❄️🕯️Festive Plague Doctor and Nurse Cosplay🕯️❄️
So we've started on our Holiday Matsuri (HolMat) cosplay- which is going to be the Festive Plague Doctor and Nurse from Squishable
[Video ID - a overview of the tree skirt. It's a deep red velvet material with golden beads embroidered at the bottom in the shape of a flower and cross. The video sweeps across the embroidery and then flips to show the underside of the skirt which is a purply red cotton.
The text in the upper hand says "Found this gorgeous tree skirt at Goodwill- will I be using it as the base for my plague nurse cape? More likely than you think" and in the lower right hand corner there is a picture of the Festive Plague Nurse.]
I found this lovely tree skirt at Goodwill (yes I know, they're not great but you gotta use what you got) and I'm currently going thru transforming the small red flowers into snowflakes by replacing the red beads for those fun cracked snow marble look, the cheapy gemstone with the fun green stripe and (sloppily) adding more branches to make it look like a snowflake. I'm fairly pleased with the result so far but I'm having the worst time picking up the needle and thread to continue... 😭
We were playing around with different ideas on how to translate the puff balls into real life and we're having a hell of a time, so we grabbed some other pieces to hodge podge together to get a better idea of what we wanted. I doodled over with the correct color scheme/cut I'm more interested in making (cotehardie)
The mock up went well- but even here I can see where it's not as good of a fit as I wanted it to be (foreshadowing). So Snip moved forward to making the skirt. He did 7 panels instead of 8 because he didn't want to gather it 😂. I'm loving the drape and swoosh of the fabric- a wool blend that was in the discount bin at Joann!
Here is a mockup of the mask, idk how but Snip didn't realize the nose was so slender? So he had a hearty chuckle when we got them in and saw them in 3D (originally he wanted to make the mask similar to the golden guard up top).
Despite MULTIPLE try on attempts, the final sewn garment just didn't have enough give in the front. Remember before how I said I see where we went wrong? I don't think it was closing properly then (notice how he was holding the top as an old timey prospector?) And we hadn't noticed because when he was closing the mockup it had overlapped.
But this is why we try to find as similar as possible material for mockups as our final fabrics. We're going a different route for the top that Snip is much happier with! And hopefully we'll have the base dress done tonight. (Not excited to sew up 30 buttons for each garment 🥲)
Finally some cat tax. It's getting cold in Florida and they're loving to sleep on or near the tree skirt (which only makes it that much harder to keep beading 😅)