Making A Scholar's Cosplay PT 1: Scholar's Hat and Medals [EDITED]

Alvic Libretto of Excalibur aka Libra Fitzkhione Photo © LINK

EDIT: 3/2/17 - I created the costume pictured above for someone I was dating who attended the Las Vegas FFXIV Fan Fest in 2014. We are longer together, but since I am proud of the work I did, here is how I made a few of the costume pieces. Sadly, due to personal reasons, I never finished uploading the rest of the steps for the costume tutorial. 

I've mentioned this before, but my ex-boyfriend attended the FFXIV Realm Reborn Fan Fest in Vegas in October, and although I did not attend with him, I created his cosplay for the event. He entered the costume contest (which was pretty awesome) but he did not end up placing.

I figured I'd post a bit about the costume and the costume making process I went through. So today I have a few photos of the medals on the coat and the scholar's cap.

The cap was made with:

• Foamcore (to add stiffness to the top of the hat)
• Stretch pleather from Jo Ann Fabrics 
• Really thick sewable interfacing  
• Eyehooks
• Polyfill stuffing 
• Hot glue (cosplay's best friend) 
• Acrylic Paint
• Eyeshadow (in silvers and blacks)
• Triple Thick spray on Glaze
• Polymer clay for the "metal" decoration at the top of the cap and the "metal" for the tassel
• LOTS of hand stitching with black thread

The hat took a LOT of trial and error, because in game, this thing is HUGE. I mean Final Fantasy proportions are pretty unrealistic as it is, but making this hat in real life was driving me nuts. It was the first thing I started, and one of the last pieces I finished for the costume.

I started by making a pattern for the upper portion. The hat is pretty big, so I made several modifications to the over all size to make it look like the one in the game, but I ended up trimming that down a bit in order to make it more wearable. I went with the pattern above which was cut, and taped together after several trial and errors.

I used that pattern to cut the shape out of foamcore, and then we used clamps, pleather, and hot glue to stretch a sheet of pleather over the top of the foam core piece and wrap it around the edges. This created a nice base for the top of the hat. (Sorry I don't have more photos of the process.)

Next was the part that actually wraps around the head. My first prototype worked well enough on it's own, but when I attached it to the pillowy top part, it was way too short! I had to scrap that pattern and start all over on the base making it even longer. Thankfully this was the easiest part of the hat. I was able to cut this pattern out of interfacing and pleather and sew it on my machine.

To create the pillow-y part underneath the brim, well, my ex hot glued some pleather on there to start, and I ended up hand-stitching all the way around the outer brim and the center, stuffing it with polyfill, trimming, and pleating as I went.

Hat worn by my lovely assistant, a can of sani-wipes from Aldi.

Afterwards I hand-stitched the band to the brim and voila! All that was left were the details. I need a better shot of them, but the details were made by hand with polymer clay. I baked them, painted them with metallic paint, and once they were dry I rubbed metallic eyeshadows on them to age them a bit and then sealed everything with spray on triple thick glaze. The tassel part was made with out little scraps of pleather from the rest of the hat.

It was a lot of work, but the hat ended up being my favorite part of the finished costume, and I'm really proud of it.

Although I don't have good shots of the hat's polymer details, I do have nice photos of the two medal badges from the jacket which were made using the same process.

These badges were made with: 

• Polymer clay
• Acrylic paints
• Metallic Eyeshadow (various colors)
• Triple Thick Glaze
• Scrap Fabric
• Metal (to make my own eyepins)
• A button (used like a stamp for the impression)

I handsculpted the two medals out of scrap polymer clay, and used a button from my button collection to get the crested impression in the bronze colored one. The clay was originally bright green, but before baking it, I coated each pendant with a thick dusting of metallic mineralized eyeshadow.

Once the baking process was done I covered the silver one with silver acrylic paint, and coated the bronze one with a layer of triple thick glaze and more eyeshadow. After a few layers of eyeshadow in various colors, I rubbed a bit of black acrylic paint on each one, and then gave everything a final coat of glaze.

The result was some pretty nice metallic medals, and they were really shiny.Sadly, the silver one (which was my favorite) was lost at the convention. I'll have to make a new one and iron the rest of the costume so I we can get some better photos, thankfully people at the con got some really nice shots.

The ribbon-parts of the badges were made with scraps of fabric and painted with acrylics to get the right coloring. I then hand sewed the polymer clay ornaments to the ribbon portion, and those pieces were Velcro'd onto the finished jacket. (Maybe if I took the time to hand sew them on the silver one wouldn't have fallen off, but we were out of time.)

That's all for now. I'll try and get more photos together and discuss the rest of the costume.

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