Street Fighter official photos

Here are photos from the Halloween Parties that sweet daughter and her (the Count) husband attended. The spikes on the bracelet are fabric and soft but look pretty wicked!

At the club she ran into a fellow Street Fighter and posed for photos... cool

This one is at the final fitting, showing the footwear. Another successful Halloween!

Chunli Costume Done!

puff sleeves, padded full, boots, wristbands with spikes, hair piece bun covers with ribbons, matching blue panties (for those high kicks!)

More Chunli Photos

The sneaker boots are made by adding fabric spats that are laced up with the canvas shoes.
The dress has a white sash, and will have further gold stripes added, after we do the fitting and get the length exactly where we want it. There are high slits at the side seam and back seam. A zipper will finish the back neckline.
The wrist bands are leather with fabric spikes, painted silver. Aspen is the quality control expert. She approves.

New Halloween Costume

this year, it's Chunli, from Street fighter....
These are the cute little bun holders with the big ribbons...
Above is the first sleeve, and below shows some poly-filling, puffing it up a bit.

Tomorrow I will be making the China inspired dress, (that requires these sleeves) and sash. There are white boot type runners too. The wrist bands have spikes, and I have already made those from fabric, and need to spray paint them silver and attach them to black leather wrist bands.
More photos tomorrow!

Warrior Princess part two...

This is probably the most challenging part of the costume... the breastplate armour.

Here is where ALL the crafting skills come out... paper mache, glue gun, painting skills.

The challenge... to make an antiqued gold metal breastplate with no gold, no metal and new (not antique) materials... hmmm

First a couple of paper mache bowls. I used shallow soup bowls and lined them with clear wrap, then coated with a few layers of paper mache.

After they were dry, I trimmed them and glued them to a cardboard cutout of the rest of the shape needed.

Attached rings (to mount to the other parts of the armour (with duct tape) and cover the whole lot again with a few layers of paper mache.

When that was dry, I drew the lines where the embossed lines stand up on the breastplate. I used piping cord (from the fabric store) and the hot glue gun (crafter's best friend) to attach in the curly pattern I had drawn.

Of course there were the mandatory finger burns... ouch.
Cover all of this with fine strips of paper mache.
Dry, then spray with gold paint. Then accent the lower areas with gold paint mixed with black to "antique" the whole thing.

Looks like metal! Yeah!

Halloween Costume

Darling Daughter has asked for a Xena, Warrior Princess costume this year. She has wanted this for a few years, but has lived away (at the University of Waterloo) and has been too far away for fittings. This is the year. Here is the photo that we will copy....

Here is the bodice work. I used a McCalls pattern 4109 for a corset type bodice. The fabric is a distressed dark brown fake leather. The bodice has many seams, all top stitched .25 inches from the seam, and piped at the bottom edge.

The "skirt" is made of many strips of leather, rounded at the end. I made these by bonding two layers together (right sides out) and top stitching around the edges.

There is a second layer of "riveted" half circles. I sewed these together just out of view under the next layer and the "rivets" are actually hot-fix metallic studs.

I am working out the kinks of making the metallic overlays for the wrist, knee, arm-bands. The shoulder-pads are leather with metal overlays, and the breast and back plates are more difficult and will likely need paper mache, painted metal... not sure yet. Stay tuned!