You've Been Scratched by a Woman!

Porkchops in the oven. So famished am nearly see-through. Protip: Drinking a venti double-bagged Awake Tea from Starbucks is NOT a good lunch substitute.

But onwards ho! Dr. Jacquin was finished up last Thursday and debuted at the Museum Gala Saturday night. Here's the second half of that story.

When we left off last time, the cuffs and collar were patterned up and I was on the verge of starting the embroidery. If you placed your bets on things ending in despair, you're probably a few dollars richer right now. This was the product of three nights' work: 

If Dante's Inferno described an eleventh level of hell, it would probably feature metallic embroidery floss. The ladies at the shop made rage faces when describing the difficulty of working with this specific floss and I blissfully ignored them until I was two or three stitches in and found I was spending ten minutes per stitch untangling the damn stuff. So any notion of a fancy padded satin stitch, as per the historical examples, fell by the wayside. Instead, I seized upon a embroidered trim bought out of Turkey for Giovanni Auditore's lapels that looks passably enough like Napoleonic embroidery. eBay turns up a LOT of good trims if you search for "medieval trim" or "renaissance trim" or even "vintage sari trims." Oddly enough, this particular trim is also used on one of Henry VIII's costumes in the fourth season of The Tudors.

Not sure why everything is getting flipped tonight. Before the trim could be added, it needed to be a bit more gold so I grabbed the left-over gold paint from Marius' armour details and gave it a light going-over. I didn't want to coat it too thickly because that would clog up the individual stitches. In the image above, the first four segments are painted and the last isn't, so you can see the difference. Not huge but enough to make it jive with the gold buttons and aiguilette* a bit better.

The trim came with adhesive backing but I tacked it on with a few stitches here and there just to be safe. It was a lengthy process but not as lengthy (or rage-inducing) as embroidery.

Then I only had to get the cuffs and collar on for good and add the buttons. This is how it looked Thursday night - only had to add the shoulder knot and get my boots sorted out.

The shoulder knot should normally grow out of the aiguilette up towards the collar but this one, being current military issue, didn't have that feature. So I hashed something quickly together with some generic cord from Fabricland.

Not perfect but enough to "do the look" until I find a cord that matches the aiguilette better. Attaching this was a bit tricky - to hide the stitches, I had to make sure they fell parallel to the twists in the cord which let me lay them down in those little crevices created by the twists.

On to the boots! The second half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century were all about those sexy brown-topped riding boots and that's what Jacquin's wearing in The Duellists (go figure). I've got a bit of a thing for riding dress boots (versus field boots, which lace up around the ankle) so I had a spare pair I could modify for this costume. The basic pattern looked like this:

I drafted it up quickly by taping a tube of pattern paper around the top of the boot, tracing the top line and then adding a couple of extra cms for the bit that would fold to the inside, and then cutting it to shape. The bottom lip had to be folded up and glued and the center back seam had to be stitched up which made it a bit bulkier than predicted. Nevertheless, it did the trick. Gave them a bit of a polish while watching the movie for the three hundredth time.

And that was it! No really decent photos yet but how about a super-classy one taken in the lieu halfway through supper?

Note the careful inclusion of the bag with two bottles, one corkscrew, and a flute. As you can see, the front is pulling downwards a bit from the weight of the aiguilette, which Jacquin's doesn't do in the film. I'm still debating whether I'm going to add a layer of extra-heavy adhesive interfacing behind the buttons on the right side to fix that. The maroon sash is temporarily covering the gap between the top of the white riding breeches and the bottom of the coat until I get a proper pair of period breeches made (where the waistline will be somewhere in the vicinity of my armpits, thereby eliminating the problem.)

And that's another project crossed off the list, minor alterations aside! This isn't going to hit a Con floor until early Spring 2013 but I'm working at lining up a decent photoshoot in the interim.

Lastly, on the topic of Cons, the roommate and I popped up to Edmonton for the second day of the Edmonton Comic and Entertainment Expo. I wore Marius for that one and I think there was a moment where I may have put the wind up some Legend of Korra cosplayers. Going over to chat with them briefly, I asked if they were going to Pure Spec and told them I was working on a Korra costume. They were looking at me askance and confused the whole time and continued to do so after we parted ways. I only realized a day later that it might have been another case of unintentionally bending the gender, as they say. I still don't understand why my voice doesn't give it away but there it is.

Ah well. Currently halfway through Korra, who is coming together beautifully. Just have to get a bit more ripped, a bit browner, then we're almost there! Stay tuned for an update this weekend.

*'Aiguilette' is surely the hardest word in the world to spell correctly.

Chestermere Expo Recap

So this past weekend is going down in the books as The Best Weekend Yet.

Somehow, by some crazy fluke, Chestermere Library managed to get six of the Black Library authors over from the UK for a two-day Expo. These are the people who write the Warhammer/Warhammer 40K fiction and they're damned good at it too. The fact they all ended up in a recreation center in a little satellite community east of Calgary is simply ridiculous. I first heard about it back in July; I was sitting in the truck on the road to Winnipeg with the joust troupe in the middle of the night when the link popped up on Facebook and we nearly had to pull over so I could deal with a case of the vapours. The best part? Chris Wraight, author of Sword of Justice and Sword of Vengeance, was going to be there. Marius Leitdorf crops up in Chris' books as a flashback character in the memory of Rufus Leitdorf, his youngest son. To get the chance to meet Chris and chat with him about his work without making the laborious trek to a Games Day was almost beyond comprehension. It wasn't a solo journey either; my best bro Cil volunteered to come along as caffeine-administrator, moral support, and de facto squire because, let's face it, I can't get that stuff on myself.

Now it's thrilling for any costumer to meet the artists, authors, or actors associated with their character but when the character is particularly obscure (and you've put upwards of 400 hours and over $1k into your costume), it's... pretty much the best thing in the world. I was a total bag of nerves on both days - the anticipated 'chat' was more a string of incoherence on my part (due to lack of sleep, nerves, lingering concussion stupidity from a few weeks back [more on THAT later], nerves, caffeine, excitement, and more nerves) but Chris was wonderful. And entirely posh too. He signed my books and was even good enough to sign the back of my right pauldron. Every time I think about it, my arms do stupid flaily things. Symptoms are expected to continue for at least three weeks.

And people recognized the costume. "Hey, you're the guy that takes buttermilk baths, right?" "How's Daisy doing?" One of the best parts was sitting in the general Q&A session when someone asked "How do you know you've become successful as an author?" Dan Abnett pointed to me and said "When people start dressing as your characters." [See comment re: Stupid Flaily Things above]. The Abnetts themselves - Dan and his lovely wife Nik Vincent - are absolutely great. Nik had terrific advice during the 'Writing for Black Library' panel she hosted with Graham McNeill and was always willing to talk shop about the writing process and getting the proverbial foot-in-the-door.

It was a terrific event: well-planned, well-organized, well-laid-out. A bigger crowd would have been nice for the sake of the organizers and authors but the small locale and the low-key atmosphere couldn't have been better. Doing bigger Cons, even San Diego, is one thing with a costume like this but when you find your favourite authors from your favourite series landing in your own backyard? You can only resort to internet-speak and rant and rave about the sheer amount of FEELS you have. And hope to god that all future Con experiences are not tainted by comparison.

Checking In

I'm knee deep in Marius of late because there's just over two weeks left before we jump on the plane for SDCC. Poor Marat has been put to the side in favour of getting the Big Stuff done (but that's okay because he's a greasy bastard anyways...).

So where are we at?

As of five minutes ago, Marius looks like this:

Not that exciting and actually kind of flesh coloured... But we're making solid progress. The greaves are getting there too:

This was earlier today, having contact cemented the inner trim on in preparation for stitching.

I'm finally at the point where I have a game plan with this. Part of the reason I was hesitant to start was due to lack of said game plan; I didn't know how the trim was going go, nor how the greaves would be cut down, nor the final shape of the breast-plate, etc. In other words, it's not like making Giovanni Auditore's Assassin gear where it was like BAM! Here's the reference photos! BAM! Here's the short films showing how the stuff is supposed to move. Instead, I'm working from this miniature box:

And numerous obscure images in my head that may or may not look something like these:

(Pls ignore the retardo art)

I'm not complaining but it does add a swing factor I'm not used to. Anyways, progress is being made and if I take it one step at a time, it's incredible how quickly it takes shape.

While I'm at it, let's take a quick look at the greaves. I lucked out with the cuirass and the gorget since I had pre-existing armour pieces I could soak and mold the leather over. The greaves (or boots, I suppose) were a different story. I do have a set of armour greaves (seen in the picture up there) but I wanted Marius to have really big, robust-looking boots which would lend him extra weight and emphasize his stockiness - based on the model, which is quite hideously proportioned, he looks like he would have been short and powerfully built.* So I had to build a custom form to mold the leather around.

Starting from Fev's excellent tutorial she made for her Altair boots (check out her website, she's awesome! - http://www.fevereon.com/props/index.php), I laminated a number of insulation sheets together as such:

Then grabbed my hacksaw and went to work. After about thirty minutes, I had the following:

I swear to god it's not what it looks like. As I'm roughing it out, I find it helps to grab the sand paper and smooth it out a bit just because it helps you see the shape it's taking (phallic, apparently, in this case). After another half hour, this is what it looked like plus normal-sized greave:

The plus side of doing this eventually in leather is that the circumference can change easily due to the flexibility of the medium (just cinch them up tighter or looser as needed.)

Doing the form was one thing. Molding the leather around this beast was something totally different. To spam you with repeat images now, you can see the wrinkling around the ankle:

This is because you're taking the same amount of leather that wraps around the upper calf and expecting it to somehow curve in gracefully around the narrow part of the ankle. New and Exciting Fact: It Doesn't.

So you swear and you scream and you reef and you pull and you sweat and you wish you had taken up lawn bowling instead and you make small cuts along the edge to coax it into that graceful curve and you drive nails and screws through the leather and into the form to make it stay. And it does. Sort of. Then you grab your thousand foot long strip of 6" wide muslin and you start wrapping that bitch from the top down, making sure you wrap in the same direction as the leather wraps the form. Then you swear some more and sweat as you pull that muslin strip as tight as you can humanly get it to make sure all of the wrinkles are out. Then once you get to the bottom, you drive in more nails and duct-tape the end down just to make sure. Then you swear more still when you find there are remaining wrinkles but you do your best to smooth them out and put the thing aside in a fit of pique. Leave to dry at least five days (or whenever it ceases to be cool to the touch on the outside of the fabric).

I have a picture somewhere of it wrapped and drying but can't find it at the moment.

And once it's dried and you've got a bit of clever trimming, you've got it ready to add the trim!

And on that note, I'd better add myself to bed. Hope to have everything molded, cut, and as close to paint-ready as possible by the end of the week. Impossibilities abound!

But wait! There's more! Have a couple of photos from our Banff photoshoot last weekend (taken by Errin, who is a totally ballin' photographer!):

*Why, yes, I have thought about this rather extensively.

Quickly Now!

So Calgary Expo starts this Friday and predictably time isn't something I have a lot of (this is also due to the myriad of work left to do on the museum exhibit that's slated to open next Thursday AND on-going joust practises for the tournament in Texas).

Sort of weird - it's the first time in three years I haven't been rushing to finish a costume (for myself at least). It's actually entirely disheartening and will certainly be rectified next year. I do have a commission in the works that'll be finished up by Thursday night for my good bro Cil - she's being the Marquis of Guy Davis' excellent comic of the same name. Would post WIPs but it's just a whole lot of black 1770s clothes and hey... there are patterns out  there for that.

That brings up a good point, actually. I need to start steering this blog more towards actual sewing tips and tutorials. That will be the goal for this summer while I'm working on my three mains for San Diego.

Those, to set the record straight right now, consist of:

Marius Leitdorf (Warhammer) New molded leather armour and new pants
Malfatto aka The Doctor from Assassin's Creed Brotherhood

And, coming lately to the fold, I give you Dr. Jacquin from the Duellists. Yeah, I know he turned up last post but GAIZ IT WAS INEVITABLE! Dark hair, wicked clothes. And let's face it, kids - he's pretty much Marius in Napoleonic form but without the crazy. I also need something relatively light to wear down there - not sure how a frock coat of melton wool and silk is going to be light but there it is.

 

So that makes two doctors and a madman. Should be iiiiiiiinteresting....

Speaking of mad, I did a quick test-run with Herr Leitdorf two nights ago since I wanted to do the makeup at least once before Con and try it with the new wig from Arda Wigs. They're absolutely GREAT by the way - REALLY decently priced, excellent quality, very thick hair, and huge wig caps to fit massive noggins.

Things might be a bit tricky at Expo this year - the weapons regs have tightened up A LOT and I really hope my runefang and dagger look "fantasy" enough to pass inspection because I'm going to be a hella lame Elector Count without my bloody runefang. Might give me a good excuse to practise my sporadic raging. Oh wait, I do that at work....

Anyways, weird and shitty regs aside, I still made a sheath for the dagger tonight. Have some before and after photos:

Wine is key to the creative process, don't ye know?

Aaaaaand half a bottle, two hours, and six million expletives later, I give you the following:

I'm going to pick up some burgundy/purple dye at Tandy tomorrow and spruce it up a bit with some gold scrollwork. As per the feeble education component of this blog, I used Noctiped's excellent scabbard tutorial. His work is absolutely immaculate!

And on that note, my stomach full of Wendy's should be tolerably digested so I'm off to bed to convert the rest of it to permanent love-handles. See you on the other side of Expo, kids!

It Lives!

Well, it lives to joust, at least.

Howdy, folks. I guess it's been awhile, eh? At first, there was the psuedo defection to Tumblr, then there was the trip to Europe, then there was the Three Musketeers thing, THEN there was Christmas, and god knows, NOTHING gets done then.

So now we are here in February and the Costume Coma is beginning again. The jousting thing is progressing full-steam ahead and we've got our first tournament in May in Austin, Texas of all places! So, as you guessed, the Costume Coma Spring 2012 Edition features a LOT of historical gear.

Here's the List (it's okay, I cry too when I look at it):

MUST HAVE:
-Arming doublet
-At least one normal doublet
-At least three linen shirts
-Banner
-New boots
-Arming coif
-Helmet crest
-Sword scabbard
-Belts
-New velvet cap

NICE TO HAVE:
-Fancy brocade doublet
-Max's hunting gown and hood
-Proper hosen (well-made so crotch does NOT go when riding)
-'Bases' - weirdo armour skirt worn extensively by Germans between 1500 and 1545.

The arming doublet is DONE. It looks like this (about 3/4 finished here and missing the padded arms):




















It was made with THIS absolutely excellent tutorial. All hand-sewn, proper materials like linen and melton wool, nice period buckles, etc, etc. (By the way, if you're in the market for period buckles I totally recommend these chaps. Cheap, excellent selection, quick shipping, and just generally REALLY pretty stuff)

To be honest, the arming doublet is probably the biggest, most involved project on that list, so the other things should be relatively quick. I'll try to post play-by-play updates as it all comes together.

Before I sign off, have a few self-indulgent joust-related photos. Back in November, the troupe helped out with a TV show called 'Man on a Mission.' Basic premise is this - a vaguely hunkish guy goes out to learn to do "guy" things, like drive fast cars, cook steaks, gamble his life's savings away in a game of craps, etc. In one episode, he learns to joust and that was us. I ended up riding demo games for this one (spearing rings with a sword, spearing a hay-bale with a spear, doing quintain stuff). Decided to wear Marius' gear with the leather arming vest (but without the 20 lbs of makeup - let's face it, even I have a weirdness threshold) and it was a pretty good time.














Rowan decided she was going to have a good time too and try to buck me off during the rings. She was pitching quite the fit, so we traded her out for Peter, who is my main jousting bro this season.














Had a bit more luck with Pete.














And there we all are at the end, still smiling despite the long, somewhat arduous day it was (wish I could get away with wearing that stuff all the time...). Photos are taken by the wonderfully talented Marnie Burkhart

So jousting is the name of the game this summer and the sewing projects will be in accordance! However, the Texas joust may require me to miss this year's Calgary Expo and since I need my Con fix, there are plans in the works to hit up San Diego instead. Going to pimp Marius to The Nines, if that's the case and it's already begun. So stay tuned for updates all around!

One of THOSE Days

Hey guys! Second Con report is coming soon with the Big News but because I had a pretty shitty day today, have a few of the Marius photos we took last weekend. Mostly because they make me feel un-shitty.












































































I am grinning like a fool in all these shots because I absolutely, utterly adore this outfit. Hands down, it is my total favourite EVAH. And that last shot is my total favourite EVAH photo of any costume EVAH.

And now that that's out of my system, bed beckons. And verily I did go forth and lay upon that bed and quoth I, "I'm bloody fed up with bloody people and their bloody bullshit and godjesuschristinahandbasket I need some bloody days to mybloodyself to bloody write and eat steaks."

Here endeth the tale.

CCEE 2011 - The RECAP Part 1

Where do I start? It was awesome. It was beyond awesome. It was probably one of the best weekends of my life.

Friday "Preview" Night

Work went longer than normal so when I got home, the race was on to get everything together for Marius. Apart from the makeup test back in April, I didn't really know what I was doing in that department so it took way longer than planned. Caught a ride down with Cil aka Chell from Portal 2 and swanked around for a couple of hours before we all packed it off to the Hop n' Brew pub for some well-earned pints.

Photos of our crew haven't made it to the internets yet but there are a few kicking around here and there. So, without further ado, I give you the following:



















(Ganked from LoneHowler at Flickr.com)

I wish I could say I was hanging my gut out on purpose there and not be lying slightly. It's the sash, I swear. Stole Thomas More's collar of Esses as substitute bling until I make my own. For the hair, I decided earlier in the week to cut down a rather crappy black wig I've had lying around and make it a bit gray with that spray-in hair dye. Good thing Marius is kind of a haggard dude because, man, that was some haggard-looking hair.

And I never thought it would happen - someone recognized the costume! He didn't make it all the way to Marius but he came damned close:
Him: Wait. I think I know what that is.
Me: Are you serious?
Him: Yeah. Warhammer Fantasy?
Me: Yup!
Him: Empire?
Me: Hell yeah!
Him: Are you one of the elector counts?
Me: YES!
Him: I can't quite remember the colours. Nuln?
Me (with flail): OMG ITS AVERLAND. BLACK AND YELLOW. Marius Leitdorf! The crazy one! Him: OH YEAH!!!!

Another guy thought I was one of the greatswords - props to him because he had the context right. Buuut speaking of swords, see that giant-ass one I've got? Yeah, that was made by the ridiculously talented Inkibus, who is a sheer genius when it comes to prop fabrication. She also did the weapons for Giovanni. Thanks again, Inki! All of your work was the icing on the cake!

Saturday

Saturday is going to stick in my brain for a looong time to come. Got up very early to do Giovanni's makeup and get dressed.














There's a scene at the start of the ACII Lineage films where he's getting all his gear on - I can tell you right now that it's not that easy and you need at least one other person. Thankfully, Deez aka La Volpe aka my room-mate was on-hand to set me straight and to make sure we had all of the stuff as we piled frantically into the car. After making a quick pit-stop at the grocery store to buy tomatoes for our skit, we got down to the Con.

To be continued....

Giovanni: The Current State of Affairs

Have an update! Quick! Like a glove!

I give you the following:


















It's sitting at 95% done right now. Just have to make the weapons sheaths and figure out those damnable cords (orly?). You can see the vambrace sitting on the boots over by the sewing machine. The boots turned out perfectly, so my initial misgivings were completely unfounded.

Can't believe I'm nearing the end with this. I've never worked on a costume for such an extended period of time; typically, they're shorter projects packed into a month or two of uber-intense, stressful work. But Gio's been ongoing since late December now and the prospect of wrapping him up is a little... sad. But still exhilirating.

Con starts the day after tomorrow. It'll be Marius Friday night and then Gio Saturday and Sunday. Holyshitisthisreallyhappening...

And I just got word from my brilliant roomie (aka La Volpe) and she's snagging me some gold tooth enamel from her work so the good Elector Count can have a gold tooth for Friday night's festivities. Because he's a classy dude like that. Still have to find a snuff box...

Marius: Fun with Foam

As decided a while back, Marius is on hold until I can get Giovanni in some state of completion. There are points, however, when my Assassin Threshold is maxed out and I crave some insane Elector Count. This weekend was just such a point so I had a go at carving the form for his breastplate.

By the end of the day, this is where we were:














I would have been completely up the creek if I didn't already have a breastplate to compare this too. So I grabbed my trusty 1480s cuirass, traced out a pattern onto the foam, and started to hack and slash. There was only one issue:










Yup, the foam isn't thick enough to give it the proper globose shape. (And I'm sorry but Marius NEEDS to have a globose breastplate. Question: Is it the shape of the cuirass or is it actually a giant gut? YOU'LL NEVER KNOW. Hint: It's both*)

Optimally, I would like to have the breast-and-back plate molded up and finished by the end of the month so I can wear it all in the Lilac Festival Parade with the other re-enactment geeks. Proooobably not going to happen though. But today, when taking patterns off the real!breast-plate, I thought "O hai, why don't you just wear that with the pauldrons?" This would entail the construction of a proper arming doublet so I don't die but I've got one started so we'll pick that up where we left off. Now it remains to be seen if I want to lug around 30 lbs of plate at Con or not...

Before I go, something very cool happened this morning. A bird hit our kitchen window (that wasn't the cool part) and when I went to investigate, I found this tiny yellow thing on its back with its legs in the air. It was okay, though - no broken bones and so I sat outside with it in my hand while it came to its senses. At one point, it decided the hand wasn't good enough so it flew on to my shoulder and decided it would stay there for the next two hours while I planned out the initial cuirass pattern. It was only after I identified it as a male yellow warbler that it came back around entirely. So I took it outside and off it flew.

And for proof that I'm not having you on:

















It's been brought to my attention that the latest posts are lacking stupid cat pictures. I hope this makes up for it.

Next post will feature epic weaponry and sarcasm.

*WARNING: As author becomes increasingly stressed, posts get increasingly ridiculous

Marius Day 5: We Are Clothed!

Somehow this happened over the last seventy two hours. There are a few loose ends to tie up on the doublet and the pants (because I'm completely lazy when it comes to finishing touches like linings tacked down and cuffs hemmed) but at least you can get the general gist here. I don't know about you guys but for me, at first glance, it's like "What in the living hell?!" and then at second and third, it's just generally offensive. But that's fine because Marius is a generally offensive type of dude. As proof, here's a passage from the Empire codex:

"The short-lived crusade of Baugard the Rash of Parravon in 2512 [was undertaken] to avenge an insult done to his infamously ugly wife by the visiting Count of Averland."

That's my boy.

Don't know if I'm sold on the pants or not yet. Once I get my giant black dragoon boots together with this, I think they will work. If not, then it's Pants Round Two, where they will be made with a purple base and the same alternating black and yellow stripes of the doublet.

But there are some spurs on the way! Chekkit out!












These were the most unique, un-Western-looking ones I could find and with some giant spur straps, they just might do the trick.

Marius is complicated to costume, not going to lie - he's got to look (and act) like the love-child of Jack Sparrow and Emperor Maximilian yet have an obvious lethality to him. I think this will come through better once the cuirass is finished and I've got the giant Runefang slung across my back. One thing at a time, one thing at a time...

Stay tuned for a play-by-play on the doublet construction in a day or two because it was an adventure unto itself. At one point, there will also be a lengthy expose (+ art) on the life, character, and times of Marius Leitdorf in a seperate section because the hours spent hunched over the sewing machine have spawned an unfathomable amount of fangirlish fluff.

Now do I brave the outside world in search of food or continue my hermit-like existence in the house?