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!