Journey into Construction

I have previously posted about designing an outfit that would fit in with the Asgardian culture of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This is how I made it.

The pattern for my Asgardian outfit is based on McCall’s 3129 for the body. The grey swathes were draped. I hemmed them by hand and then sewed them to the body by hand because I didn’t think machine sewing would look nice or allow me the control I wanted over placement.

The back swathes are trimmed with gold faux leather. As well as being decorative this weights the swathes so they move nicely.

Because the faux leather doesn’t heal pinholes the way fabric does, I held it in place for sewing with bobby pins.

What I hadn’t thought of in my design (because drawn fabric will sit however you want it to) was how to make the front swathes fitting. At first I tried darts and, while they worked on the muslin, the real thing didn’t take them so well. It turned out a pleat worked just fine.

The swathes are sewn into the side and shoulder seams but not the sleevehole because I wanted to have a layered effect as is often found in Asgardian clothes.

I copied the construction of my hood from Sif’s in Thor and it turned out to be much simpler than other hoods I have made before. You start with a rectangle and put in two pleats at the centre back.

To put the outfit on, the two front swathes unzip at the side seams.

I had trouble finding the zips for this outfit because I needed jacket zips with metal teeth, with the slide the same colour as the teeth, and the colour had to look gold. Turns out zips with gold teeth but a silver slide are a thing?? Eventually I found some that were the way I wanted. They only came in various lengths of Way Too Long but that was alright because I could cut them to length and I needed enough to make trim as well.

The sleeves are attached to the outfit by functional zips. The zip ends overlap at the back.

The shape of the sleeve was largely determined by how they zip fitted in the armhole, which actually took a lot of hassle out of trying to make the sleeve pattern fit just so.

To make the patchwork sections of the sleeve, I stitched together the design I wanted into a rectangle and then cut out the shape I wanted for the lower part of the sleeve.

I sewed the upper and lower sections together and put the zip trim over the top.

The vambraces have a strip of black stretch fabric on the inside instead of a closure. This makes them easy to get on and off, and even though it looks a bit weird bit to me, it is not inconsistent with Asgardian styles.

Photos of the finished outfit are here.





Movie images belong to Marvel Studios.

For Asgard!

One of my favourite things about the Marvel movies is the costume design for Asgardian culture. They are a bit traditional fantasy and a bit sci-fi and, while each character has their own look, they also have a consistency between them so they look like they come from the same culture.

I wanted to see if I could design an outfit that would fit into that culture. I did have to make one allowance for the limitations of Midgard: zips. Asgardian clothing tends to appear and disappear by magic (and movies have their own brand of costuming magic). I don’t think zips are too out of place on Asgardian clothing as they don’t have the same technological limitation that most medieval-fantasy cultures have and they use trim that looks like zipper teeth tracks.

I had been very taken with Sif’s coat, which is onscreen for maybe three minutes of the first Thor movie, so my design was primarily inspired by that. Or rather mostly inspired by the general impression of that, because I have had no end of difficulty finding decent images of it.

 This was the start of my design (back view):

The angle of the underlayer came from the back of Loki’s coat from The Avengers. I played around with having decorative seams but decided it would be too hidden and so not worth the trouble.

The gold bands on the bottom of the grey swathes on my outfit are also an idea borrowed from Loki’s coat.

Another aspect I took from Sif’s coat was having a split at the back of the hood for a ponytail. (You kind of can't see it in the picture but it's there...)

I had more difficulty designing the front of my outfit. I eventually decided on taking inspiration from Odin’s outfit. The overlapping, angled layers matched the back of my outfit and are a common feature of Asgardian clothing.

I kept having to pause my progress on this outfit while I waited to come up with a design that felt right. It was annoying to be unable to do anything but when the inspiration struck I was always glad I had waited for it.

I had thought the front design went through a lot of iterations but then I got to the sleeves. I knew I wanted my sleeves to be detachable, like Thor’s, but that was it. I tried designs that were plain, fancy, layered and curvilinear (like Sif’s), patchwork (like Loki’s) and crossover (like the rest of my outfit).

I settled on patchwork but decided to err on the side of simplicity.

I chose the one in the bottom right which takes some of the elements from Loki’s Avengers outfit.

I did the stripe design in powerpoint.

The last things I designed were the vambraces.

I started by drawing them on paper but then I realised that, by using layers in Gimp, I could try out designs by placing them on a photo of the in-progress outfit.

It’s just like playing paper dolls.

I ended up choosing a design that was based on the braces worn by young Thor at the start of his first movie. I don’t have a better picture of them because he never has his hands still.

Choosing a colour scheme was also a difficult part of this design.

When I envisioned it in my head my outfit was mauve and grey but something I’ve learnt about myself is that I am much more comfortable in dark-coloured clothes. So if I wanted to ever actually wear this it had to be dark (which has the unintended side effect of making me look evil).

I went to spotlight with no particular colours in mind and found an appropriate type of fabric I wanted (suiting) – and then I had to choose from the colours available. So I took a photo and went home to test combinations in Gimp.

Sequels coming soon: Construction, Photos



Movie images belong to Marvel Studios.