At a convention to 2017 I picked up a voucher for a photo shoot with professional photographers for next to nothing and wanted to have a cosplay to wear for it. I love cosplay, but I lack a lot of confidence to wear it and suffer from chronic procrastination in the build process. I hoped having a deadline might help me build something awesome. And you know what? It did!
Skyrim is my favourite game and I always play a mage, so I wanted to make a mage-y outfit. Of course, in game I wear armour not robes, but I’ve always thought the robes looked kinda cool. So I decided to try to make the Novice Mage Robes from the world of Skyrim. It feels appropriate being the first costume from Skyrim I’m making, but also I’m still a novice sewist and costumer, so novice robes are a nice place to start.
I spent a lot of time looking at pictures of the outfit in game, working out how I could best tackle this costume. It is pretty simple, but I wanted it to be right. There would be proper photos of this after all! I settled on three layers; tunic top, duster or a short cape, and robe. Once I worked out the layers, the fabric choices were clear. I wanted to stick to as natural fabric as I could because of the game setting, so it’s mostly made out of cotton and linen. The notable exception being the suede-y fabric of the duster, which is 100% plastic, but looks just right.
For the tunic, I relied heavily on the fabulous pattern book The Tunic Bible, plus some modifications to make the trim look like the game, and to adjust the fit. I’ve made this pattern a few times before, but this time the collar and placket was thinner than normal, and for some reason this made it much more frustrating and tricky! But eventually I managed to put in enough pins to make it work out!
The robe I just cut a triangle out of folded fabric, then cut little bits until it looked good. The trim was nice and easy too, I just cut the trim fabric in the same shape as the robe, then sewed it into place. But I couldn’t quite get the shoulder to sit right. Eventually I decided to sew pleats into the shoulder to hold them where they were meant to be in a relatively ordered way. The robe was held on by pins to either side of my hip and a long strip of fabric acting as a green belt and waist wrap. And the belt of course!
The last soft piece made of fabric for the costume was the duster. I ended up tracing a pattern from an existing cape and then shortening it. The collar has some stiffened interfacing in it to make it stand up. This was the very last thing I worked on and I thought it would be nice and easy. Turns out not so much. I made about five versions of this! The last one I finished about 5 minutes before leaving for the photo shoot, it has a lining in it because that made the sewing seem easier and I managed to put a burn in the collar at the very last minute while ironing it down. I’m not 100% happy with it, but I got it done! And it looked pretty good. Even the burn added a scruffy kind of authenticity to it.
I’m proud of the job I did on the pin though! I used craft foam covered in thermoplastic with a little bit of twisted thermoplastic for decoration. Then I sprayed it silver and washed it in black and it was done! It sat somewhat precariously under the weight of the fabric pulling it down, but it looked pretty decent!
The bag and bet were a problem. I wasn’t confident I could pull off leather work in the time available to me. Or at all without a lot of practice. So when I can’t make things, I outsource. Nathan’s Workshop did an absolutely fabulous job! Similarly with the pants. I had planned to make some loose brown pants out of homespun, but these ended up not looking very good. Instead, I used armour leggings from Wild Bangarang, who always have the best leggings.
I had my photo taken with Starshot Photography. And look at the fabulous results! I’m so glad I had this photo shoot and that it gave me a deadline for my cosplay. It seems I do work better under pressure after all.
I also built my Staff of Fireballs, which is a whole other blog post!