarge first, of course. I used one of the quarter sized ones in the back of my mother's pattern making book and scanned it; for some reason, the scanner saved it at three times the size of the original, so I had to make some more calculations than normal, but as long as you know the ratio between your beginning and end point, you should be fine.
Open the image in Inkscape, I just click ok when it asks wether to embedd or do something else.

Please click on the image if it's too small ;)

Then, using the Bézier tool, start tracing the pattern. I usually start with the biggest size and work my way to the smaller sizes, darts, grain lines etc. Make sure you trace everything you want to have on your big pattern!

The Bézier tool, in case you didn't watch any tutorials

You'll need this tool to manipulate the straight lines into curves;
If you click here the window on the right side opens up

To make it easier on my eyes, I make all the lines red and 1mm thick using the window on the right side.

Work in progress...

...and all done

Now we manipulate our lines a little:

Using the selection tool, drag your background off the page.
We don't need that anymore! :)

Select all your lines by drawing a big rectangle over all of them, still with the
selection tool

Now combine them, so you can move them all at the same time.

It should look something like this.

Now we need a grid:

I like mine to be a 1cm x 1cm grid, with thicker lines every 5cm for better visibility, but that's just personal preference.

When I have the grid, I draw another rectangle around the entire pattern.
This means that the edges "stick" to the grid, which is very useful.

 Make sure you combine the rectangle with the other lines like you did before!
Now I count the squares within the rectangle, write them down and do a little math on them. This is where you need to know your ratio, my book says 1:4, but since my scanner for some reason saved the image at three times its original size, I had to divide by three and then multiply by four.

What, you didn't think that
this was gonna be entirely
digital, did you?

Using the same window where you found the grid settings before, you can now change the page size to your new measurements.

If it looks like this, you're almost done!

Now we're actually enlarging the pattern:

Still with the selection tool, move it to one corner of the page

And, keeping Ctrl pressed, pull on one of the corners until you meet the
corner of the page.

It pays to zoom in at this point to get all the edges lined up. Remember to keep Crtl pressed when pulling on the corner, or the width to height ration distorts.
Okay, that's as far as we get using Inkscape. I suggest saving your work as an .svg file (the default option), so that you can come back and manipulate it further later on, if you need to. But if you actually want to print it out, I suggest saving as a .pdf file, using the "save as " button.

That's what my finished product looks like, note the zoom factor

 One last tip, because I didn't know this before: you can actually print this out at home, using the "poster" button in your print menu:

You might wanna select some overlap if you want to glue it together later

I hope that this helps some of you, if you have any questions, shoot, but keep in mind that I too am still learning to work with this program ;)
Right now I'm working on converting all the basic patterns from my mother's pattern book into printable patterns so that I don't lose any time enlarging next time I want to use one of them.

Bits and pieces

To be honest, I haven't really been sewing much lately. It's not that I didn't have the time, I just wasn't motivated enough to use that time to sew. But I've been doing some prep work, and other little things, that I didn't deem interesting enough to justify a blog post. But since this break is getting kind of long, here's some bits and pieces:

-the circular gallifreyan shirt:

Finished embroidering the collar and halfway attached it to the base of the shirt. Now I'm too lazy to iron it so I can finish attaching it.

attached collar

finished embroidery

- patterns:
I bought a pattern for a vest/waistcoat/gilet (I have no clue what to call it in English), because up until now, I always stole my brother's when I wanted to wear one. I traced the pieces I needed instead of cutting them because I wasn't too sure about the size I needed and didn't want to destroy the paper pattern, so that's as far as I got.

No pictures yet, so you get the pattern envelope. I'll be doing view A first

Also in patterns: I'm still scaling up a 19th century corset pattern, I even have some fabric for it.

enlarging the gussets

 I will be doing full posts when (if) I finish any of these, but right now I'm kind of busy with other things. We'll see how it goes.

What I've been doing lately...

Lace. Lots of Lace.

Pattern found here, scroll down and you should be able to find it. I love drawn instructions, so much easier to follow than written ones... In any case, the pattern repeats itself every four rows, so I knew it by heart pretty quickly. So far, I have about 5m of lace and still some yarn left, I kinda challenged myself to crochet the whole roll of yarn into one continuous strip of lace. I already finished all four seasons of raising hope while crocheting, so this is gonna take some time, but I like having an easy continuous project for things like watching tv, riding the train etc. I just have to see if I can make something cool/pretty/useful out of it when I'm done. Hm...
In other news, I have some plans for a shirt/tunic for the summer (fabric's bought, you'll see more when it's out of the wash) which will feature some embroidery. While I love the look of blackwork I don't feel up for counted thread embroidery on a finely woven fabric and even after some considerable time couldn't find a decent pattern (or any pattern, actually) for the later, more curved and freely flowing (floral) designs, I looked for other inspiration.
I've dabbled in Circular Gallifreyan before, but it's hard to do nicely by hand, so tonight I busted out the computer - and Paint. Really, I tried Gimp, but it just wouldn't give me a tool do draw circle shapes! Anyway, because I wanted it evenly, I drew 3 different sizes of circles and after that only used the copy/paste/move tool, the eraser and sometimes brush (for the dots). Oh, and the straight lines tool, because who the hell could ever draw a straight line with a mouse :)
I used the "A good man goes to war" poem from the Doctor Who episode of the same name, here's the first verse:

Don't worry about the writing at the top, I do know how to spell, it just helps visualizing how many circles you need when you write it out that way.
It was quite fun to make and I'll certainly do the rest of the poem as well. I think it would make a nice pattern as embellishment for collar, cuffs or hem of a simple white shirt.
That's all for today! Have a happy Easter, everyone :)

Edit: I did the whole poem! Yay!