Anyways.
So last year I elected to skip Emerald City con for financial reasons, but I was determined to go to Rose City so I bought my pass nice and early. Aaaaaaand then like half the group couldn't go and the rest backed out leaving just me and Rachel with passes and wanting to go. We talked about just calling it off, but then as we talked about it we realized that with just the two of us we could wear whatever costumes we wanted, leave when we felt like, maybe even attend some panels at the con or something, it had the potential to be the most chill con ever. So we decided to go.
That year a lot of Star Wars actors were going to be there, including Hayden Christensen, and Rachel has gotten very into Star Wars, so she chose the green velvet dress Padme wears in the third prequel movie:
It's basically just a hooded cloak dress with a purple sash, I could make that in my SLEEP.
And I elected to go as my muse and goddess, absolute queen of the bitch queens, Yennefer of Vengerberg from The Witcher 3.
More complicated, sure, but with these being the only two things I was making, definitely not a problem.
Rachel's was just as easy as I thought it would be, with a few small hitches. I got 10 yards of olive green velvet and some purple satin, and this pattern:
The black robe there is literally the same dress.
The only hitch was that the dress has some embossed patterns going down the front, so I had to learn how to emboss velvet. Turns out it's very simple, it just involves dampening the fabric, placing it on top of a rubber stamp and ironing the back of the fabric.
I found a nice scroll pattern stamp of a good size on eBay and embossed the pattern down the front of either side of the front center seam. It was kind of a pain at this scale, trying to make sure they all lined up, but I managed.
I threw together a little drawstring pouch out of the leftover velvet scraps so she'd have somewhere to carry her phone and whatnot.
The sash was literally just a rectangle of fabric. I got a little fancy and just added some Velcro to the ends so it would be easy for her to get in and out of it without struggling with just wrapping fabric.
I also made a small beaded brooch, just a circle of felt that I embroidered beads on, very simple. It took maybe an hour.
Overall, her costume was beautifully simple and she looked amazing when it was done.
Now, on to Yennefer, my love.
Yennefer is true bae, don't come at me with your Triss bullshit. Triss took advantage of a man that had lost his memory. Do you know what that makes her? A bad person. I have opinions about this, I will fight you.
First, the saga of the hair is kinda funny. In the interest of saving some money, I figured I would dye my hair black, as I like to do anyways, and just learn to curl it. I'm bad with hair, but I can learn, right?
No. No, I cannot. As I go through the costume making progress just imagine me, every weekend, spending a day watching videos and tutorials, buying so many hair products, new curling irons, SO MANY heatless curl options, spending hours in the bathroom in front of the mirror only to end up with some vague curling at the end of my hair and me in tears. I tried. So. Hard.
In the end, I bought an Astraea wig in black from Epic Cosplay.
It was perfect and I stopped stressing over it.
Quick side note, the main reason I chose to do Yennefer this year is because I had recently gotten into perfume collecting and had tried several times to get my hands on that perfect lilac and gooseberries perfume, since it's just so iconic. I finally succeeded:
It's gorgeous and I highly recommend it if you're a fan. So I was going to be able to even smell like my character, not just look like her. I even got a little travel perfume bottle so I could keep it with me at the con and make sure I left a trail of scent just like she does.
I feel like finding her choker should have been easier, but the market was just flooded with replicas of the TV show version, which is nice, but I was specifically doing video game Yennefer. I did eventually find a good one though.
Now, I had been struggling with motivation to make costumes for a while, so as I was making this costume, I ended up taking no progress pictures, as I was just trying to make it without stressing myself out. But I will describe what I can to you.
So, I was able to buy and modify a lot of pieces for this without making it from scratch, and that helped a lot.
I found some perfect thigh high boots just on Amazon:
Yes, I know they should be high heeled. I even found a different pair that had heels and would have been perfect. But I've worn heels to con before and that is a special kind of hell. I declined.
They were actually a little too tall, which is an experience my 6 foot tall ass almost NEVER has, so I had to cut them down a bit and re-hem the top.
I made several straps with faux leather and some buckles leftover from previous projects and attached them to the boots for all the buckles and straps Yen has on her boots. I elected not to worry about the fact that the boots bunch up around her knees.
For her pants, yes I could have just added white stripes to some black leggings or something, but honestly that sounded like a frigging chore. After some research I found that at one time Spanx had sold some black faux leather leggings with a white stripe down the side. While they no longer so, I did stumble across someone on Mercari selling a pair second hand in my size. Fucking jackpot.
Now, the thing is, Yennefer has lines of white stitching down the front and back centers of her pants. I could have just sewn some decorative stitching into the pants, but it wouldn't stretch with the fabric and as these bastards cost SIXTY DOLLARS for a pair of leggings, I was hesitant to make permanent alterations to them like that.
So I got clever. I bought a black garter belt and painted fake white stitches on the straps, added small loops to the insides of the boots and just wore that. The straps down the front gave the illusion of the stitching, while also providing a little more support to keep my boots from sliding. It was perfect.
I also elected not to make the undershirt. YES I can do it, but like I said, I was taking it as easy as I could on myself for this. This is the one I got:
I needed a lace up collar with sleeves that weren't too baggy, this worked perfectly.
The gloves were just some faux leather gloves also from Amazon:
I cut the gloves down to about 3/4 of the way down my arm, took the cut off part and sewed it back on facing downward to make a cuff, and then added some black faux fur to the top. Added the white stitching around th edge of the cuff by hand with embroidery thread. For the little cord bracelets she has I just took some beading cord I had in my own stash, one in a silvery grey and one in a taupe kind of color, and twisted them together.
Her fur collar was super simple, it's really just a crescent moon shaped piece of fur, with some of the same cord I made for the bracelets attached to the end so I could tie it in front.
Okay. Time for the money piece. The jacket.
I looked everywhere for a pattern or a tutorial or something to help me get the shape with the kind of seams I wanted. But every cosplayer I've seen drafted their own pattern. I was on my own. In the end I used a combination of the good old wrap-myself-in-duct-tape method and this pattern:
It was a strange, incredibly janky process where I made a mockup from the commercial pattern and then laid my duct tape pieces over the mockup to get the angled seam lines of Yennefer's jacket, then cut the mockup along those lines and made a new mockup with those pieces. It was a mess, but it worked in the end.
I got this gorgeous brocade velvet for the jacket that I kind of became obsessed with on Amazon:
Brocade Upholstery Fabric by The Yard https://a.co/d/1z2BJLp
That is apparently NO LONGER AVAILABLE in black, how sad. I loooooooved this fabric so much. Later after the con I bought more and made the long trumpet skirt Yen wears for formal events just to have it.
I added the decorative stitching to the sleeves by hand with embroidery thread before assembling, I don't know why, but I love the way they look.
I made SO MANY faux leather straps that were sewn along all the edges of the jacket, but I absolutely could not find a manageable way to sew the v shaped straps on the front of the jacket so I ended up just putting the jacket on my mannequin and gluing those bitches down with really good fabric glue.
The loops around the cuffs of her sleeves are just two different ribbons looped together and sewn down, with pearls in between each loop hand sewed on.
For some reason I had it in my head that her jacket buttons were gold, so I bought these:
When I realized I was wrong, I spray painted them silver, but if you want to use them, they do come in silver so you don't have to repeat my mistake.
I bought some loop trim that I sewed to the opening to hold onto the buttons, but I also added an invisible zipper in front, I absolutely had no faith that those buttons would hold straight without gapping when I bent and moved. I needed a zipper to hold the front closed and steady.
There's an extra band of fabric plus a flap hanging down underneath the bottom edge of the jacket, so I just added a band of fabric with some black cord I tied in bows and sewed on at regular intervals. For the flap I made a rectangle out of the brocade and I added a secret pocket on the back of it that was big enough for my phone, a perfect secret phone holder.
I also added boning in all the seams of the bodice to try to keep it from wrinkling. It didn't super work. Oh well.
Oh! Also, I learned something back during the Emerald City con I didn't go to. The group did an Avatar themed costume, and I made fans for one of my friends who was going as a Kyoshi Warrior. It was shockingly easy to just buy dollar store fans and replace the fabric on them, and she told me about how those fans saved her life at con, being able to fan herself when she got hot. So I made some matching fans for both me and Rachel out of scraps of our costumes' fabric.
In the end, I was very pleased with the costume. I started early and finished with two weeks to spare, so I was able to do a costume test run which was amazing. I was able to find small issues, like the straps on the boots not staying up, and fix them ahead of time instead of scrambling the night before. It was so fantastic.
Rachel and I got tons of compliments but since we weren't a large attention grabbing group we didn't get stopped for pictures so we could just relax and browse. We actually got to see the areas we wanted to see since we didn't have to follow the group, we went to a panel about haunted places in Portland, we left when we were tired and didn't bother to go back on Sunday because we had seen what we wanted and we were tired. And the fans totally did save our lives, we were both covered in velvet and it was WARM. I will be making custom fans with all future costumes. We now refer to this as chill con and I'm gonna be real, all future cons really need to step up their game to hit that standard. I loved it.
Hilariously enough at the same time I was sewing these costumes I worked on a whole second costume for myself just because I wanted to and I had plenty of time.
I have been watching V-tubers streamers for some time now, basically just streamers that have an anime avatar they use for streaming. They're very cute and very entertaining. One of the cutest ones was a girl named Ceres Fauna, her "lore" is that she is basically Mother Nature and a kirin, a deer spirit from Japanese lore.
Well, it's been a thing that she talks about that she was goth in high school, so finally she was given a goth alternate outfit by her designers and it was just adorable.
And then because they know their audience, the company she works for actually printed and sold the t-shirt she's wearing. I had to have it.
But to be cute Fauna usually wears it kind of sliding off one shoulder. As a regular T-shirt the neck wasn't wide enough to do that on me. So I got a hold of some ribbed fabric, cut the neck off the shirt and gave it a new wider neckline so I could let it slide off one shoulder all cute-like.
I really didn't intend to go any further than that. I was just gonna alter the shirt and call it good. But then I looked at that skirt and realized it would be very simple to make.
So I bought some sheer black fabric and threw together a skirt. The straps were just faux leather, I was making miles of straps for Yennefer anyways so it wasn't even out of my way to do so. It came out very cute.
And then it took shockingly little effort to find the rest of the accessories.
The lace sleeves:
The chunky boots:
The stockings:
The heart thigh garter:
The green wig: (I intend to dip dye the ends of the wig to get the gradient at some point but I haven't done it yet.)
And the heart choker:
I even bought some yellow contacts so my eye color would be right.
I still need to make her kirin horns to complete the costume, I intend to do that out of foam clay and wire and have them attach to the wig with magnets, but I haven't gotten around to it. Plus there's a few little details like ribbons in her hair and the necklaces. I don't have an immediate con to wear this to so it hasn't been pressing. It was just wild that I made an entire extra outfit while making con costumes. I'd normally have never looked twice at a side project no matter how small during con prep.
I still have more to write about, a few months ago I had the most intense crafting surge where I made three whole costumes and like, half a dozen smaller projects. Plus I am just now starting on an Aloy costume from Horizon Zero Dawn that I really want to document, I just need to get caught up. So I'll be back to write about my crafting frenzy, but I think this is enough for now.
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