Solas - Dragon Age Inquisition

 Commission of Solas, everyone's favorite lying hobo apostate elf. Sweater, undershirt, pants, belt, and shoes were included. The sweater is made of linen/acrylic blend 4x2 rib knit in a natural marled linen color with 1x1 rib collar. The undershirt is olive knit with basically an attached faux suede dickie. It zips up the back. (Very stylish.)

The collar fabric came from the same manufacturer as the sweater fabric so it matches perfectly, but it was very (very) thick. The collar is lined in the 4x2 because self lining it would have been too bulky. I also extended the brown faux leather trim to just below the seam rather than stopping right at the seam so I could get the rivet in. I went through a number of drafts and tweaks of that collar shape and I'm happy with what I ended up with, but it took me a little while to get there. Knit is not the most cooperative fabric when it comes to trying to shape it like this. I tested out various angles of rise and height, interfacing/internal structure...

The seam around the collar and around the cuffs is accented with a hand stitch, and the brown trim is one piece, no seams. Water soluble basting tape (both to turn under the edges and to hold it in place for sewing) was indispensable for this.

The pants are a linen blend, pieced and accented with a hand stitch and faux leather lacing. Not sure what's up with all those seams, but that is how they're designed.

I purchased an extra long belt on etsy and stitched on the accents by hand. They're the washers from black grommets.

The shoes are made from sueded knit backed with cotton rib knit to add dimension (the suede knit is thin, and backing it made it look a little more like woven straps) and self-lined in knit. They pull on like socks and have some elastic built into the lining to help them stay up. I attached a 6 mm shoe sole so they can be worn outside or on concrete. The toeless style is not the most comfortable shoe design ever, but sanding down the front of the sole made them a little easier to walk in and stand on.

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.