In 2013 we did glowing black and green and 2014 was concept art inspired!

Someday we want to put together an original outfit set that’s all inspired by peacocks since they’re just right for the Glitterati, but for this year’s b-day outfit we settled for black with slight peacock touches here and there (plus we wanted everything to be a little grunge-tinged too – hence this fabric we found for the background + grain). Maybe this outfit is the preface to the peacock set later!

We did heavy makeup in blues/greens/purples on the main eye for each of us w/ silver & black on the other eye (the one under the hair, hehe). We also thought we’d only do half the lipstick too. Basically, one side of each of us is plain(ish) while the other has a glove with feathers at the end, dark eye makeup/dark lipstick, and the feathered ear cuff things. We added a splash of green with the green feather tank for Kerith and the green glitter-caked shoes for Jaryn.

We’ll always be crossing our fingers for a Dance Central 4 where Kerith & Jaryn cause the mischief they mentioned in Dance Central 3!

For more photos, you can check out the post on our tumblr!

In October 2012, as the release date for Dance Central 3 grew closer, Nate and I were worried our favorite snarky twins wouldn’t be making an appearance. Luckily, they did! It was a small one in story mode, but it’s there and it’s pretty saucy like The Glitterati pretty much always are. Their new outfits were absolutely fabulous and we had no idea how we would make them but we wanted to make them so bad. We told ourselves: SOMEHOW.

For the next couple months, we collected materials and brainstormed ideas, hoping to have them done for Katsucon 2013 in February (hahahaha, didn’t happen) but didn’t end up finishing them until PAX East 2013 in March. We were glad we pushed them off though because there were so many little details we wouldn’t have been able to add if we tried to rush them for Katsucon. So like we did with the DC2 Crew outfits & Street Style outfits, here is our post detailing the adventure we had putting these costumes together! We’ll go piece by piece like we did with the Crew outfits blog post.

SHIRT/BODYSUIT: Kerith’s shirt and Jaryn’s leotard came from a place that has saved us a good number of times when it comes to spandex costume pieces: River’s Edge Dancewear! The pattern for the leotard had to be modified with a higher neckline when they made it, but they had the two items that were closest to what we needed and could be made in a fabric that we could work with for these pieces. We got 12 different fabric samples from different places (you can see some of them below) – some weren’t the right color, some weren’t shiny enough, some could possibly work – because we thought we might have to try our hand at making the shirt & leotard ourselves. (I’ve never sewn a leotard before so I was veeeeery nervous.)

One of the fabric samples we got from R.E.D. was used in our dye test bath just in case the dye might take and it would turn out closer to the shade of their shirt/leotard (because none of the fabric samples were exactly right). Luckily, the dye did take and luckily it was closer to the color of their clothes! This meant we could order the shirt/leotard from R.E.D. and dye them, which is exactly what we ended up doing. They’re actually pretty comfy too and all the shiny we need! AND WE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE TO SEW ANY SPANDEX, HUZZAH! Below is a shot of the leotard and shirt – Kerith’s shirt had been dyed but Jaryn’s leotard hadn’t yet.

VESTS/COLLARS: We looked long and hard for a fabric that was the right shade with a pattern similar to the one on their fabric. What we found that ended up working the best was a home decor fabric! It was the right weight and had a good pattern so we ended up buying numerous yards (waiting for a sale to hit before we purchased!) since we knew we would need it for the vests, collars, Jaryn’s shoes, and also her waistcape.

I took a pattern for a jacket from a historical costume, modified it, and sewed it without the sleeves for our vests (making mockups in muslin first to make sure we had the right fit for each of us). The lines were all handpainted on with a dark copper fabric paint and the GG logos on the backs were embroidered on a thicker fabric in a multi-colored metallic floss and then cut out and attached to the vest. We were going to embroider them straight onto the vests but we ran the risk of them messing up so we wanted to make sure they came out okay before they went onto the vests! The gems attached to the vest had to be color-matched to our rings so it was fun searching for those! The green ones on the front of our vests are Swarovski crystals whereas the others (the greens on the back and all the yellows) are all plastic. We wanted to put the fanciest ones in the front, haha!

The collars were measured, cut out, and pleated very carefully by Nate and then I sewed them onto the vests. It was hard making them work because they needed to stand up but they also needed to be pleated, so there was a lot of trial and error with scraps and different types of interfacing. More on how the collars came to be can be found in the next section!

JARYN’S BUTTCAPE: I LOVE BUTTCAPES. Nate was the saving grace with this as well as the collars. He took to figuring out the pleating like a champ and I’m extremely grateful for that because I was still sewing vests and working on painting the details on them. He made sure to measure the length out correctly so it would match my short fry self and not Jaryn’s fabulously tall frame and then drafted out a pattern and cut the pieces out of the fabric as well as Decor Bond, which would be what helped hold the pleats on both this and the collars (many thanks to Lin for the help discovering tutorials and such on this – LIFE SAVER <3). Nate ironed all the decor bond on and I hemmed all the pieces (4 sides on all 8 pieces), sewed the pieces together (to make 4 fans with 2 sides of pleats), and then sewed the 4 fans to a long piece of tulle so they all stayed together. I added some armholes to the tulle after that and slipped it on under my vest. I got lucky there cause I had no idea how I was going to attach it to myself or the vest without weighing down the vest.

P.S. Have I ever mentioned how much I love butt capes?

KERITH’S PANTS/BELTS: I have never made a pair of pants in my life so I was extremely nervous about making these, especially since they’re fairly tight on Kerith (of course, thanks Kerith XD). We were going to look for a pair we could possibly modify, but with how specific the color of his pants matches the rest of his outfit plus all the design work along the top hem of them, we knew we’d have to try to do the whole thing. I made a mockup with a similarly weighted fabric and made them fit Nate before cutting out and sewing the pattern in the brown fabric. The front closes with velcro because we didn’t want to put in anything crazier than that for fear of screwing it up when we started doing the hem work at the top of the pants (the two layers of fabric and the curved hem).

As for the belt, another hit in the home decor fabric section! We knew Kerith’s belt(s?) was/were brown with a faint pattern on it and when we saw this fabric it just screamed to us to use it for the beltpiece. It was very thick and frayed a lot, so we ended up lining the edge with brown bias tape, which actually worked out in the end because it kind of looks like there’s a brown trim on his belts. Since the belts sag on Kerith we had to make them sag on Nate, which meant there was a trusty safety pin or two holding them onto Nate’s pants.

G BUCKLES: My sister had gotten some InstaMorph moldable plastic for me for Christmas one year and for the longest time it sat on my worktable because I wanted to use it for JUST THE RIGHT THING. Basically, you heat up the little balls of plastic in hot water and then mold them – they dry in whatever shape you mold them and can be remolded with hot water. As Nate and I stared at the buckles on Jaryn’s vest and Kerith’s belt, my mind went to the InstaMorph. It would be lighter than certain types of clay, more heavy-duty than paperclay – it would be just what we needed! Nate fiddled around with shaping it and I tested out some paint on it and when we figured out that it would be perfect, Nate sculpted the G’s and added the pins to the back then I painted both of the buckles.

ARM/LEG PIECES: Nate measured our arms and my leg and patterned out these pieces out of Worbla. He attached thin flat strips of wire on the insides and then shaped the pieces so they would fit. I painted them with layers of bronze, gold, and a slight tinge of silver paint and then glued all the gems on each piece – I think this is probably the part that took the longest. I was still finishing up my leg piece the night before we wore these costumes at PAX East. SO MANY GEMS. I was worried about keeping the leg piece up on my leg while walking around, but I ended up sewing velcro to the tights I was going to wear and gluing the opposite pieces into the inside of the leg piece and it stayed up just fine! Phew.

SHOES: THEIR SHOES. HOW DO THEY DO ANYTHING IN THESE SHOES? Kerith’s shoes look like they’re a piece of his pants – like the tops just meld into his pants. So Nate had to cover a set of cheap slip-on shoes he got in the same fabric as his pants and build up the top so it reached over the pants. I took a pair of platform sandals – I used the fact that I had to cover them as an excuse to give myself a couple of inches since Nate is so tall! – and covered them in the same fabric we used for the vests/etc. Jaryn has these flaps on her shoes around her ankles in the front and back and I made those a separate piece from the shoes so I could slip those on and then put the shoes on under them. I added brown trim to those which was the same trim we glued around the bottoms of both pairs of shoes. The crystals that you can see on the bottom rims of the shoes are actually drops of different colored glitter glue. We were going to glue crystals to them, but we didn’t have time and figured glitter glue would be just as shiny (and cheaper :D)!

MISCELLANEOUS: The wigs are new/different wigs than the ones we use for the other two outfits – their hair is longer in this game and styled differently. Wigs are our enemies so these are one of the things we kept putting off because we were worried about them. They need to be poofier, but we are satisfied with the way they came out! The face makeup takes less time to do than the cheek lines from the other two outfits but we had a grand old time finding just the right shade for the eyes and ended up using an orange color with some gold-dusted over it. Also concerning makeup, white nail polish will always remind me of white out. The rings were made with pieces we found at the craft store!

Overall, we are extremely excited with the way these turned out! Usually, there are things we end up wanting to fix on our costumes but when we look back at photos of these we just end up going I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS IS US (maybe we need to redo the shoes) BUT STILL. We’re really happy we made these and look forward to wearing them again!

So welcome to the first post of the SPimH tag/category. I needed to talk about my love for waist capes – or buttcapes, asscapes, halfcapes – whatever you want to call them (I usually favor asscapes; IT JUST ROLLS OFF THE TONGUE) so here is the Special Place in my Heart tag and here are the asscapes.

I have always thought regular capes looked really slick, but wow okay, a half cape – a cape that hangs over your lower backside instead of upper where it can possibly restrict your shoulders. You still get the cool, flowing action just in a different place. I DON’T KNOW WHY I LOVE THESE SO MUCH.

I’m not sure when my love for them began. I feel like it was in 2000 when Vagrant Story came out for the PSX and the main villain, Sydney Losstarot, sported a super-fab waist cape. That was the first time the word asscape came about in our house. I was looking at him in the game and saying, “What would you even call that thing?” My sister almost instantly went, “Asscape?” And we both chuckled like the mature adults we never will be and that word has lived on in my vocabulary since then.

Next up, and during that same year year of the asscape? was Kuja from Final Fantasy IX – SO STYLISH, SO EVIL, SO… FLOWY AND MAGICAL AND ATTACHED TO UNDERGARMENT BITS? I think the asscape with the super tall boots is rad though, so rock it, Kuja.

Then I played the first Kingdom hearts game in 2002 and gasp– do I spy another asscape? Squaresoft/Square Enix (whatever they happened to be way back when, still Squaresoft? It’s been too long) just loved handing me asscapes. It’s like they knew. Riku (while in Heartless/Dark Mode) wore a pretty awesome asscape complete with some belt action. WHO DOESN’T LOVE BELTS not Tetsuya Nomura!

Galerians: ASH came along in 2003 and a favorite Galerian of mine, Nitro, happened to be sporting an asscape. Now, it started higher than some others but still fit the criteria. As long as it didn’t start at the shoulders and covered the region of the backside I loved it. Still can’t pinpoint why. This is also when I noticed that most of these characters that I loved with these draped lower backsides were villains in some form or another. Perhaps having an asscape makes you evil, who knows. Is it the wonderful butt fabric’s fault that Riku went into Dark Mode maybe it is. Fabulous accessory for being evil though. It must be up there with a curly mustache to twirl and amazingly arched eyebrows.

I started subconsciously putting my love for asscapes into costuming. Miss Tenel Ka Chume Ta’ Djo (there’s a mouthful) of the Star Wars: Expanded Universe has been a favorite character of mine since I got into Star Wars (a long time ago in galaxy far– you get the drift) and she only has a few official images of her, most of which are from the shoulders up. So when making costumes and outfits of hers, I got to throw in some of my own ideas to round out the whole outfit. She’s not really a fancy-dress-up type (even while she’s the Queen Mother of a 63-planet consortium) so I brought asscapes in to make it somewhat fancy while still keeping it functional in case she needed to fight. Like a boss and all that. First was the Legacy of the Force: Tempest cover (which I’ve made a couple versions of a waist cape for). Then I ended up bringing a different butt cape – technically one that went on the side! SIDECAPE? – in to a costume I threw together for a younger (two-armed, pre-Lightsabers!) Tenel Ka in a week before Katsucon 2012 (you can see I reused the sleeves from the Tempest cover Tenel Ka – was not gonna sit and scale a whole new set of sleeves together NOPE).

Also with a BioShock costume I made – Jasmine Jolene – I saw another opportunity for a fabric tail. There isn’t much official art of Jasmine so I ended up looking for inspiration from a few pieces of fanart of her and also realized I could buttcape the outfit up SO WHY NOT? I thought it worked with the setting she’s usually in and gave a new dimension to the outfit instead of just being the corset and shorts.

In October of last year, Dance Central 3 came out and it was like the heavens parted and light happened to shine all over my face and someone was singing something somewhere because my favorite Dance Central character, Jaryn, was… wait for it, wearing an A S S C A P E.

It was a sign! I mean, we knew we were going to costume as the Glitterati in their DC3 outfits (if they were in it, which they are, so YESSSS!) but after I saw the asscape, I knew it was meant to be. It was a pleated asscape too. Extra fabulous.

I’ve been fiddling with making some of my own waist capes (I’ll be proper and use the correct[?] term now, sorry) and have been getting a ton of different ideas for fabrics and patterns and so on, so you might see another post on these in the future! I just had to share this to start because these hold a special place on my backside in my heart.

What characters with butt capes have I missed? Let me know on Twitter (because I know I’m missing some)!

Special Place in my Heart is a post-when-the-idea-strikes feature here at Neon Shores where (when said need/idea pops up) I’ll write about something video game-related or otherwise that holds a geeky place in my weird little heart.

Below is a photo of us in the outfits! There are more photos of our Glitterati birthday outfits on Zhobot’s Facebook page!

We also recently got the costume pages done for our three in-game Glitterati costumes, so check those out in the costume section!

(Check out Glitterati costume page for more photos!)

When Nate and I realized we loved the Glitterati and their ridiculously amazing outfits, we knew we would definitely want to try our hand at the Street Style ones since we weren’t sure how we would tackle the crew outfits. We weren’t necessarily planning on even trying the crew ones but after finishing the SS ones we knew we wanted to try our hand at them. Our love for Kerith & Jaryn trumped the HOW DO WE MAKE THESE FRICKIN’ THINGS?!?! — we figured out that we would find a way somehow so we planned to have them ready for Dragon*Con 2012! We got them finished just in time (we actually finished a couple of things at the hotel at con haha) – there are a few minor adjustments we want to make (which we will get to in the post) but we’re really happy with how they turned out!

Since both outfits are very similar, we’ll go by outfit piece instead of by character like we did with the Street Style post!

PANTS:
These were the easy part. The only really easy part, hehe. We both bought leggings that were labeled “liquid latex” – we thought that looked close to the design of their pants without being made of vinyl or leather or something of the sort (you know how I feel about sewing vinyl – I made a second Jaryn street style jacket with something that wasn’t vinyl – check out the new photo in our recent post! XD). We cut the pants where they needed to be cut (mine on the thigh and his on the lower leg) and we took his in some since they were baggy on him. With the piece I cut off of Jaryn’s, I sewed some elastic into the top of it to see if it would stay up on its own on my thigh. It doesn’t – so there’s one thing that needs to be fixed! The spiral bits that stick out from her thigh and his lower leg, we’ll get to those in a bit!

BOOTS/SHOES:
Since they each wear one boot and one shoe, this required four pairs of shoes between us. I had an old pair of boots I wasn’t using for anything, so my boot was taken care of – I could glue anything to it and would be fine. Nate’s boots were boots he used for other costumes though, so for the additions to his boots (errr, boot), his had to be something he could add to the boot and then take off when needed. I found a pair of flats like Jaryn’s shoe at a thrift store and Nate found a pair of shoes like Kerith’s on ebay. We wanted the silver additions for the two shoes to be removable too since they were both shoes we could wear for other things. The silver additions were pieces of bent metal attached to elastic. The additions for the boots were strips of the same vinyl-type stuff we used on the vests with the same size grommets used in as the vest on the ends as well. The strips were glued to the side of my boot while we managed to cobble together a thing that looked the same except with a circle of black elastic so Nate could put it around his boot.

WIGS:
I realized we only briefly touched on the wigs in the Street Style entry! We both started out with Blue Steele wigs in ash blonde from Arda Wigs and we were planning on cutting them super angular in the front like Kerith & Jaryn’s haircuts. We realized, as we were working at the last minute before Katsucon (where we first wore the SS outfits), that whenever we moved and the hair moved and it didn’t look right anymore. So we ended up kind of blunting the edges on their haircuts a little to make it look more “normal” – we also tried spraying it so it would stay while it was angular but it made the wigs look hard and weird. We washed the spray out and tried to make them both look more natural.

The Kerith wig was easier than the Jaryn wig because it was mostly just cutting the bangs (which is how we managed to do it the first day we wore the costumes, haha). Jaryn’s needed the side pieces as well as all the tiny, shorter pieces of hair that go from her temples to the point in front. Her bangs/the main point sticks out farther and up a lot more in the game than this wig but trying to keep it that way meant spraying it so I just cut the point and then tease it up a little at the top whenever I wear it. Sometimes it cooperates and sometimes it doesn’t. But the wigs are comfortable and they work! XD

We’ve worn the wigs so much now since the Street Style costumes originally debuted that Nate’s Kerith wig has a small tear in the band. He’s been working so hard at being sassy that he busted his wig, y’all.

OTHER SMALL BITS:
Both pairs of earrings were made by Nate out of clay – mine were hooks and his were clip-ons. He also cut out the silver shapes that went on the front of the vests. He measured and cut them out of gray craft foam with an adhesive backing then I painted them silver. Finally, he stuck them onto a piece of a cheap thin clear vinyl shower liner we bought so they would have the spaces in between them and I added some hair clips to the back so we could clip them to our vests and remove them easily if we needed to.

The gloves were a single pair of black liquid latex gloves we purchased (since they wear theirs on opposite hands we only needed to buy one pair, wooo!) that we cut the fingers off of and added silver bits too. To give it the raised look we attached the same type of metal we used on the silver shoe additions to pieces of craft foam and then attached those to the gloves. Mine was cut shorter than his since I needed room for the spiral piece on her lower arm.

The black spiral bits were the parts that gave us the most trouble. It was one of those cases where you look at the illustration and you think THAT LOOKS SO AWESOME HOW DOES IT STAY LIKE THAT then you try to think of a bunch of ways to make them stay and none of them work. We finally settled on fabric with wire sewn into the edges. The fabric on the spiral pieces looks different than the fabric on their pants & vests so we used a shiny, black material that had sort of a raised pattern. We made them and didn’t bend them for the first time until we put the outfits on at Dragon*Con. The arm ones are fine but the leg ones give us trouble so there’s the other thing we need to fix!

Now for the big parts!

SHIRTS:
These shirts were a trip for us to make. Usually, we can find patterns to use and modify and we’re okay with that (we’re not the best with sewing machines, haha! XD), but we could not find a good pattern to modify for Jaryn’s shirt. For Kerith’s we used an old tank top Nate had. We cut the tank top apart and used it as a pattern, cutting the silver shirt fabric out longer and at an angle along the bottom. For Jaryn’s I ended up fiddling around with a mockup made out of another stretchy fabric we had and just kept modifying it until it worked! I used that as the pattern for Jaryn’s and then cut it out of the silver shirt fabric, then sewed them both to become actual shirts. I added clear straps to mine just in case it didn’t want to stay up.

For the white detailing down the front of their shirts and around the edges, we found a white horsehair braid that we thought might work. It’s normally used for other things like stiffening hemlines and such, but we thought we could use it as the detailing on the shirts. We didn’t want to get something too delicate or hard to see but we didn’t want to get something that would stand out too much, either. Luckily, this stuff worked out perfectly!

VESTS:
The vests are our favorite parts of these costumes because we took so much time making them and put some thought into how they would work so this paragraph might ramble a bit, our apologies!

We started out with muslin and a vest pattern (the same one we originated with for Nate’s Street Style Kerith outfit) and patterned out one that would fit him and one that would fit me. From there, we measured/took in/fiddled with the muslin mockups until we were satisfied with the fit and look. The first idea we had was to use a black vinyl (here we go with the vinyl again! although, these wouldn’t take much to sew – it wasn’t a whole jacket again, so I was fine with it!) we found and line it with a black lining. We were going to be putting something in between the vest and lining so we thought this might work out. The first vinyl fabric and the lining we had weren’t working out, so we had to go on a hunt for a different fabric!

I ended up at a fabric store I don’t normally go to because it’s farther away than our normal haunt, and I found a table full of tough, thin, outdoor vinyl for $5 a yard. I also found a roll of really swanky vinyl for about $18 a yard. I told the girl at the cutting counter when she said, “you know there’s cheaper vinyl on that table, right?” that I needed to line it in black somehow. She showed me black interfacing and told me to use it as lining, told me how to put it on the inside of the cheaper vinyl without melting the vinyl and I thanked her profusely for all the money we saved. I knew our original plan of putting something between the lining and vest wouldn’t work out then, but at that point, I wanted to just get the vests together!

So we used the muslin mockups to cut the vests and interfacing out of the newly purchased stuff and found the stencil of the Glitterati logo we had made for the back of the vests. Nate used his Xacto skills and cut the logos out of the backs of both of our vests. We ironed the interfacing to the vests (left the logo on the interfacing for now though, so that the vinyl middle parts of the GG’s wouldn’t flop around and get messed up while we sewed everything). I sewed all the seams of the vests together and sewed on the thin black trim around the edges and armholes of both. While I did that, Nate measured the thicker strip of vinyl we had, cutting out the pieces that would be attached to the bottom, along with all the pieces that would hold the bigger piece on. He also added the grommets to the tops of all of those pieces.

We put the vests on the dress form, one at a time, and measured the five pieces of vinyl, pinning them onto the vest so they were all the same distance apart and where they needed to be to hold the bigger piece on the bottom. Once all the pieces were pinned, I sewed each of the five pieces (ten in all for the two vests) at the top so they stayed on the vest and at the bottom so they stayed on the bigger strip of vinyl around the bottom. We looked at the picture of Kerith & Jaryn closer (again… we looked at it so many times) and discussed the small pieces of vinyl that seemed to hold the places I had just put together. So I took what we had left of the thin black trim and cut 20 small strips out.

I laid the vests out and glued each piece over the parts I had sewn, making it appear that the strips were being held up by these small loops of vinyl. It took a good amount of time to measure all of the bigger pieces, add the grommets, add them all to the vests and add the bottom strip of vinyl – not to mention adding all the 20 tiny pieces after that – but we really liked the way it looked in the end!

For the logo, we wanted something fun. In the game, their logo on the backs of their vests look gray/silver. Before we even started the costumes we thought, they’re flashy, why not have it light up somehow? Nate had always wanted to do stuff with EL lighting, so we figured this might be a good chance. It took us a while to find panels that were white and that would be the right size for the logos, but we did after a lot of searching!

We hesitated on adding them because we were still afraid of the middles of the GG’s not being able to hold their own and ended up bringing them to con with us. While being lazy in the room one morning, Nate took the Xacto knife he brought and finally cut the logo out of the lining as well, adding the EL panels in with the only thing we had with us – duct tape!

We realized this was a good thing though because we didn’t want the panel in there permanently (with glue, etc.) in case we needed to replace it. We attached the battery pack to the inside of the vest under our arms and it worked out perfectly. Originally we were going to have the battery pack in between the vest and the lining, but since the lining was ironed on instead of sewn, we couldn’t. It’s alright though cause it’s not visible when it’s under our arm!

We ended up getting these on late Sunday night of Dragon*Con, putting on the makeup and trying to figure out how to keep those pesky spiral leg pieces on! Those are the things we need to fix the most, we think. We WERE planning on wearing these to Katsucon in February… but now we have Kerith and Jaryn’s Dance Central 3 outfits to make (woooo!) – so keep an eye out for those!

Last Fall, Dance Central 2 was released for the Xbox 360/Kinect. Right off the bat, Nate and I were disappointed that one of our favorites (Oblio) wasn’t a returning character from the first game. After playing for a bit, we realized that there was a crew of two characters that were starting to fill the void we felt for Oblio. Those two were Kerith & Jaryn – The Glitterati. They had just the right amount of snark and a set of fun songs to make us pay more attention to them and then finally to make us realize that they were our favorites in DC2. THOSE QUIPS. THAT INHERENT CREEPINESS. We couldn’t not love them.

The costume ideas started brewing when we unlocked their Street Style outfits and we decided to try our hand at them for Katsucon 2012. We were going to start working on them earlier than we ended up starting, but due to getting everything together for the table at MAGFest and then a family emergency right after MAGFest, we didn’t have a chance and we ended up starting these costumes roughly three weeks before Katsucon. This was not good since Nate had that vest to create and I had to put a jacket together from scratch. XD There are a good number of things we’re planning to remake or fix up on these costumes, but for the amount of time we had to make them, we are proud of them and had a lot of fun wearing them!

We’ll go over the details by twin. ;D

KERITH:

The pants and shoes were easy enough. Nate already had a pair of black dress shoes and the pants he picked up from a thrift store where he also purchased a black button-up shirt. Since Kerith’s collar on his shirt is not like your everyday dress shirt, we took the sleeves we cut off of the shirt and used the fabric from them to make the bigger part of the collar (which stands up with interfacing). The two smaller parts of the collar are the pointy pieces of the original collar we had to cut off to make the top of the shirt more open/lower cut. We added a piece of the purple fabric I used for the lining in Jaryn’s jacket to the inside of the front of his shirt where Kerith has a hint of purple. It doesn’t stay flat correctly while Nate’s wearing it and that’s something we have to fix since it was one of the last things we added and we were in kind of a rush (no more starting costumes three weeks in advance!)…

 The vest was the big part of this outfit. He knew he wanted to make it out of something that wouldn’t fray when we cut all the holes in it – also something where we wouldn’t have to hem every hole we cut so again, it wouldn’t fray. We discussed vinyl first, which is kind of what the vest looks like in the game, but cutting circles in that would’ve been very time-consuming and they probably wouldn’t have come out as round. He finally settled on craft foam! He knew he would easily be able to cut the circles in the foam with an x-acto knife. I helped him make a muslin mockup of a vest pattern and I sewed most of the pieces together in the fabric so we could use that as one big pattern for the craft foam. We kept the shoulders of the mockup apart and cut out the whole vest in craft foam, then Nate used a cookie cutter to make all the circle patterns before going over them all with an x-acto knife to cut the pieces out.

After finishing the circles, he sprayed the vest (interior and exterior) with a couple layers of purple spraypaint, then a layer of pinkish-purple, then finally a layer of glossy sealer. I sewed the vest collar for him, which was interfacing sandwiched between two layers of a silver fabric. The pieces were cut from a paper pattern of Kerith’s collar shapes that Nate freehanded. Since we didn’t have a lot of time, we didn’t really measure the pieces so he had drawn all three (five technically, lol) of Kerith’s collar pieces, but only the top two (on either side) ended up fitting on the vest – we were okay with leaving the third off because it looked fine without it, but it’s definitely something we want to fix when we have more time to fix up these costumes! The patterns on the vest collar were done with the sewing machine. We added the bias tape to those pieces and the vest and connected the collar to the vest the day we left for Katsucon. Again, we really want to have more time to fix these costumes up and we wish we hadn’t had to put this one off until we did!

Nate’s Kerith wig was cut as we were putting on the costumes Saturday at Katsucon (again with the rushing). Luckily, we had practiced the makeup once beforehand so we kind of had the hang of it. His watch was $12 at Wal-Mart! Kerith would be ashamed because he probably pays $93874920384 for one.

JARYN:

As far as my wig, I cut mine the night before the con so I was a little ahead of him – just a little, haha. At first, I didn’t really like it, especially how I rushed to style it at Katsucon (*shakes fist at hairspray*). But I realized if I don’t try to keep it in one place and fluff the bangs out a little, it looks much, much better and I have grown to like it a lot. I tried to get the little short hairs correct that she has between her temples and the point of her bangs, which is what drove me nuts and what I didn’t like once I was finished cutting it. I was going crazy the night before the con, I tell you. XD But looking at the later pictures we took, I really like it and will use this wig for all future Jaryn costuming — yayyyyy don’t have to redo that part! But onto the other parts I do want to fix!

The shorts and shoes were both purchased pieces (THANKS EBAY!) while the shirt and jacket I made myself. I had no prior experience sewing vinyl OR making a whole jacket, so there was that with three weeks before the convention. But we’ll get to the jacket in a bit – first, the shirt!

I had a pattern for a turtleneck that I used to make the shirt and I didn’t attach sleeves to it. I knew I would be in that jacket all day anyways and I knew the vinyl would get pretty hot so I just left them off and hemmed the armholes. The fabric I used was spandex and polyester and was a little lighter in color than I wanted it to be. The polyester dye I purchased to make it darker wouldn’t work (and I realized this after I bought it) because the heat of the water I would have to use for the dye to work would make the little plastic sequin things melt off. So I left the fabric the color it came as and it grew on me later. Once I sewed the shirt pieces all together I did all the cutouts. It wasn’t until I looked at the whole shirt when I was trying it on that I thought the cutouts I made were too big. This is something I want to fix when I remake the shirt. I was thinking about doing something to the inside edges of the cutouts as well (hemming, adding trim, something) – but luckily the fabric didn’t fray and I just ended up leaving them the way they were – even if they were too big!

The jacket, much like Nate’s Kerith vest, was my big hurdle. Like I said, I had never sewn with straight-up vinyl and had never made a jacket, so the whole thing was daunting to me! I cut all the pieces for the jacket out (as well as the purple jacket lining) and pinned some of them together (getting help pinning some other parts of it from bethiichan – who has made many amazing jackets :3) and then pretty much just went for it. I didn’t use any interfacing where the pattern told me to since all the pieces were vinyl. I kind of had to fudge the sleeves since the pattern had them ruffled/gathered at the top. I stared at it for a while and ending up just shoving the sleeves farther into the armholes before sewing them (I cut the pattern out bigger than I needed it) – it actually worked out, very much to my surprise and was definitely a relief! The lining is only sewn into the jacket at parts since the jacket was way too long before I hemmed it. I ended up cutting both the jacket and lining shorter while they were on my dress form, hemmed the bottoms of both separately and then sewing them together at a few places in the middle.

The crappy thing with the vinyl was that I couldn’t sew on it. I knew I didn’t have time to do all the tricks and magic stuff to help sew with vinyl and get it through the feeders on the machine (tissue paper, etc.) so a lot of the stuff I wanted to do to the jacket like add more of the white trim just never happened. I hot glued most of the white trim on (except for the edges on the front) and the thinner white details are fabric paint, which actually worked really well. I also made the belt for the jacket but didn’t have time to actually attach it. Since I couldn’t sew through it because of the vinyl surface and hot glue didn’t work very well for vinyl to vinyl, I ended up having to go without it for most of the time we wore the costumes. I also wanted to take the jacket in some so it wasn’t as baggy on me. But for being my first jacket and my first adventure of sewing with vinyl, I was very proud of myself. Woo!

Although, I do want to remake the jacket and as much as Jaryn’s jacket looks leather or vinyl in the game, I might try to find something that’s not vinyl but is still shiny and kind of has the appearance of it. That way I’ll be able to do all the detailing work that I want to do on it easier than messing with vinyl. And I’ll be able to add the belt! XD

Overall, we were very proud of these – especially with the timeframe we had. We love the Glitterati way too much and we were so happy to show that at Katsucon. Our favorite moment was the girl that asked us if she could get a photo of the Glitterati doing the clapping pose to show her friend because her friend would “totally pee her pants” – we laughed so hard at that.

Currently, we’re working on the Glitterati’s crew outfits and since we love them so much, we also might be making an original design Glitterati costume as well (you know how we love to do that all the time with characters, hehe)! So look for those soon as well as another Dance Central costume set which should be done very soon! ;D