Adventures In Costuming Part 1: The Boots

So for the last 7 days or so I’ve been more or less rushing to put a costume together for WonderCon this weekend. Why a costume you ask? Well as much as I chortle at certain “cosplay” pictures I have seen far more well done costumes that simply make me agape and impressed. Also, through a very random set of occurrences over the last few years (but isn’t this always how it goes) I’ve acquired a few friends that are pretty stellar at making costumes. So being on my constant quest to improve and gather new skills and refine old ones I decided to give it a try.
After spending 2 days trying to source a decent base garment in pretty much every surplus store in Los Angeles I finally found one, however the other “major” part of this piece was white almost knee height boots. Not surprisingly pretty hard to find a pair of these let alone a set my size. So after spending the better part of yet another day gathering some other odds and ends I went into Halloween Town, my local year ‘round Halloween shop and picked a pair of black captain costume boots. Halloween Town seems to carry a nice assortment of your average off the rack Halloween costumes and then a handful of one-off accessories like these boots.

I picked up some of DupliColor vinyl and fabric paint at Pep-Boys truly crossing my fingers that it would work and fortunately it actually worked quite well (on the boots at least). Now obviously for the price of these boots they’re not leather, not even close although they are extremely and strangely comfy. I’m guessing they’re vinyl and the paint worked fairly well, however after trying the paint on other genuine leather belts it didn’t work well at all, so take that as a note. Spending an hour taping up the soles of the boots was a bit of an arduous process but watching Golgo 13 on Netflix at the same time helped. Amateur tip, painters tape that you find in every hardware store really isn’t made to fit in all the smallish curves of say, a boot, so the two work-arounds are using dozens of about 1” length pieces and really making sure you mask off every nook of the parts you don’t want to paint, or getting the super expensive tape used for masking intricate airbrush art. I went with option A cause I’m cheap and had the time. It worked well enough just a few drips getting through the seams in the tape pieces. Also the paint wouldn’t color the stitching in the boot so it remains black but I actually kind of like the look. Anywho, enough about the boots. Tomorrow I’ll try to make another post about the suit itself as well as my re-introduction into sewing and becoming reacquainted with a seam-ripper.

1 year ago  /  1 note