Final Fantasy X Embroidery Story

Thought this was a wicked cool picture. Well, without further adieu, i finally got the time to work on and come nearly close to finishing my X costume. I have no pictures of the staff because it is actually at my fathers work, getting the top silver piece done.

I mean the piece that attaches the gold head, and the blue staff to each other with enough support that the entire staff doesn't fall apart... hopefully that'll be done by Saturday-- considering the convention is-- six days away now @_@. But what you've all been waiting for-- embroidery

As you recall, the skirt previously looked much like this-- just a normal blue pleated skirt--

The flowers looked like this prior to be embroidered, and we used my mother's new brother pe 770 to do so. :D Learn more about this process here.

With Azure's help, we drew out the general pattern with some chalk onto the skirt. Then we took the normal sewing machine, which my mom actually got a new one, and did a really tight zig zag stitch with a thread that had a little bit of shine to it.

The pins are just there to hold the pleats until the day of the convention. Um, uh, it was obnoxious and annoying, and I shed a lot of tears.

Final skirt. :D Only thing that's needed would be a little slit in the side (considering i currently cannot go up stairs). And now to the Obi!

So if you recall, the Obi originally looked like this. Me and my mom made all the embroidery patterns for it, stitch by stitch, in a program called buzzedit. This program is not for the weak of heart.

It's a very odd program, and involved a lot of copy and pasting from previous designs. After we finally got the design finished and looking close to the anime, we had to size it.

Glued thick paper to the back with temporary adhesive to give the embroidery the ability to stand on it's own.

We printed them out, life size, and then adjusted and changed them as needed; which was probably the hardest-- awkwardest-- thing that i've ever done for cosplay. Ha. And then the embroidery started. (If you ever need any of these patterns for an embroidery machine and you have no idea what you're doing, feel free to email me at acroymsoup66@hotmail.com and i'll give them to you!)

The image that I showed you, in PE design is the embroidery going down the center of the obi here.

The obi's pattern in full. I couldn't get the whole pattern because I happen to be skinnier then yuna, but i used the following picture as a template and tried to get it all correct in the front, and then-- look better for my shape in the back considering most of it is covered by the bow.

It's then got velcro on the back to keep it together, cause i make a poser obi instead of a real one :D

Left to do for this is to embroider the dark blue by hand in the middle of the circle, because the machine couldn't do it. It ended up getting all caught up in the machine and almost completely broke it, so i don't recommend doing this. And I have to figure out a way to do the flower above the circle-- which i also have no idea how to do.

Anyways. Happy Cosplay! :D More very soon!

More pictures:

Next up! Hibiscuses for the masses.

Last for Updates Not Mine-- Lenne

And here we go. One more time. Just one more costume. Aha, that's what I keep telling myself to keep me working on them.

She ordered a wig off of ebay, and is now proving difficult to keep it untangled. Will be buying wig brush and wig head within the week. Lol @ long wigs.

The shirt was made entirely by guesses and lots of screw ups. It proved difficult because wendy is not lacking in the-- how do i politely put this-- breast department-- unlike Lenne. (Wendy if you're offended by that let me know-- though I doubt it-- it isn't like it's not common knowledge). We bought matching material to make the sleeves, but they're still on the assembly line like everything else.

 Um. Besides that, there's a giant snap in the middle, to keep the two halves together covered up by the frills. The frills were made from the same dye to make my shirt, despite looking completely different. And then sewn on with a straight stitch. They look like a half circle in the back, and I really wish I could've taken a picture of her with it on, cause it looks a million times better than this.

Wendy sports some brwon boots, and still needs the large cream colored socks that go past her boot line-- remember this Wendy. Besides that, she wears a skirt that I gave her, that I was going to give to good will, underneath her nice new lacy skirt.

You can kinda see how see through it is here. Sort of.

Next thing we work on for this will either be her sleeves or the wonderful earrings that she wears. Which we've also met a stale point with. What's the cheep way to buy beads? o-0..

Happy Cosplay! :D

The Youngest of the Family

I was going to go into Elma now, but for some reason the blog entry didn't save, and i'm kind of covered in watermelon so we'll skip to Rikku. My dear Rikku. I have very little pictures for her, but we really are doing stuff. I promise.

First off, Anna Maria is in-charged of making the scarf and the armbands. Neither of which I have pictures of. Sorry guys. Maybe if anna comes over soon, i'll be able to hijack them and do a quick photoshoot. Anna also needs to pain those beads so I can string them through the Rikku wig.

Which looks like this if you forgot. It also needs it's headband which is on my to do list. I was really hoping to find a scrap of blue material, but it's not turning up so I might just need to cave.

Put little eye-lits (is that how you spell that?) in the bikini, don't think I have enough cord to correctly tie this. I dunno, I'll look later. Debating about chopping off the yellow piece that actually holds the two together now that it has prettier holds. I don't know though. May seem like a waste.

Made the skirt, it's actually got the pleats in the correct place, which was by accident actually. It's a little high for my liking, and longer than the actual skirt is supposed to be. But mom won't let me make it any lower (even though, what girl doesn't wear low wasted pants nowadays?). She is the youngest of the group, at 15, which is why I agreed that the skirt should be longer in the first place.

No Ass cheeks showing here. No. Stay away from her boys or meet my pistols. Dx

Two little bags top it off with  no decorations. Maybe they'll get some by the time I post this... Hmm..

Happy Cosplay regardless. :D

Elma Elma Elma.

I think you should listen to this song while reading this, because it's the song I'm listening to, and it is going to be stuck in my head all day, I assure you. Onto the subject of the bee, i mean -cough- Elma.

Her chair spot. As promised. There's not as many pictures in this one, so I guess i'll just do it the straight forward way. With no lefts and rights and aligns. :{

Now you see why we call her the bee? We're trying to get all of her sewing done so that *SHE* can begin making her armor. The sewing's the hard part right ;]. If anyone has any suggestions on making armor, I suggest you message her. Considering, this is her first cosplay, and she wants to do the shit right. I'm a bomb that's about to explode~~ Oh, wrong song.

Put brown ribbon up the middle, as well as stabilizer (medium weight I believe) in the front to help the shirt keep it's shape under all that armor. :D

The back looks nearly the same, except she used wonderful zipper camouflage.  The skirt however completely pooped out tux. (he doesn't like pleats)

We found a pattern to help with the making of the skirt, which was nice when it came to the whole pleating issue, compared to the making of my skirt.

This is a picture of the beautiful skirt upon completion. :D

Now i guess that it's abouts times to get started on the leggings-- except they're being worked on behind me... Time to go help with my wonderful oppinion.

Happy Cosplay :D

And... Gippal is up to Bat

The cape is obviously the hardest part of this costume, ergo we decided to start with this first. Although it's not all the way done (still needs some minor gluing), it was a lot of work and has taken me nearly two weeks with enough hands to feed an army helping.

Wonderful signs I made to keep everyone organized. :D And I'm kind of using them as transitions, on Facebook as well as here.

I don't know why blogger is making me do this weird formatting instead of just putting them side by side like normal people but... whatever.









Um. We traced and measured out the stripes and originally didn't taper the stripes to fit the cape, despite niki's warnings. We obviously had to re-do them, and with this measured and remeasured the stripes. 

I fastened the cape with paper clips while we measured the stripes out, they kind of provided the needed support to actually visualize the thing. The cape itself is made out of a really thin poster board that I then covered in fabric via hot glue because the sewing machine has one hell-of-a-time going through all the fabric and poster board. Burnt a lot of my fingers that way. I told Gippal he wasn't allowed in any hallway contests <<;

Tried 3 million different things, and then decided on this rope which I can't for the life of me remember the measurements of it. However, it was cheap (.50 a yard), and then I used quilter's tape to put around it, which was 2.99 for 3 yards. Cutting the quilter's tape down the middle hot dog style, i made double use of it, and ended up with pretty decently cheap and good looking lining. (unless you look at the back of anything of course).

Mom was nice enough to then sew this around each and every little stripe, and the along the sides of the collar itself, which had to be hand sewn back down later on, just because some of the sewing machine stitches ended up popping out.

Stole one of Niki's ideas to make these little square pieces that go on the ends. Pierced brads through squares that measured a little less than 2x2. Made a pattern piece and then poked each piece individually to ensure that they all looked perfect.

And then I painted them grey! :D With some awesome 20 for one dollar brushes that I got on sale at Michaels. The paint doesn't stick well on the brads but I figure that's Sam's problem to figure out <<; Unless someone has a suggestion?

They just need to be put on their respected stripes now, except I'm out of fabric glue and I think that it'll work better than my magical hot glue gun. Disregard the fact that this square isn't perfectly placed on the stripe. <<; On to the grommets!!! :D And that is exactly what they are. We tried for like a week to find the perfect sized circles, only to find out that curtains have giant hoops on them as well...

Well, they're called grommets. And unfortunately you can't buy them in sets of two. So this was i think 8, can't read the package because i'm slightly blind right now. but it was a whopping 12.99, which I payed for with a 50% off coupon. The people at these stores must hate me.

This is the final result. Although, it needs some gluing. Don't look at the inside please...

Skirt flowers down :D

Okayyy. Back to Final Fantasy ten now that i've-- made Gippal's Cloak, made Rikku's skirt, helped paine with her shawl thing (is that what that should be called?), headbands, um-- and everything else that doesn't make much sense when it comes to final fantasy ten. Mainly cause we're in an alternative reality right now-- nerd joke-- get it?

Momma got this embroidery machine for her birthday and it's seemed like a god blessing when it comes to this costume. Haven't seen anyone else do their flowers with an actual embroidery machine yet! It's a brother p770, and takes a lot of weird files and loads of fun complicated things.

This is the pattern that we bought from an embroidery website (here.) We (mainly Niki actually), removed the leaves, re-colored the flower itself, and removed the happy holidays (Because the flower was supposed to be a Pointsetta-- though most Pointsetta's don't look like this). Wow that's a lot of parenthesis in a paragraph.

The flowers had to then be uploaded via a usb, and then put into the machine itself. We made three different sizes... Which i thought I had a picture of i guess i don't. There were three different sizes, and then I placed all the little flowers and pinned them to the skirt where I wanted mom to put them. She then embroidered the entire skirt for me :D

Here are all the flowers done. Now i'm working on getting my main artist over here to draw the scribbles on the skirt, which we'll do on a normal sewing machine, as per mom. Uhhh. I guess that's it? Sorry I don't have more pictures. Happy Cosplay! :D

I'll probably have a giant post soon about all the other costumes and their progress as per nobody uploads their blogs, though they are all authors on here-- <<;;;. Back to sewing!