Sakura - Naruto The Last Movie

Commission for tunic top, belt, bag, arm and leg bands, and headband (not shown). Tunic top is made from cotton with 2% lycra for stretch.

Top has a side zipper and closes along the neck/chest opening with hooks and snaps. 

Belt and bag are made from heavy canvas. Belt has a fleece interlining for extra dimension and shaping, bag is made with ultra heavyweight interfacing to keep a nice rectangular shape. The canvas worked well for this, but it is so thick that I had to use pliers to pull the needle through when hand finishing the turning hole on the belt. 

The bag has an interior pocket, but it's probably too short for a larger cellphone. (Fits an iphone, though.) Not sure what it says about me that I look at this design and just think how much snack food you could have at all times while in this costume. So much snack food. So handy for conventions. There are no belt buckles or closures drawn in the art, so all closures are velcro.

Dragon Age skirt

I didn't make any costumes for GenCon this year (just too impractical when I spend the most of the con sitting at a table playing RPGs, plus my hotel room was 15 miles away from the convention center) but I did whip up a DA-themed poodle skirt because why not. I'm really artistically disinclined, so my mabari is blatantly ripped off Sanshee's plushie design. (Which is really cute; I have one that lives in my sewing room.) And I have no computer graphics skills whatsoever, so I actually drew it with a sharpie, took a photograph of it, posterized it, and colored it in Paint in order to digitize it into an embroidery file. I guess if it works, it works, but knowing how to make vector images in photoshop would probably make this process easier.

I'm still figuring out stabilizer and hooping, too. I've run some smaller embroidery designs and had good results but on this big design some of the black outline is not properly aligned. It's aligned in the digital file, so this is a hooping/stabilizer error. Since I made it for myself I didn't bother making a new one, but I need to practice this a bit and maybe experiment with different stabilizers.

I also took a crochet class at GenCon (they have an entire line of programming they call "spouse activities," which I find a bit amusing) and I am still pretty bad at crochet. Ribbon embroidery went notably better.