Finally, Isabela

 Oh yeah, I never wrote this up. Oops. 

Anyways, I did successfully complete my Isabela costume, let's see if I can remember what I did at this point.

So, I broke this costume into pieces, and I'll go over them one at a time:

• Headscarf and hip scarf (and hair)
• Jewelry
• Tunic
• Corset
• Armor pieces
• Boots

I did not have time to make daggers though, so unfortunately I had to go unarmed.

First of all, I took a lot of my inspiration from this cosplayer:

https://www.therpf.com/forums/threads/azzurras-s-2014-halloween-costume-contest-entry-isabela-dragon-age-ii.228090/

For the scarves I knew I could keep it pretty simple, I bought some pashmina shawls in a pattern that looked pretty close:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B019PBZVYE/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1

I argued way too hard with myself about whether or not this was the right shade of blue, it's shimmery nature made it hard to lock on to what color it actually was. I think it may be a bit dark, but it was close enough.

For the hip scarf, I just cut it into a triangle, hemmed it, and tied it around my waist. Easiest cosplay accessory I've ever done.

For the headscarf, to save a little money I sewed the leftover triangles of the scarf into a square, and then painted on the gold trim (That you can barely see in any screenshots, I'm not sure why I bothered) with a generic stencil and gold fabric paint.

The seam in the middle was kinda ugly, but it was going to be folded in half and tied around my head, none of it would be visible.

Hair was easy, my hair color is right, even if it was too long and my bangs were wrong. It wasn't different enough to bother with a wig, so I was just going with my own hair.

The jewelry was a bit of a thing. I would have LOVED to make the coins look just like hers, I had some good screenshots, just no good way to make them. The blog I used for reference had a laser engraver and I was very jealous. In the end I had to convince myself to buy some generic pirate coins and be content.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08B6DW197/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s01?ie=UTF8&th=1

For her earrings, I repainted the coins gold and added a bit of black rub'n'buff for antiquing, and then straight up glued earring posts to them. Very straightforward. I decided I liked the star design better because it had slight echoes of the actual design her coins should have, and the skulls are just too on the nose for a pirate.

For the coins that hang down from the collar, I drilled holes in the coins with my dremel and connected them with jump rings, but held off painting since I'd just do it all at once when I attached them to the collar

And I worked really hard to ignore the fact that some of them should be smaller according to the reference images.

The collar itself was probably the biggest part of this costume, and I love how it came out. To get the basic shape for it, I went with the old tried and true duct tape pattern method.

I wrapped my neck in plastic wrap, then duct tape, and then used a sharpie to draw the shape of the collar on me, marking the center and where my collar bones were, and how high up I wanted it to go. I cut it off me and divided each half into fourths so the pieces were relatively flat. Due to there being no chance in hell the shape I drew was symmetrical, I picked the side I liked better and mirrored it for the other half of the collar, rather than try to make both sides just be the same.

I traced these onto craft foam, cut them out and glued them together with contact cement to make a foam base.

I then covered this foam base in worbla, forming it to my neck while it was still warm to make sure it stayed the right shape.

I added a border of worbla around the top and bottom, and then covered the front in masking tape to be able to draw out the shape of the medallion thing on the front.

I apparently forgot to keep taking in progress pictures at this point, so I guess I'll do my best to describe it. 

I cut that front medallion piece out of worbla and attached it to the front. I rolled some snakes of worbla scraps and outlined the medallion and used a hot knife to melt and shape the snake into what looked like a round bead chain. In retrospect I wonder if it would have been easier to roll a bunch of different sized balls and attach them, but that seemed like too easy to mess up at the time. I glued some chains around the edge and added the gem in the center with my thermoplastic beads, and added a ring of chain around that as well. And I must have put 10 to 15 coats of wood glue on this thing to blend everything together and smooth the texture.

I attached the coins to the front by melting the worbla a bit and sticking jump rings in it to attach to the holes I'd drilled in the coins.

For the snakes that wrap around the collar, I took a length of PVC pipe that I heated up and bent into a curve, covered it in worbla, and added snake heads that I carefully sculpted out of thermoplastic beads.

Originally I was going to leave this a separate piece with hidden magnets to hold it in place, but the magnets wouldn't really hold, so I ended up cutting it in half and just gluing the pieces down. I also used just regular puff paint to draw on some details.

I planned to use magnets in the back to hold it closed, but once again, the magnets just wouldn't hold. When it came down to it, I didn't have a better idea or enough time to be clever, so I just looped a ribbon around the back of the snakes and tied it shut.

From here I spray painted the whole thing gold, antiqued it with rub'n'buff, and painted the gem turquoise. I don't have a final picture of the collar by itself, you'll see it on the whole outfit.

Isabela also has a small gold armband just above her bracer, I kept that simple and just rolled a snake of worbla scraps and shaped it on my arm. Painted it gold like the rest of her jewelry.

For her lip piercing, I was able to actually take one of the extra studs I bought for my Xena costume, trimmed off the prongs, filled it with a bit of worbla, and day of I just stuck it to my chin with some spirit gum.

That's it for the jewelry!

For her tunic, I bought this top:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FSZCWBX/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1&psc=1

Purely because it had the lace up neckline, so I didn't have to do it myself. I removed the sleeves and cut off the lace band around the middle and sewed the remaining pieces back together. I kept it short enough that the middle section would be hidden by the corset, and then I added flaps to the front and back made of the same corset fabric that I stitched decorative channels on it to give it the look of panels like Isabela's has. I also used the removed sleeve fabric to make a small collar to fold over around the neckline.

This is the only picture I took of any sewing I did, so you're just gonna have to look close at the final costume, my bad!

Since I've gained a bunch of weight, none of my old corset patterns would fit me, I had to draft a new one. That... did not feel great. But we pushed through.

I just bought some basic white linen like fabric for it. To make it look like it laces up the front but still have a normal corset busk for getting in and out I basically made an extra panel to go over the busk that would be held down by the lacing. It made edge binding complicated, but I figured it out. I can't really give you a detailed tutorial at this point, I'm afraid I just don't super remember. I am not the right person to teach you how to make corsets, unfortunately. 

One extra detail, Isabela's outfit is actually open on the sides with strips of fabric connecting it. Since I'm wearing an actual corset, leaving the sides open wasn't really an option for me, so I ended up getting some skin colored fabric and gluing strips of it down the sides of the corset with small white strips going across to sort of mimic the look. It worked okay. 

For the armor, I had a shoulder pad, two elbow pads, a bracer and a set of gloves to make. 

I had to kind of mock up the base shape myself, I had a vague idea of how big I wanted them to be, so I started with a basic triangular shape, and then curved the inner seam to give a three dimensional shape. It's really hard to describe, hopefully the pictures help.

When you cut it out of foam and glue that curved gap in the middle together, you get a nice rounded convex shape, like a shield. I just repeated this smaller and with a slight shape variation for the elbow pads.

To get the designs, I honestly just screenshotted the pictures from that cosplayer I was using as reference, and used the magic of photo manipulation get the perspective right. I'll add them to this post when I get them back, I'm on a new laptop and don't have them at the moment.

I printed out the patterns, cut them out, traced them on foam, and then glued those onto the foam bases. That's a very simple description for something that took HOURS.

Once these were glue together, they were painted silver and antiqued like the jewelry.

For the upper arm bit that comes down from the shoulder pad, I cut four chevrons of foam and glued some vinyl pleather on top and painted them black. I heated them up slightly and folded them in half to give them the ridge down the middle. I also painted some buttons silver and glued them on place to be the rivets. 

This was easily just glued to the bottom of the shoulder pad.

For the gloves, I bought some faux leather gloves, cut them short and cut off the fingers.

The armor bits on the gloves were made the same way as the others, printing off the design, cutting out a base shape and the design out of foam, gluing them together and painting. I added bits of cord to the underside of the little finger guards to make them 3 dimensional.

That was it for the armor bits, aside from the bracer and straps, but that will get lumped in with the boots, which we will cover now. 

Shopping for fabric was scary, I wanted vinyl pleather, but it was expensive. However, I managed to hit the jackpot when I found a grey pleather on clearance for $5 a yard. I bought ten, I was so excited. I bought some brown upholstery spray paint so I could make it brown, I figured that would be perfect. For the record, this is fine for a one time wearing, but the paint chipped and scratched a LOT while worn. All the pieces I did this way would need to be remade if I wanted to wear this again.

For the straps, I painted a chunk of pleather, cut it in strips and did a single line of topstitching around all the edges for decoration. I added buckles and buckle holes, the buckles I got on Amazon in a bunch of different sizes, small for elbow straps, wider for the bracer and the boots.

These are straps I was making for the boots, but you get the idea.

For the bracer I wrapped my arm in paper and tape to make a pattern, and just cut that out of painted vinyl, and glued three buckles and straps to it. Once again, no direct pictures, sorry! I was on a tight timeframe for this costume, I only had two weeks, and sometimes I was just focused on getting things done as fast as I could.

For the boots, I was going to use the bottom half of an old pair of boots I didn't wear because the zippers were broken, and make thigh high boot covers to match Isabela. I started by wrapping my leg in duct tape to get a pattern, which was a CHORE to do single handedly, I really should have waited until I had someone to help me. I cut these out before painting in an effort to save paint.

Of course I painted the boots and some extra pieces that would be the knee pads as well.

I ended up hating how bright the brown was, and gave everything a nice rubdown with some black oil paint, and it looked much nicer.

I cut the boot cover parts in half to make a midway seam, and did an awful lot of decorative top stitching, including sewing in the knee pad and adding cuffs to the top. 

And this is where my progress pictures run out. I sewed up the back and glued them to the boots, added elastic under the cuff to hold them up (Which did NOT work, even a LITTLE bit.) Glued on the buckles and I was done. Now for the finished picture!

Isabela wears bikini bottoms underneath, but I'm not that bold, so I had little booty shorts on. If I walked even a little my boots practically fell off, it was terrible, but they looked great if I stood still. And there was a major Dragon Age nerd at the party who was just thrilled to see me. In the end, I'm happy with how it came out, even though I could tell I was rusty at costume making and I'm not happy with my body. I'm still proud of how good it looks. The straps were all coming unglued and the paint got all scratched up so it needs MAJOR overhauls if I ever want to wear it again, plus I need to just not be a baby and make boot covers with a zipper so they can fit tighter and not try to cheat with elastic. But that's what I love about costume making, learning how to do things, and figuring out how I can do it better in the future. It felt good to make a real costume again.

The Thrifted Tarot

 Well, I have continued making tarot cards!

So, I kinda stopped trading cards after a while, I had plenty and just felt like I was done. But I hadn't had a crafty project in a while and I'd had the thought before that I'd like to physically make a whole deck for myself, after discovering how much I liked making cards.  And I decided I wanted to call it my Thrifted Tarot, and make it entirely out of things I got from the thrift store, nothing purchased new. 

So a few weekends ago I decided to hit some thrift stores and pick up some books to make cards with. It took a few rounds, I think I ended up with working from about 10 books, but I was able to find artwork for all 78 cards, along with one bonus card because I like to add bonuses as sort of my own signature on a deck I created.

Everything was thrifted or second hand except for the glue I used to glue things together and the pens I ended up using for the titles, but those don't count, things like glue and pens are outside of the rules.

I don't have any pictures of the process of making the cards, because it's the same as it was before and it's pretty simple. 

I cut out the images I liked, cut them down to a little larger than tarot card sized and glued them to cardstock. The glue was just a Krylon brand spray adhesive I bought at Michael's. I hate working with spray adhesive, it's so sticky and messy, but I've found it's the best way to evenly glue down pictures cut from book pages to avoid the paper wrinkling. The cardstock I used was from packs of greeting cards I bought from the thrift store as well, I find that greeting card cardstock has the perfect thickness for tarot cards, thick enough to be sturdy, but not ridiculously thick. 

I backed the cards with a black marble pattern contact paper I had left over from recovering the surface of a Craigslist desk I bought for my kid. That also involved cutting out roughly tarot sized rectangles, pulling the backing off slightly at the top, sticking it to the top edge of the glued picture/cardstock and then slowly smoothing the contact paper down as I continued peeling the backing off. That made sure I didn't get bubbles.

For trimming, I used my Fiskars guillotine paper cutter to cut the top edge of each card straight and even, and then I could line up the top edge at the top of the cutter and get a straight 90 degree angle down the right side of the card. To get them to the correct size after that and make them all the same size I would take a tarot card and push it up against the lowered blade, and then tape a ruler to the cutter on the other side to mark exactly how long I wanted it to be, basically just like I did when trimming borders off of other decks previously. That allowed me to get the cards all almost exactly the same size. 

It's also important to do this one side at a time, I positioned the ruler for the bottom edge and then cut the bottom edge on every card so that I was cutting the same size every time because the ruler never moved. Then just reposition for the left side of the card. I did find that I had to cut a little more off the right side in some places just for positioning so the image didn't end up off center by cutting more off the left than the right. But it worked. I did have a few mistakes where I wasn't careful enough and over-trimmed, so I actually had to replace a few cards because they were just too far off from the other cards.

The rounded corners were just done with a corner rounding punch, nothing fancy.

I struggled with the card titles. First of all, there's the fear of the writing or paint or whatever wearing off over time. I already knew from the cards I'd made before that I couldn't use my Zig calligraphy pens or even sharpie, those would wear off. After asking people in my tarot crafting group and trying a few things, I learned that my best options were a multisurface paint pen, a Copic marker or a Tombow marker. 

The paint pen had clearest lines, and an opaque silver color I would need for cards with mostly dark colors, but was the easiest to scratch. (Not EASY easy, it was very resilient, but by comparison.) The Copic was nice and dark, had no silver, but was less easy to damage than the paint pen. The Tombow was apparently bulletproof and undamageable, but it also had no opaque silver and had a much more faded color, it wasn't nearly as bold. Plus it was a brush pen which would have made writing more challenging with my lack of calligraphy experience. In the end I chose the paint pen, the opaque silver was what tipped the scale. I also figured I'd give the cards a protective top coat anyways, which would help reduce the risk of scratching off.

And, for the record, by "scratching off", I mean I tested these markers on scraps cut from the books and then WENT AT THEM with my thumbnail, quite roughly and violently TRYING to destroy the writing, which is not how much damage these cards will be subject to. I just wanted to be sure.

The second issue I had with the titles is my handwriting. I have awful handwriting, and I've hated it my whole life. A high school english teacher once charitably described it as "My thoughts just go too fast for my hand to keep up." I describe it as a drunken spider staggering through a pool of ink. But as I thought about it, maybe my handwriting was exactly the "font" this deck needed? Rough and unpolished, you could say it was just what I had "lying around." So I decided to not even try to make it super neat, just readable, and then let it be what it was. Which was super challenging as I started writing the titles and my insecure brain insisted LOUDLY that the cards looked better before I added my messy scribbles, but I ignored it.

I intend to edge the deck as well, I think, but I haven't committed to that yet, we'll see what I think when I really start working with it.

For the top coat I had a can of PYM II, a clear spray specifically intended to preserve things like pictures, newspaper articles or, dare I say, book pages. I had bought it because it's also recommended for polymer clay and I intended to use it for my wine glasses but I ended up wanting a shinier finish so I hadn't really used it. After giving the handwritten titles a full 24 hours to make sure the paint pen had a chance to cure, I then gave the cards a very thorough top coat of PYM II. It wasn't necessary to coat the backs, the contact paper is vinyl-ish so it doesn't need sealing. The spray gave the cards a faintly dusty texture, but didn't add any gloss, which was what I wanted. There were a few places where the spray can dripped on the cards so there's a little shiny spot, but it's not really noticeable, and the whole theme of this deck is that it is what it is, so whatever. 

After that cured for another 24 hours, the cards were done and I could put them in their box. I will go into the box in a moment, but first I'm gonna give you a break from all my babbling with a massive image dump. Here's the deck!

Okay, I could try to arrange those more neatly, but honestly, arranging pictures on this site is a fucking chore, so you get a single column and that's just the way it is.

If youre curious: I've kind of had a hard time nailing down the meaning for The Portal, but I knew the card felt right in this deck when I looked at it. Basically my thought is an awareness of something beyond your understanding, other worlds you could reach if you just step through the portal. It's opening your mind to other possibilities and then stepping forward to experience them, connecting with something beyond what you can see or touch. Recognizing that existence is more than this one moment and we are all progressing to a portal to something else. The eternal journey of the soul, something like that. It's a card I can feel, but it's kinda hard to put in words. 

I'm also very proud of the box, so let's talk about that. A while back my boyfriend's parents were selling their house, and so they were offloading on us a lot of the old stuff of his they were holding onto. We went through it, weeded out what we didn't want and finding storage for the stuff he wanted to keep. One of the things we found was  a lovely wooden box that looked like it had once held a watch, and once the foam inserts were removed, was basically exactly tarot sized. For a long time I didn't have a deck to keep in it, but when this came up it was too perfect.

There were only a few small hitches. First, the deck was a little too thick, so I needed to make the interior like, a quarter of an inch taller, which luckily the lid had clearance for. I also kinda wanted to cover the inside of the lid because it had the watch company logo on it and I didn't want that visible. So basically I took some posterboard I had in my craft supplies, cut it to fit inside the box perfectly and covered it in this black satin fabric from my fabric stash leftover from a robe I made myself and then glued it inside the box. I could have done a few things differently to make it a little neater but all in all I'm happy with how it turned out, it holds the deck like it was meant for it.

The box didn't originally have a clasp either. Now, I knew I could buy a clasp for it, I've done it before, but that goes against the thrifted theme of this deck. So back to the thrift store I went. I managed to find a little Minnie Mouse pencil tin that I just mangled to remove the clasp and then glued to this box with E6000, seems pretty secure so far. 

All in all I kept to my all thrifted theme and I also feel like my messy handwriting kind of ties the deck together instead of just being a collection of random images. I'm really happy with the art I found, and I can't wait to work with the deck. I had a bunch of leftover images I had pulled out as possible cards and since I was having so much fun I ended up turning those into cards as well and making an oracle deck, but I'll post that later. There's enough images in this post.