Construction Details:

TOPSTITCHING. TOPSTITCHING EVERYWHERE.
This costume rekindled my hatred of polyester gabardine. I thought it would have a good weight and feel to it, hang without being too heavy, that sort of thing, and to top it off I got 2 yards of it ultra-cheap due to some marking I was able to easily wash out; and I must just be misremembering how much I hated working with it. No, no. Despite a walking foot, despite meticulous pressing and steaming, cleverly-placed interfacing and even strategic hand-sewing, it was a huge aggravation of unpredictability and noncooperation. I also didn't take into account the amount of structure that a suit jacket has in it...there were at least 5 types of interfacing in there (I even went on a wild goose chase for horsehair canvas), sleeve head padding (roped shoulder) and even though I was trying to avoid it, shoulder pads. Small, thin ones though. At least. So many little adjustments and constant fiddling and tedious steps and re-dos.

But yeah, anyway, all of that contributed to taking way longer than I thought. Also, doing decorative topstitching along curved edges with a walking foot is kind of a pain, so I think I'll probably redo some of the edges if they continue to nag at me. Maybe try a roller foot with as little presser foot pressure as possible. It also didn't help that my favorite buttonholer didn't have a setting for the right size buttonholes on the sleeves (they are kind of an odd size, yes) which caused me to try 4 different model buttonholer attachments (don't ask why I have so many, it's a long story) with very limited success.

Plus, there were just all these annoying little details I kept catching, like having black topstitching along all of the major seams, and having one random red buttonhole. Thank goodness for HD images though, otherwise I would have been kinda pissed to find out later.

Since I had a hard time finding white dress shoes with black soles, settled for beige soles and then painted on black leather edge-coat which worked amazingly well as far as going on easy and staying on without any kind of scuffing or flaking, even on the sole....imagine that, since I was using it for something close to its intended purpose (it's meant for the edges of belts and other places where you don't want a "raw" leather edge)...and since I later realized I forgot to do his dumb little black toe-tip I will probably go back and do that as well...maybe.

Wig was pretty much ready to go, got it from my secret canadian back-alley wig seller (Mekou on here and coscom, but really I just seem to like to buy her old wigs :P), might go in and thin out a little bit of the front/top but otherwise was a good length. It has a little bit of a reddish undertone to it which I wasn't expecting, but it only seems to show up under certain light. Overall I really like the color tho, it's a neat shade of purple. I had originally gotten a purple-black mix off eBay, but it turned out to be black with big, random, irregularly placed chunks of purple. Needless to say, that didn't work out so well.

Personal Thoughts:

So yeah, good old G-cubed. When we were discussing a Scott Pilgrim group for Katsu last year, I knew I was in. While I didn't care for Jason Schwartzman as Gideon (too flaily and screechy, imo...while gideon does get all fired up and obnoxious in the battling at the end of the graphic novel he's still more composed and less overall dorky), I did like his snazzy blazer, though. So, this costume is kind of a hybrid of the movie and GN/video game costume. Hence the purple hair. While his hair isn't ever shown in color in the comic, I had always seen it as black, not mousy brown, and then when I saw it colored in the video game I thought that seemed "right". Also, I liked how he had the super-squared-off glasses in them, where they just gave him slightly large standard-shaped glasses in the movie. Moved the pin from the tie to the lapel, etc. Overall there is a lot shared between the three, so I tried to bring it all together. I guess if anything, it looks the most like what he wears in the video game sprite.

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