After completion of the hat for Rincewind, I decided we needed some representation of The Luggage that follows him. The Luggage is pretty big, but I wanted something that could be carried in stead of pulled behind us with a string. It is just much easier at cons to be able to carry things and not have to avoid hitting people with something pulled.
I was thinking about a making a wooden box, when I ran across the Mimic chest leather pattern from Leather Hub Patterns. I absolutely love their patterns, they always fit together so well and there is construction video for their patterns if needed. The leather hats (witch and wizard) where also from their patterns. So I purchased the mimic pattern and set about altering it to meet my needs. Some of the alterations were simple, like excluding the horns and eyes since they did not require any changes other than marking out what holes to not cut! Removing the teeth required reshaping the front a little bit and the tongue and the inside detail pieces were reshaped. Adding the feet were harder. The Luggage has lots of feet and they are usually represented as human like. I decided I liked the more clawed version of the mimic chest, but wanted to add at least a few more. I figured I could fit 4 more feet on the bottom pretty easily while still keeping space to hold The Luggage. However, this required pretty significant pattern modifications since the feet for the chest go up the corner sides. So I cut and made the regular foot in craft foam and then played with the pattern till the pieces fit under the chest. I do a lot of my leather pattern development and testing with craft foam. It is cheap but behaves enough like leather to give me a pretty accurate feel for how the pieces will behave.
Modifying the leather pattern for the feet
I have always hand punched all my leather with a hammer and a single hand punch, but this pattern has 91 pieces after adding the extra feet! I just could not get through all the punching, my hands and wrists kept hurting so we finally broke down and bought a hand press. The holes went so much faster!
My new toy! A leather punch
All leather finally punched!
Once punched most of the leather required staining. The staining was multilayered to give the leather some texture. The base layer was a very light yellowy brown which I put on with 2 thick coats to get a consistent color. This was then overlaid with a dark brown stain which was streaked on with a brush to give some texture.
Staining the leather
Next came construction. First I did the feet. You can see the standard feet in the back of this image and the new ones I designed for under the chest in the front. The new ones are shorter and don't have that upper cuff for attachment at the corners.
feet!
Lid
Some pieces of the construction were really simple, like the top of the chest. Other parts were pretty tricky, such as the corners and the feet attachment. There were several times that I resorted to a flashlight to see what was going on between the layers when holes did not perfectly line up. While I often dont need them, I am so thankful for the video for this project. There were some unique tricks to getting this pattern together. The video is very clear and made it so much easier to figure out what exactly was going on during construction. This project took me about 3.5 months, but I am happy with the result!
My husband and I wanted unique hats to wear for cons. He specifically wanted a leather Rincewind hat from the TV miniseries The Color of Magic. I had already made him the robe but he wanted a new hat.
Rincwind and Twoflower
I found a really neat leather hat pattern from LeatherHub patterns on etsy. This pattern has the strangest looking shapes! Based on the recommendations in the pattern, I used a thin veg tan leather for the base. Once the pieces were all cut they had to be punched. There were so many tiny holes, the punching took significantly longer than the cutting. Once cut and punched, I dyed the leather red and left it to dry for a couple of days.
Wizard hat, cut and punched
Wizard hat, dyed red
LeatherHub patterns has videos to compliment their patterns, which makes it super easy to understand how they go together. The pattern pieces fit perfectly and it went together very easily. I stitched it together with red waxed artificial sinew.
Wizard hat undecorated
Once it was finished it needed the word "Wizzard" and a bunch of stars. The text description in the book states some of the stars were falling off, so I did not glue all the corners on all the stars. It also states that the large star on Rincewind's hat is a 7-pointed star, so although the TV show used 5, I went with 7 points on the central star. The stars and letters are cut of a gold patterned leather and glued with leather glue.
Wizzard hat
I also made a witch's hat for me using a different LeatherHub pattern, which went together just as easily! For my hat, I dyed it blue, but wanted it to look older, so I underdyed it with some black in streaks first. I then covered the hat with rhinestones before stitching it together. The rhinestones are essentially 2 part snap together rhinestones for leather work that I bought in bulk mixed colors. This makes the hat a bit heavy but really fun to wear.
Leather witch's hat
I am really finding leatherwork a lot of fun right now and am loving some of the great patterns I am finding online to try out.
One thing I find I need most at steampunk events is a fan, as the rooms can be very hot. The second most common thing I need is a parasol, since many of our local events involve being outside. So I wanted a matching fan and parasol that would be quick and easy to make, not too expensive and easily replaceable when lost or damaged. So I decided to decorate cheap premade bamboo and fabric fan and parasol with silver and black sharpy.
The sharpy worked pretty well on the fabric surfaces and made a really quick way to decorate a fan and parasol. I was worried these would still be a little plain, so I decided to make a new handle for the parasol, a new topper for the parasol and a decoration for a fan tassel. Keeping with the theme, I used some epoxy sculpt to make some tentacle pieces. I had some brown epoxy sculpt that I figured would make a good base for copper coloring later. I have never worked with epoxy sculpt before and it is really sticky. It also took longer than I expected to get to the stage where it would hold detail. I had to work up the material and then let it sit for a while before molding details. This was very frustrating as I did all the detail to start with and had to redo it after the material set up a bit!
Once dry however, it took rub-n-buff really well to make a nice copper looking set of decorations.
It was really easy to glue the new handle and topper to the parasol, and I think they make the parasol a bit more unique.
Final details for the fan and parasol was adding a little trim. For the fan, I quickly whip stitched on some black lace and for the parasol, I added some black and silver fringe. These both came from my stash and made a great use of some scrap trim I had laying around. When I sculpted the smaller tentacle above, I used a straw to make a hole so the tentacle could be threaded on a ribbon to add to the fan handle.
These items were pretty quick to make and get a surprising amount of use! I am always in need of a fan or a parasol and since these were relatively cheap, I dont worry too much about losing them or breaking them.
This year I got to attend the Labyrinth Masquerade Ball in LA. This event is beyond phenomenal, the cast did an amazing job of creating multiple wonderful worlds, the entertainment was top notch and the costumes were to die for (I seriously recommend checking out the pictures on the website or facebook). The whole event felt so immersive. We opted to attend the preshow, where you tour through the space with various cast members. This was very worth it, the cast members were amazing and worked hard to orient the new people and to show you some of the unique things for the event. We also attended the tea, which was amazing in both food and unique teas designed specifically for the event. I did take at least some pictures, so here are a selection from this magical event.
First, here is our outfits for the first night taken before we headed down to the ball.
There were so many amazing costumes, I captured only a handful of them, but here are some of my favorites we got to see first hand. However, just looking at the facebook photos, we missed so many amazing costumes in the crowd! I highly recommend this event for the sheer love of costume and hope to go again some day!
Out of this whole costume the skirt took the longest simply due to the fact that I really wanted it to light up and stitching tons of LED wires by hand is really really slow.
The skirt is 2 layers, the bottom layer is smooth, pink, pearlized, sheer fabric. It is a basic A-line cut gathered into a pink elastic waist band. The simple cut let me stitch LED strings all over this base skirt. The LEDs are Flora RGB neopixels from Adafruit, these can produce full 24-bit color, are ultra-bright, can be chained together and can respond rapidly to programmed instructions. Each stand in the skirt is 8 Flora neopixels strung together with clear wire and there are 8 strands. You can use conductive threads for these, but the loss in conductivity over the length of the skirt would be too much, so for this size project, I used wire. Once wired, I stitched the LED strands to the skirt. The stitching pattern was random and the strands were designed to have different spacing between the LEDs to make it a little more organic looking.
The wiring all runs to a pouch under the bustled overskirt which is high enough that I don't sit on it, but low enough that it is not under the corset. The Arduino controller and the LiPo batteries are held in this pouch.
The overskirt is much fuller than the underskirt and is made of crinkled, pink, pearlized, sheer fabric. The overskirt is floor length in the front and slightly longer in the back to allow the skirt to be bustled slightly by tapes in the back (you can see 2 of the white ribbon tapes for the bustle in the pouch photo). The ruffle at the bottom of the skirt goes all the way around the skirt. To the front of the skirt, I cut out gear shapes in random shiny fabrics I had laying around. These fabrics were gifted to me and were 1/8 yard strips in 16 colors, I used all the pink tones for this skirt. These two fabrics (the pearlized sheer and the slippery shiny stuff) were horrible to sew and every attempt I had to applique this stuff failed, so the gears are glued on with fabric glue.
To the back, I added a couple of elements to enhance the bustle, these were based on 1860s fashions were you start to see extra stuff down the back, but the skirts still have fairly round hoop support. The added bits are pretty free form, there are several layers of basically quarter circles with trim added to the back.
The arduino in the skirt allows the LEDs to have several programs that the skirt cycles through every 30 seconds. The first is a red raindrop effect, the second one is a blue snow shower effect and the last one is a rainbow blinking effect.
In case the videos aren't working, here is a quick picture of pattern 3.
