Cosplay time! Cosplay time! Time to talk about Cosplay!

Well hello there!  It's that time of year again - Con Season!  Not that it isn't always Con Season because there are Cons all the time, big and small, and such . . . BUT I am now working on my cosplays hardcore, all day, err day!  So here is a an update on the one with the most progress.

I actually had to change my plans up because my close friends are pregnant (we were doing a group thing, but she said she won't be comfortable doing it any more because of the wee baby).  So I decided to cosplay she who is, arguably, one of my favorite characters of all time: Harley Quinn.  Now I love all of her costumes, but when I was a kid watching Batman The Animated Series for the first time . . . I just loved how whimsical she was.  Yes I know she is a homicidal maniac and loves a homicidal maniac and is just all around insane, but I found her antics so goofy.  With this in mind I decided I didn't want to do one of her more sexy outfits, but I didn't really feel like doing her harlequin jester outfit . . .  I had always wanted to do a hoodie for her, but, being inadequately skilled in fashion sketching, I could never get a full physical visualization of what I saw in my head.  This really annoyed me because as a cosplayer I come up with stuff in my head all the time, but for some odd reason I was just stuck with her.  After hunting around for a bit . . .

Source HERE.  And my sincerest admiration to the artist, Helen Chen.

This is almost exactly what I was seeing in my head.  Suspenders are amazing, the ears/horns on the hoodie are not outlandishly large or small, just a hint of sexy, the whimsy is there . . .   There are some minor adjustments to be made such as the mallet, the gloves, maybe a shirt underneath the hoodie, but . . . I'm just so happy.  So have some progress pics!

The pants!  I took two sets of jeans and ripped them to pieces.

So much thread!  Hand for scale.

The headpiece.  As you can see, it still needs to be attached and needs white on the ends.

Attempting to make a pattern for the neck frill (?) when this happened . . .  Kind of creepy . . .

Finally got that figured out :-)

Thus far!

The only thing I have really had a problem with at this point is the jeans.  I got them too big so I would have room to adjust the sizing, but I am having issue with the crotch area . . . It is not too long at all, but too baggy - it looks like I've got some random skin flap from my belly button down.  I attempted to fix that and it looks good, but there were some flaws in the fix that are bugging me.  Everything else seems to be going swimmingly . . .  Now for that mallet . . .