Well, took me a while to come around to writing this post.
I’ll try to be brief: I wasn’t very satisfied with the NMN version of the robe. However, about a month later, our club (Amulet D20) had a thematic evening, which has seen some adjustments:
- I decided very early on that the shoulder spikes would be too much of a cancer to do, so I replacement with a shoulder pad with black feather outline. I didn’t manage to finish that by NMN. I decided to finish that by the thematic evening.
- The Trim post said that I replaced glue with proper seams. I lied. That wasn’t done at the time, but was surely done for that thematic evening.
You may have also noticed that the introductory post promised a chapter on props and cooling. Unfortunately, there was a mad lack of time to do any props, so there aren’t any at the moment.
With that out of the way, here’s the result:
And here’s the theory for comparison:
… yeah. It’s not the best. The photo itself is not really the best (I have a severe lack of images with me actually wearing this) — especiall with the fucky wucky going on on the layer three.
It’s not the only thing — turns out that I took a big L on fabric choice. The upper layer — while smooth — gets wrinkled waaay to quickly. No amount of ironing is enough to fix that for more than a few minutes. However, I’ve gotten some pretty enthusiastic compliments from some of the cosplayers who were attending the thematic evening, who seemed to be way more excited about the end result than I was, so I guess I could count that as a win.
Lessons learned
- Fabric glue is kinda shit
- Despite that, I should have gotten the glue sooner and glued the fabrics together before trying to pin out patterns and sew things together. Could have saved me from at least some wrinkling
- The gold paint I used works reasonably well on coarse fabric, but kinda sucks on smooth fabric
- I should have probably gone with a single layer of wool. Wouldn’t be as smooth, but it would be cheaper (probably, because one layer — unless wool costs two times as much per meter as the average of my fabric selection) and wouldn’t wrinkle as much, probably.
Costs
180-200€. Fabric was 150ish, bottles were 30ish, and there could be some things I forgot to account for.
In the time department, I estimate about three, maybe up to four weeks of work (8 hours/day), which were dispersed across several months. I elected against plugging my hourly wage into that equation.
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