Adventures in Cosplay: Teen Titans

My first project for ECCC 2015 was Robin's costume. I'm making this outfit for my sister (yay crossplay!). In my design, I tried to keep the visual integrity of Robin's Teen Titans outfit, while incorporating interesting detail from other Robin designs.

This was the first costume I had every made without having the recipient around to try it on, but luckily we're twins so I tried it on myself. :D

I started with two faux leather jackets I bought from Goodwill (for more money than I would have liked to spend...) My sister was quite insistent that we go with muted reds and greens (rather than the traditional bright Christmas colors) so when I found a sage green jacket and a mahogany red jacket, I had to have them.

These are not them. I didn't take pictures.... but they're close!

I cut the sleeves off the red jacket, and cut the side panels out as well. Luckily, I found that the back side of the fabric was a nice lighter red suede, perfect for accents.

I decided to go for a scalemail look on the sides, so I spent forever cutting out individual scales from the sleeve fabric.

WHHHHHYYYYY

I also really liked how they emulated feathers. Bird imagery became kind of a big thing with this costume....

With contrasting fabrics, I could create a pattern with my scales. I learned from The FTM's Complete Illustrated Guide to Looking Like a Dude that diagonal lines hide curves, so I settled on chevrons, a pattern which I wanted to repeat later on the pants.

I grabbed a bag of red pyramid studs from the fabric store on a whim, so I put one on to see what it looked like if I used it to tack down the scales...

Looks so cool, I think I'll....

...go crazy and put them everywhere!

(At this point I got a camera that wasn't on my phone...)

I stitched the sides back into the jacket, and used some super shiny red pleather scraps to make trim.

Sewing trim down.

With the finished trim!

I cut the sleeves off of my green jacket, so I could use the wrist section for sleeves. (There was a cool zipper I wanted to keep). They were too small for my biceps, so made contrasting inserts by painting some of the green with dark green leather paint. (I used Leather Studio acrylic).

Some more scraps were used to make the piping.

Then I sewed in the sleeves...

I decided to make Robin's weird yellow stripes into actually functional straps with buckles. I used gold tone webbing and finished the ends with gold pleather from a cheap thrift store skirt (that will become the utility belt later...)