In the end, though, Holo did quite well! She won second place master craftsmanship in the masquerade. Winning an award at Anime Boston has long been on my bucket list. I am not quite sure what to do now! My cosplay competition drive is running on fumes right now, so I was thinking of trying to staff some cons this year instead. It seems like the next logical progression, I suppose!
Anyway, I'll go ahead and finish up my progress posts about Holo and we can finally put this thing to rest. It'll probably be some time before I get around to doing a Holo photoshoot, but considering how many TONS of photos I had taken this weekend, I am sure that plenty will crop up!
As ever, I am eternally grateful to Katie Bair for writing her amazing wig book, because it saved me here yet again. Most wolf ears I have seen looking nothing like the rest of the wig and are poorly blended, if at all. I wanted mine to look like they sprouted from my head rather than being separate pieces because...well, Holo's ears are a part of her body.
If you've ever looked at wolf ears, you'll notice that the fur differs in colours and lengths:
To that end, I devised a concoction of paper clay and three different types of faux fur.
Then I hot glued all that shit together.
A little Got 2b Glued later, et voila!
I had a little trouble with the flow of the hair once I had the ears sewn onto the wig. Specifically, it wanted to part near to the crown of the wig and go to either side of the ears, which created a few awful bald spots. On one side I manage to part the hair so that it wouldn't show the bald spot, but the other side took a bit of silicon glue to keep the hair in place. After all, though, my wig received a ton of compliments on how natural it looked!
I talked awhile back on Facebook about how much trouble I had finding faux fur in Holo's reddish brown colour. Well, I eventually did. On some sketchy ebay seller. Then it didn't arrive until like two weeks before the con. It was a good thing that the colour of the fur was indeed quite close to the wig or I would have been in panic mode.
So for the tail I took a fellow cosplayer's advice (seriously, you know who you are, and I am indebted to you!) and cut my tail with a curve.
The auburn fur is overlaid on top of the white fur with a jagged pattern.
Pre-stuffing, here is what I had:
Lots of furries recommended using a belt to attach the tail, but I decided against that in order to eliminate bulk underneath my corset. Instead I stitched two buttons on the inside of the corset and used buttonholes in the tail to attach it that way. It worked really well, actually.
Now, I did not document the corset because it truly wasn't that interesting. It was a regular corset pattern with spring steel boning. On it I did some bead embroidery in sort of a swirl pattern to mimic wind. One half of the corset has small pewter flowers, one has small copper spheres that look like little berries, as sort of a reference to Holo's status as goddess of the grain.
For my reticule/neck pouch, I managed to dredge enough scraps out of the red dupioni silk that I used for the bodice and skirt to at least make the upper part of the bag. I attached two tassels to its base and threaded the drawstring through eyelets. Those blue beads were a nightmare to get onto the drawstrings because I was stupid and decided to apply the aglets beforehand. Kinda oops.
At long last, here's what the final thing looked like!
Oh, and here's my trophy! Isn't it sparkley?
Again, I will make a Holo photo gallery just as soon as more Holo photos start cropping up.
Next up: Merida!
