Tali'Zorah Cosplay: Part 2 - Painting on Swirls and Sewing the Hood!

It's not hard to imagine what a pain in the bum it would be to try and source a fabric that looked anything like Tali's. It's very unique and in many cases, not even consistent, it doesn't seem to follow a set repeat so it would be impossible to find it. Some places like spoonflower.com offer a printed version but not only is it really expensive, it's too uniform for me, so I decided that the only thing for it was to paint it on myself! This represents a lot of challenges. For one, I would need to contend with a fabric that warps and stretches a lot! (My own fault, I know!) And in a more general sense, it was going to take a shit tonne of time...but what is cosplay if not time consuming?!

So many swirls....

The Process:

Idea 1: At first, I had the not-so-brilliant idea of using a white fabric marker. This produced what can only be described as a paint-like substance, but only if you shook it 12 times and prayed to the gods of cosplay and fabric painting, old and new. It could not seem to tackle the stretchy fabric I'm using and it puckered, wouldn't write, spurted everywhere, didn't work and just generally wouldn't take to the fabric, which does seem to have a light covering of lint on it. So that idea was scrapped.

Idea 2: The next attempt involved mixing acrylic paint with a fabric medium (1:1 ratio), a technique which worked very well on my Mass Effect themed canvas shoe painting extravaganza (which if you haven't seen, you can check them out here! Mass Effect Shoes!). However, it just didn't work this time round! When painted onto a fabric like this, it just wasn't consistent or uniform in its application and ended up looking like this (a hot mess basically!):

Third time lucky right!?

Attempt 3: This is the moment where I had to accept that I likely couldn't supersede the need to buy real fabric paint, so I gave in and bought some Dylon Fabric paint (which at the time of posting this is on offer in HobbyCraft stores! 20% off!) This worked far better: it has great coverage, doesn't flake or not take and looks nice and crisp once it dries.

And so it begins....

As for the swirl pattern itself, I did make attempts to match it to the original design but in the bits I couldn't see or wasn't sure about, I just winged it and kind of made it up but kept it in line with what the design is like originally. 

Mistakes have been made... frequently... like this one where I totally forgot how to swirl....

Or this one, where I just misjudged the spacings (this has happened a lot! Like 50%+ of the swirls!)

But all in all, it hasn't gone too badly and I'm liking the progress so far! It has taken me about 2 days of pretty much solid painting to get the two hood pieces and the middle part to my liking and then it was time to sew them up!

Sewing it all up!
I did a fair bit of reading about sewing jersey fabric but in the end, what worked for me was a straight stitch with a wide-ish stitch length, that's all! I suppose ensuring I have a stretchy seam isn't that important because the hood and top part aren't form fitting.

So, off I sewed! Each hood piece needed sewing the the centre strip and then each armhole needed a quick stitch across and that's it! But once it was all stitched up, for some reason it was absolutely huge! Nothing like the size of my mockup, I think due to the stretch in the fabric and the way I'd left it handing over chairs and radiators and what not, I'd ended up making it larger than when I initially cut it, so I had to try and reduce some of the fabric bulk by sewing with larger seam allowances.

Then, I needed to sew on the U shape she has and all the trim. I chose exactly the same fabric but in a grey. I've seen some people use white and I do like the contrast but I'm pretty sure that in game, it is actually a grey/lilac/darker purple. Who the hell knows, I certainly don't, I just went with what I liked!

The way I went about making it was in short, highly inefficient but that's like my cosplay trademark! I seem to like to get stuff done in the least sensible way possible :P I'm sure 100% of you would be able to do it far easier than me! I basically did some half assed measuring of the centre piece, transferred it to a piece of tissue paper but instead of drawing  U shape and cutting that out, I left the piece  of tissue paper as it was (a long rectangle) and stuck the fabric under it and then just kind of cut into it. Trust me, it's as stupid as it sounds! But the problem with this fabric is that it slips and curls horribly. If I had my time again, I might have gone for something less stretchy! But hey ho, we're committed now!

I stitched the grey piece on with a combo of the machine and hand sewing to get round the curves and what not. And once that was done, I had the unenviable task of sewing all the trim on! I wish I'd gone for some real bias tape instead of just cutting strips of the grey fabric out and pinning it in place! It took an absolute age, about 4-5 hours to get all the grey fabric on the hood. But it is done!! Check it out:

Not everything is beautiful mind you! I've got some real shoddy bits but I plan on hiding them :P And the back is definitely too loose, but hopefully with all the buckles and back harness-y thing she has going on, I should be able to tighten it up and keep it flat and looking like it fits me properly!

So, the hood is completed! But I still have to paint swirls on the rest of it yet, although I'm going to have a little break between starting that!

Tali'Zorah Cosplay: Part 1 - Pattern Drafting

For costumes like these where you simply can't buy a pattern off the shelves, you've got to draft it yourself! Or, in my case, you go to a charity shop, buy a hoodie that strangely enough pretty much already looks like Tali's costume....

.....And then you shamelessly sharpie all over it and hack it to bits until you have something that looks like this:

The strip you see goes between the two hood halves straight down the middle and will ensure there is no front seam. The seams that this strip creates will be hidden under the grey U shape she has on her hood.

So once I had this fabric pattern, I laid it down on some tissue paper and traced around it to give me my first paper pattern. It took me two goes at a muslin mock up before I was happy with how it looked.

This picture below shows the tissue paper progression of my pattern. I'll make my pattern available once I've worked out how to photoshop it... I'm completely inept with photoshop. If anyone has any tips, let me know in the comments because I'm more than happy to give you all my pattern so we can all embody the bad-assness that is Tali'zorah.

One thing I realised would be VERY important regarding her hood is that it's all very well if it fits your head but don't forget you're going to have a helmet under there! I made it much bigger than my head (which is hard, I have a big head...) so that it could accommodate the helmet whenever I get round to it... I really hope I've made it big enough...

Here is my final muslin mock up!

The next step was to wrap myself in muslin and see if I could wrangle out a pattern for the body pieces of the wrap. I don't have any pictures of this process because I couldn't hold the fabric and the camera at the same time but my measurements were as such:

For the piece that wraps around her body: 18.5cm wide and 100cm long
For the piece that wraps around her thigh: 14.5cm wide and 60cm long

Her sleeve pieces will be tackled at a later date, for now all that's left to do with my pattern pieces is to transform them into something purple!

Fabric Choice:
The fabric I've chosen is a cotton stretch lycra/jersey combo that I bought unsurprisingly from ebay! I thought a bit of stretch would be important given everything is so skin tight but it has proven to be fairly difficult to work with in terms of edges curling up due to the lycra and only being able to cut out one piece at a time due to way it warped in certain areas after I washed it! Also, for a fairly inexperienced sewer like me, I've heard some horror stories of how hard it is to sew correctly and I have to say, preliminary tests with the machine have proven really tough and there have been a lot of unpicking of stitches... But we stay positive and power through, I have a knack for winging things and it still working so I'll do a bit of research, be as prepared as possible and just goddamn get it done!

So I have 2x hood pieces, 1x middle hood piece, 2x body pieces and 2x knee pieces! (Some pieces are under others :P)

So here are the pieces for the main fabric part all cut out...You know what bit comes next? That's right...painting on the swirls.... Lord save me!