Post the Eighteenth: A New Hope -- for a Project That (Maybe) Won't Drive Me Insane

  All right! New project time. The problem with cosplay is that, more often than not, there are not a dearth of ideas to do.  I'm no exception. Link, blue mage, Flammie, Knight Gundam, Anbo-jyutsu martial artist, etc. ... 

I have an interesting idea for a white mage, 
but I don't think the world is ready for that.

 

  All of varying levels of difficulty and, uh, expense (one of those is a full fursuit, for crissakes). But it feels like there's maybe one a bit more obvious that should be done first. And maybe a bit more do-able than some of the others listed.

  At some point you may have said to yourself "ahh, they made a red mage costume. They must main that in XIV." And that would make a lot of sense. You would also be wrong.

  No, I main Summoner. Rest assured, I can feel your disappointment from here. But I don't care. I think they're cool. 

  They're also definitely not something you see all that often. Not that this should necessarily be a deciding factor, but as an attendee admittedly it is nice when you aren't greeted by 100 copies of the same cosplay.

  But they have a lot of little bits that come with them, so, this will be a whole thing. What all will we need here?

 

• Outfit (coat, headgear, gloves, pants, footwear)
• Book
• Carbuncle (plush, lol. Not going to be one of those brainless dillweeds that brings a live (non-service) pet to a convention.)

  Well, okay, no. You don't actually NEED that last one. Yes, that IS technically an arcanist's thing more than it is summoner's. Yes, carby is the magical equivalent of an appendix at this point. I don't care. It's cute and the right thing to do.

  Besides, how hard could it be to make a plush?

(Ominous crack of thunder)

  But let's ignore carby and book for a hot minute and focus on the coat. 

  One of the projects that's been sitting rent free in my brain for ages at this point is a quilt coat. Not a quilted coat, mind you, but a quilt that also happens to be a coat. Look it up, it's a whole thing. Some of them can even look quite stylish. Or at least as stylish as a wearing a blanket can possibly look.

 

   Enter the Convoker's set from Endwalker.

 

So...much...EVERYTHING

  Hold on, hold on! Hear me out. I'm not thinking of doing a literal interpretation of this. Much like with red mage I want to use the official work as a jumping off point. And I think that's where turning this into a quilted coat could turn out very interesting. Especially if I lean into the pixelating tendencies of quilts.

 

  Since this is so complicated and will require sewing a lot of sharp angles, it'd be smart to do a warm up project. You see, it turns out the best way to get to get sharp, less-than-90-degree-angles (which it's clear this project is going to have a lot of) is to use a technique called paper piecing. It's actually a very old way of sewing and predates using rulers, etc to produce your shapes. It's a bit more modern now (I've yet to read instructions that don't start with "print off your pattern"), but the basic gist is still "Sew fabric to paper. Rip off paper." Don't worry. This will make more sense as this goes along.

Picture by Leanne Parsons

  Enter the storm block. Simple enough that it shouldn't become it's whole own thing, but complicated enough to get in some good practice. For my own amusement, I quickly slapped together a mock-up of what these blocks can look like in a full project. 

 

First one screams "rainbow quilt" to me.

 

  Not to say this would actually be a whole dang quilt. I don't really know how many blocks of this I will do. It may be after six blocks I'm done with it and they get turned into pillows or something. I don't know. But a little extra planning never hurt anyone and it's just striking how different the patterns look just by adding in extra space.

  This block pattern from Devoted Quilter. Since this is a side project I won't be showing this part step-by-step, but I will be posting overall block updates. But this should give me some good practice with paper piecing without driving me bonkers right out of the gate.

 Chosen fabric colors. Working with small, leftover yardage here. And while that means I don't have my pick of colors, it does mean that it's free (the best price).

  The "spending money" part will come soon enough.

 

 

  So. A lot of this kind of paper piecing runs on rectangles. Normally you wouldn't bother with a template for this. Just grab your ruler and cutter and GO, but since these are leftover yards of indeterminate size I wanted templates so I could Tetris the pieces and get an idea of how to squeeze in all the pieces without wasting gobs of fabric.

 

  Speaking of rulers and cutters, they make nifty grid rulers and cutting mats for just this thing.

  The pizza cutter looking thing is called a rotary cutter, by the way. Not that I ever call it that. No, my nerdlinger brain is so utterly cooked that thing is a rolling cutter and thus it shall always be.

In my defense...

  While we're here, zoom in for a sec. See all that gibberish printed at the bottom? Some of it is for printing purposes, some it is advertisement, but some it is actually useful information as it tells you who made the fabric, the line it belongs to, and its ID number. So in theory if you run out of this fabric, you can chase more down.

 

  (I mean, not in this circumstance as the fabric is nearly a decade old and manufacturers like to change things up, but you get the idea.)

 

 

   Anyway, yes, square up the fabric and cut out all the pieces.

 

Look at that tiny-butt white square. Totally not going to be annoying to sew that.

  Give 'em a good final pressing and they're ready to go! That's enough prep work for now.

  Next time: Actual designs and picking out fabric! I hope! I promise!

Material Directory

Storm block pattern - www.devotedquilter.com

Quilting cottons - Mom's fabric stockpile

Quilting ruler, rolling cutter, cutting mat - Your Local Sewing Shop

Current background music: Blue Earth Sound. "Mariposa." Cicero Nights.

  HEY! Since this is April it would be insane to assume any of this would be ready by this DragonCon, so a countdown is pretty pointless. However! In the spirit of ancient internet traditions I've set up an rss feed for this blog. Just snag the code from the main page and insert it into your reader of choice. Take that, modern social media.