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Description
Terra Branford (Dissidia vers.):
Costume and styling by myself
Make up by *cescat
Photo credit:
Location: University of Western Australia, Perth
Also huge thank-yous to *AmenoKitarou for throwing my cloak around to get this shot, and *K-chan009 for lending me her Sheryl wig when the one I got for Terra was completely the wrong colour (it turned into my HnK Alice 8D).

And to all of our other helpers and photographers for this shoot! ~cwutieangel , *Risachantag . =valiantsTALE , *Tsubaki-chan , ~Hitomi-Leonheart and *AmenoKitarou . <3

Words are pretty useless at expressing how happy I am to finally be able to put some shots of this costume up onto my gallery! It's been over 6 months since I finished this costume, and was made in around 2 weeks along with my Pandora Hearts!Alice. These two costumes were also the first two that I completed on my new sewing machine, so there was a lot of weird learning experiences going on! I tell you, it's really hard to switch over to a new machine when I've been using an older one all my life. It was like everything went upside down. =__=;

I think I ended up spending over $70 on beads for this costume, with them coming from all different sources and materials: glass, amber, timber, bone, acrylic and a few others I can't remember. All of the fringe and trim in this costume was individually and pain-stackingly frayed by hand because I couldn't find any off the shelf fringe that was accurate enough for my liking. And I think there's also hardly any part of this costume that wasn't hand painted/custom dyed somewhere OTL; I'm pretty sure a large majority of the beads ended up all being painted too, so that they matched the ref.

And I'm about to go on about costume details...so this is the warning for TL;DR!

Drafting the pattern for the dress was quite different from what I'm usually used to as I hardly ever use straight darts, but had to as I wanted as few seams as possible to interrupt the flower detailing that I'd later have to do. This made it tricky to get the dress as tight fitting as I wanted, more so because I was using a non-stretch fabric. Which again, was a decision to minimise distortion of the flower patterns. Speaking of which! After re-sizing some references, I sketched the flowers onto the dress whilst it was on my dressform. An un-expected obstacle was having to put down a white base layer (which covered up my details of the flowers ;_; ) so that the colours would be able to be seen on top of the red material.

The armwarmers were a similar story to the dress. A bit tricky to balance them being as tight as possible whilst still being able to get them on and off. They've also got self-made gold trim to match the boots, and white that goes with the top of the dress (weird design is weird D. I also put some elastic loops on the end of them to go around my middle finger so that they sit flat on my hand.

One of the biggest (and most un-expected) obstacles of this costume was all of the material wraps around Terra's waist. I had planned to make a base to attatch them all to so they sat correctly - which is what I ended up doing - but it was surprisingly a lot more difficult than I'd first expected. Balancing how much fabric I was going to need for the wraps was really tricky, as after custom dying the pink and purple wraps, cutting too much of them off was the last thing I wanted to do. After a lot of angsting and yelling at Nomura, I sewed all of the waist-fabrics into one big piece, gathered it all at the right hip (where a gem supposedly 'holds' them altogether?) and worked from there in draping them around my dressform and tacking them into place like a crazy woman! Once they were all placed, I carefully trimmed excess off the back and put in some hook and eyes to close all of the wraps together. After they were finally in place, I then had to paint more patterns onto them, as well as patterns and trim on the random bits on her right hip - which were also specially dyed! OTL;

I think the cloaky cape-y thing was the first part of Terra that I started work on. I was really exciting to try gradient dying/painting for the first time...and I think it turned out pretty alright 8D; of course, I then had to go on to paint all of the weird flower-details at the bottom of the cape...I think this is also where I re-point out the hand frayed trim of her cape, I had such a huge pile of fuzzy material threads at the end of that! D: The cape's closure is a little lobster clasp at the neck that is hidden by the beads that were all painted to match one another, as well as the same dyes that I used on the cape. These were also used to dye the tassels on the left side of the cape (they have the same gradient! 83).

On a related note, the main part of Terra's hair ornament was made in the same wasy as the cloak - having the same gradient dye and hand fraying used. Though this time, the material was re-inforced with interfacing so that it'd stick up above the pony tail. Other little hair bits were made with craft foam and sewn into the wig.

The last thing that I finished, were her shoes...I have a bad habit of leaving footwear until last. n__n; They were originally a pair of black leather knee-high boots that were severely cut down, modified with super heavy interfacing and putty to have an insanely long and pointy toe, and then covered with matching details to the rest of the costume - as per reference.

WaiCon Smexy Dissidia Team
Won 'Best Group' at WaiCon Sunday, 2010.
vs.

Description
Terra Branford (Dissidia vers.):
Costume and styling by myself
Make up by *cescat
Photo credit:
Location: University of Western Australia, Perth
Also huge thank-yous to *AmenoKitarou for throwing my cloak around to get this shot, and *K-chan009 for lending me her Sheryl wig when the one I got for Terra was completely the wrong colour (it turned into my HnK Alice 8D).

And to all of our other helpers and photographers for this shoot! ~cwutieangel , *Risachantag . =valiantsTALE , *Tsubaki-chan , ~Hitomi-Leonheart and *AmenoKitarou . <3

Words are pretty useless at expressing how happy I am to finally be able to put some shots of this costume up onto my gallery! It's been over 6 months since I finished this costume, and was made in around 2 weeks along with my Pandora Hearts!Alice. These two costumes were also the first two that I completed on my new sewing machine, so there was a lot of weird learning experiences going on! I tell you, it's really hard to switch over to a new machine when I've been using an older one all my life. It was like everything went upside down. =__=;

I think I ended up spending over $70 on beads for this costume, with them coming from all different sources and materials: glass, amber, timber, bone, acrylic and a few others I can't remember. All of the fringe and trim in this costume was individually and pain-stackingly frayed by hand because I couldn't find any off the shelf fringe that was accurate enough for my liking. And I think there's also hardly any part of this costume that wasn't hand painted/custom dyed somewhere OTL; I'm pretty sure a large majority of the beads ended up all being painted too, so that they matched the ref.

And I'm about to go on about costume details...so this is the warning for TL;DR!

Drafting the pattern for the dress was quite different from what I'm usually used to as I hardly ever use straight darts, but had to as I wanted as few seams as possible to interrupt the flower detailing that I'd later have to do. This made it tricky to get the dress as tight fitting as I wanted, more so because I was using a non-stretch fabric. Which again, was a decision to minimise distortion of the flower patterns. Speaking of which! After re-sizing some references, I sketched the flowers onto the dress whilst it was on my dressform. An un-expected obstacle was having to put down a white base layer (which covered up my details of the flowers ;_; ) so that the colours would be able to be seen on top of the red material.

The armwarmers were a similar story to the dress. A bit tricky to balance them being as tight as possible whilst still being able to get them on and off. They've also got self-made gold trim to match the boots, and white that goes with the top of the dress (weird design is weird D. I also put some elastic loops on the end of them to go around my middle finger so that they sit flat on my hand.

One of the biggest (and most un-expected) obstacles of this costume was all of the material wraps around Terra's waist. I had planned to make a base to attatch them all to so they sat correctly - which is what I ended up doing - but it was surprisingly a lot more difficult than I'd first expected. Balancing how much fabric I was going to need for the wraps was really tricky, as after custom dying the pink and purple wraps, cutting too much of them off was the last thing I wanted to do. After a lot of angsting and yelling at Nomura, I sewed all of the waist-fabrics into one big piece, gathered it all at the right hip (where a gem supposedly 'holds' them altogether?) and worked from there in draping them around my dressform and tacking them into place like a crazy woman! Once they were all placed, I carefully trimmed excess off the back and put in some hook and eyes to close all of the wraps together. After they were finally in place, I then had to paint more patterns onto them, as well as patterns and trim on the random bits on her right hip - which were also specially dyed! OTL;

I think the cloaky cape-y thing was the first part of Terra that I started work on. I was really exciting to try gradient dying/painting for the first time...and I think it turned out pretty alright 8D; of course, I then had to go on to paint all of the weird flower-details at the bottom of the cape...I think this is also where I re-point out the hand frayed trim of her cape, I had such a huge pile of fuzzy material threads at the end of that! D: The cape's closure is a little lobster clasp at the neck that is hidden by the beads that were all painted to match one another, as well as the same dyes that I used on the cape. These were also used to dye the tassels on the left side of the cape (they have the same gradient! 83).

On a related note, the main part of Terra's hair ornament was made in the same wasy as the cloak - having the same gradient dye and hand fraying used. Though this time, the material was re-inforced with interfacing so that it'd stick up above the pony tail. Other little hair bits were made with craft foam and sewn into the wig.

The last thing that I finished, were her shoes...I have a bad habit of leaving footwear until last. n__n; They were originally a pair of black leather knee-high boots that were severely cut down, modified with super heavy interfacing and putty to have an insanely long and pointy toe, and then covered with matching details to the rest of the costume - as per reference.

WaiCon Smexy Dissidia Team
Won 'Best Group' at WaiCon Sunday, 2010.
vs.