Don't eat me!

Well, with all of the Fire Emblem stuff I've been doing lately, I thought it'd be a great time to show off my newest costume in my repertoire! It's not quite finished and it hasn't been debuted yet, but I have lots of progress pics and it'll be done soon!

I'm a bit sad to say that it's an Awakening costume. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Awakening, but it's not my favorite of the series. I do love that it brought so many new fans to this wonderful series. I also like a lot of the new features, including the ability to play on casual or classic mode. I think that was a big help for people new to the series. Also, infinite supports is a beautiful thing, and it totally made sense to change the way support bonuses worked as a result. If everyone has crazy bonuses for everyone nearby that'd be a bit cray. I'm a bit torn about the pair-up system. I like the fact that it makes more sense than the rescue system (Katie Tiedrich makes fun of it best), and it's aweseome that you can get extra attacks and knock people out of the way. The only trouble is, I only ever end up using half my team and as such my healers are waaaaaaay underleveled. Thankfully there's all of the side missions and such that let me catch up on experience, though you all already know how I feel about the non-linear ones but that's beside the point. Which brings me to the last bit: reclassing. That bit is the one thing that drives me nuts. I will admit, it's nice to be able to reclass my favorite characters so I can diversify my army and still use the units I want, but I also like that most characters are so closely tied and associated with their class and as such it feels kinda wrong to change them on a personal level. And things don't make sense quite often when you change certain classes. Like anything involving Cherche/Gerome in which they are no longer riding a wyvern and they're still constantly talking about Minerva. That's just silly.

But I've digressed for long enough, because I really don't have any serious problems with the game, and I'd actually like to continue playing my more recent playthrough with my female avatar so I can marry Yarne and have bunny babies!

Which is a great segway to my new cosplay, it's that very bunny baby o' mine: Yarne!

First off, Naga bless the Fire Emblem team for having such wonderful concept art that has all of his bits and pieces easily visible and detailed such that I can figure everything out! This is the hardest job for a cosplay with a lot of detail because finding good artwork or sctreenshots from different angles is a pain and playing through the whole freaking game to get little glimpses and try to either photograph them or sketch them is a painful undertaking.

So, on to planning! I spent a lot of time considering what I wanted to make Yarne's armor out of, as he's a more agile character so it didn't really make a ton of sense to have it be legit armor, like plate mail or anything, and as such I didn't want to use methods to duplicate that when it's not the idea I was going for anyway. Usually for heavy armor I'd be using craft foam, but for Yarne it seemed more like a leather armor-type deal so I decided to go with vinyl (cause finding or dying leather that shade of blue was going to be a royal pain in my ass). Thankfully I found some navy blue vinyl at Joann's (and had a nice coupon to use on it) and bought a few yards to play with. Drafting the patterns for all of the little individual pieces in Yarne's chest armor was interesting, because they all overlap in rather odd ways. I ended up having to do several sketches to conceptualize everything properly, but ultimately I got all of the pieces drafted out.

As you probably noticed, some of the pattern pieces look like they're made from old shirt... cause they are. I took a shirt I bought at the thrift store and put it on my dressform, then drew out the pattern for a couple of the main pieces so I could get the sizing and placement right . The rest I made on dust paper, which is my usual go-to for drafting my patterns.

Once all of the pattern pieces were done, I sketchedthem out on the back of my vinyl and cut everything out. I was a bit concerned with how the back of the vinyl would feel against my skin so I also got midnight blue flannel to line the back of each piece. I stitched around the outside, flipped the pieces, then ran a topstitch all the way around each shape to keep them flat (since you can't really iron vinyl flat).

That was the simple part. Now comes all of the beautiful detailing on the armor, which in retrospect I should have done on the vinyl pieces before I attached the flannel to the back so I could machine applique them on... but I didn't. Instead I took the silver satin and fused interfacing onto the back, sketched out the pattern, ran a tight zig-zag stitch along the outside of each shape, then cut them out. I used clear nail polish around the edge of each one to keep the satin from fraying and then hand-stitched each piece to the vinyl. This was the most time-consuming thing I think I've ever done. And also incredibly dull, and painful on my fingers cause sewing through vinyl is not easy. But alas, the things we do for cosplay. Unfortunately I don't have any photos of the detail pieces before they were attached, so here's a picture of all of the pieces put together!

The little shoulder rings actually have compressed paperboard in them (cereal boxes ftw!) to keep them nice and rigid. That pretty much just  leaves his furry bits, which were all retty simple to put together and everything attaches to itself with velcro so it's nice and simple.

Sorry for the blurry photo, I'm not a very good photographer

And that's Yarne! I do have a few small things left to do for him, mainly styling his wig (which I am not looking forward to) and making the little pouches he wears on his butt. I love characters that have pouches cause then i actually have someplace to carry things!

I'll be wearing him for the first time at Colossalcon, which is in just under two weeks! I'm super excited about it and I can't wait to go! I'll be sure to have photos up after I'm back of our dear bunny in his natural habitat XD

Thanks for tuning in, folks, and I hope everyone is enjoying their Memorial Day!