Resources for Leia and Padme costumes

 At Närcon this weekend I talked a lot to a person about Padmé and Leia costumes, and I realized that simply due to the fact that I was around while the Padmé costumes were being analyzed and before social media, I have a lot of information about them, since I followed the progress of my fellow costumers. Today there is a lot of info social media, but it's usually hard to sort through social media posts to find clear and structured information on the costumes. Thankfully though a lot of the early research was done on forums and websites that are still around, if you know where to look, and this post is my way of trying to gather them in one place. So yes, if you want to make one of these costumes, but especially Padmé's, then I really recommend taking the time to read up on old internet post and on forums that were made before the advent of everyone posting videos and short clips of what they are doing.

First of all if you want to make a Padmé or Leia costume, the best way to start is over at the rebellegion. The Rebel Legion standards are lists of required elements if you want to become a member of the Rebel Legion, even if you don't want to become a member those lists are clear instructions on what parts the costumes are made up of. The Rebel Legion also has a forum, where persons making their version of the costumes have posted and are posting their progess, so you can see how other people has tackled a specific costume. Those forums can be found here: Rebel Legion Royalty/Senatorial forums

The most comprehensive website out there for Padmé, and Leia and generic jedi costumes, is Padawan's guide. Maggie, who ran the site, did and amazing job of collecting all available info on the costumes, and it is split between reference images, fanmakes and construcions tips for each costume. She basically summed up all the research that was done and made sure it was available in one place. That it is still alive, even if it hasn't been updated in many years, is a great gift from Maggie to all Star Wars costumers out there today.

A lot of what Maggie posted were summaries on what was discussed on the Jedi Council forums' Costuming and Props board. Back in the early 2000s this was the place where all Padmé costumers gathered and discussed their costumes, and posted their progress. All the Padmé Amidala costumes have their own tag in the forum - so that can be found here. Most of the threads are locked nowadays due to having been inactive for too long, but they are still there and are fill with information. Leia's costumes can be found here.

One costume that I get asked about is the iconic red gown from Episode one, also know among costumers as the "red invasion" costume. Back when blogs were a big thing on the internet Naergi from Germany did an extensive analysis, and the best recreation of the gown I have seen. If you are interested in doing that costume, you need to read her blog post. She also has other Star Wars costumes on her blog, so can be worth looking into for other characters as well. 

With this piece of internet archaeology I hope I can help some people who wants to make their own Padmé Amidala costume, and don't know where to start. Compared to Leia's costumes, that were basically made for a low budget film, all of Padmé's costumes are complicated, either in cut and construction or in materials, or in both so making one will always involve a lot of work and usually quite a lot of money as well. 

May the 4th on TV

Last Sunday it was of course May the Fourth, and I hadn't planned to do anything more than watch the latest episodes of Andor. But when Swedish garrison was asked if we could be on TV4 Nyhetsmorgon, basically the biggest morning show on national TV, and I was asked to take care of the talking of course I said yes, I was going to be in Stockholm over the weekend anyway. I chose to go as a pilot, since that is the most iconic costume that I have, except for Princess Leia.

It was fun wearing the pilot again, for the first time in several years. I even brought my best boots, the East German military boots that are both too big in the foot and to small around the calves so I can't walk or march in them, but they look the best when standing or sitting.

They had quite a nice backdrop and even smoke in the studio. I got to talk about Star Wars day the costuming clubs and the charity work that we do.

I was talking and the other troopers looked cool. It was a fun thing to do on a Sunday morning. I

Female tusken photos

 So as usual it was so much fun finally being able to try your new costume for the first time. The weather was lovely, so I brought my husband and decided to go to work for some photos.

It was fairly easy to get into the full costume, even if it of course helped to have someone help you with things like holding the gloves and wraps, since those are put on after the mask when your vision is quite impaired.

After the more formal photos it was time to have some fun with my tusken baby

Taking the costume out for a spin, before it's time to actually wear it to an event is good. For this I learnt that it's quite light and comfy, and I feel more mobile than in my old costume. A bad thing though is that when I lift my arms the bodice of the undergown shows, that's in another fabric than the skirt. I need to fix that someone, but since the skirt is quite long it will probably not be a problem to shorten the bodice quite a lot and raise ths skirt. I also need to do something about the sash and belt that keeps the bag on, I need to combine them into one piece so that the bag belt is always hidden under the sash. The final thing I need to fix is the bump on the back of the skull, I still ned to take in the top part of the hood to make it lie more smootly against the head.

And a final thank you kiss to my husband, who hasn't even seen all Star Wars film, but was nice enough to come with me as a photographer.

The female tusken gown

 I realised that I had never posted about the gown that I will wear as the base layer for the female tusken.

I sewed it up in the summer, because me and my friends were planning a dye day.

It was a day when we had access to our combined large pots, an outside kitchen and a garden with both garden hoses for water and a place to hang the fabrics to dry.

I had problems finding a good dye. The fabric in the dress is raw silk and viscose, while the shawl is polyester. I also didn't want to dye them brown, just sand coloured. In the end I used a dye that was called "caramel" and it didn't really dye as dark as I wanted it to. The photo above shows the fabric for the shawl and the gown when they were still wet.

And this shows the fabrics when they were dryed. It's also very clear how different the fibres take on the dye, with the viscose taking on the most and the polyester the least. That was also why I needed to make a really strong dye bath for the shawl to darken it a bit more.

The fabric for the skirt and sleeves is a gorgeous, slubby raw silk, or silk noile. I only had a limited amount of it, that's why I made the bodice out of viscose, since that won't be visible anyway. For the tusken you can opt for short or long sleeves. For my old tusken I had rather short sleeves, but it was always hard to make sure that the arm wraps stayed up well enough to leave no gaps between the sleeves and the wraps, so this time I went for longer sleeves. 

Reusing my old parts for the female tusken

 With a new shawl, new gown and new mask and bracelets it was time to go up to my storage and retrieve the parts from the old tusken to see what I could use.

I found a plastic box with quite a lot of stuff in it, both for my jawa and tusken. Except for the old shawl and hood, jawa scraps and fabric strips I found quite a lot of things that I can reuse.

The armwraps and gloves. The armwraps are sewn on to a loose sleeve of stretch fabric, so I can just pull them on and don't need to rewrap them every time.

A gauze sash and a long strip of fabric to use for holding up the bag.

My old boots. Strips of fabric wrapped and glued to a leather boot. I think the extra strips of fabric that I had in the box are in case I wear these out.

The bag was actually not from the old tusken, instead this was the first piece that I remade when I wanted to redo the tusken, so still more than 10 years ago. It is still the most complicated leather work that I have done, and back then I thought I would like to learn leather work, so I also found a pair of leather scissors and some other leather tools. The bag lacked the tusk decoration, so I made one out of foam clay and added it on to the bag.

I also had kept my tusken baby waiting to finally get a day out.

The final things that I will keep are these shoe covers. I made them for a journey to a Celebration in Orlando, I'm thinking it must have been 2012. I didn't want to pack my whole boots, so I made shoe covers that I can use over any shoe when I need to be mindful on how much I can pack while travelling to an event.

And with all these old parts down from the attic I felt that it was time to get it all on and take new approval photos for the 501st and Rebel Legion

Tusken female shawl take two

 When I just want to finish something, then I'm bad with documenting what I do so I just rushed this process on to get the shawl finished.

For my take two I gave up on working with tucks. Instead I started with just sewing myself into a sheet and adjusting it until I had a good fit. Then thankfully I had a friend that I could dress up in this and I freehanded the segments with a pen and cut the sheet up at the lines to get a pattern.

I started from the top and made sure that I got that fit right before going downwards. This was a bit tricky since it needed to be a lot tighter than I had planned at first. In the end I made it tight enough so that when the mask is on, it is held in place just by the hooded part of the shawl. This is unlike my old version, where the mask was first held in place, and then I simply put the shawl on over it.

Getting the hole for the mask was the most fiddly thing though, and in the end that process ate a more fabric than I thought it would, so that after four segments in place it was a lot shorter than my mock up. The good thing with working one segment at a time though was that I could simply make the fifth segment a bit wider to be back on track.

Finally the shawl was done! Then at least it was time to do the fun part, weathering it.

First it got a a proper dunk in a strong teabath, the tea should really look black. And then it was time for me to unleach my secret weathering weapon.

This was something I discovered when I did my original tusken. The water from the mine where I work reacts in interesting ways with the tea stains. It's not a water that I would recommend drinking or bathing, but it's perfect for this. For my last tusken I simply took the costume on and walked a bit in the mine, for this I felt it was easier to get some water up and spray it on the fabric. Once the mine water hits the fabric that's been in a tea bath it both lightens the fabric and turns it into a strange grey colour. So I worked the shawl from the bottom and up, making sure to get it more dirty at the bottom. I also had the gown that goes under it get the same treatment and I hung them up together so that I could work on them at the same time.

And with that the shawl was done. I made sure to protect the bathroom walls behind the shawl since I didn't want to stain them.

Female tusken failure

 So it was time for me to start with the soft parts of the female tusken, the main thing I have left to do.

After having stared at this image in high resolution for far too long I realised that there is omething strange going on with the fabric. The weave of the fabric continues without a break over the frayed edges and into the next segment. Either they have done some crazy pattern matching when cutting out, or the fabric simply isn't cut. The more I thought about the only solution would be if the fabric was pleated into tucks, and then those tucks would be cut open and the fabric frayed to create the edge. Tha would also explain why there is a female tusken whitout a frayed edge on the seams, it looks like it is inside out, and it might be possible that the tuck is so small that it didn't create a nice fray so then they just turned it the other side out. That is purely my speculation.

A huge issue here was to be able to work this by my own, it would have been a lot easier to work on a body.

Well some creatitivy with a styrofoam head and the stand for my dress making mannequin at least gave me something to work on, even if the head is way smaller than my own.

After a day of pleating and pinning and tacking this is where I was at. I felt like a Christmas tree when wearing it, definitely not the body hugging shawl of the female tusken. It was also way too short in the back.

I simply couldn't get enough fabric on the sides to shape it. With that I decided to give up on this experiment. I still think there is pleating going on, but I think that the shawl was probably first sewn together to get the silhouette, and then smaller tucks were made to create the fringe. Since I want to finish this fairly quickly I will probably go back to the common way of doing the shawl, which is to cut cut fabric strips and sew them together. Like I did with my first tusken female. Bonus is of course that it's a fairly quick and easy method, I only hope that the fabric I have, and that I have made some cuts in, for example the face opening, will be enough. But first it time to undo all the pleats.

I still think it's important to show when something goes wrong, it's so easy to just post the good results. And I am still convinced that there are tucks and not separate fabric pieces, I am just not the person to figure it out completely.

A fun and different Star Wars troop

 This year the Swedish garrison was invited to Gothenburg Book Fair, which is northern Europe's largest book fair and a huge cultural event. The theme for this year was "space", so we were invited to hang around and spread some space fun, especially in the area designated for children's literature and the like. 

We had a small booth but most of it was mingling around with visitors, and unlike a comic con and other kinds of science fiction convention I thought this was even more fun, because the visitors were really surprised and it was something fresh, unlike when people are more or less expecting us to be around and show off our costumes.

Since Gothenburg means a long journey by train I wanted to pack light, so I brought admiral Daala. Here I am in the Elsa Beskow diorama, Elsa Beskow is a classic 19th century children's author where the images are as important as the text in a way I guess she can be compared to Beatrix Potter.

What really made me travel though was the fact that my husband, who is an author after all, were there as well, so it was the first fair/convention we could be together. Well I trooped with the garrison, but when my troop duty was over I could change clothes and be with my husband and our other friends who are in working with literature in different ways.

Female tusken mask build

 So back in 2013 I posted about my Female Tusken and that I had sold the mask and that my main goal was to build a new mask and start using the costume again in 2014.

My old female tusken costume

Since then I have sold the mask and bag, lost the bracelet and gotten rid of the underdress. So what I have left is a leatherbag, without the bone clasp, gloves and armwraps, boots and the hood. Now I think that I will remake the hood anyway for this new project, but my first priority is to make a new mask, and in fact I bought a mask kit in 2012. It is not available anymore, it was a run of masks made for people in Denver, Colorado, and I got in on the last remaining one after the Denver build. I have started the mask a few times, but I have been a bit too worried about my skill in building and then I've quit the project.

Now I really want to finish it so I hauled out my mask, and realized that in my start with the kit so many years ago I had made a few things I would not have don today. I had made cuts in some of the bricks to what I then thought would make them align better with each other, I had also cut out and clued the white, flat "bone"s to some of the pieces. In doing that I had cut them shorter than I would have preferred today, but I don't know what kind of glue I used I simply couldn't get them off without risking the integrity of the pieces. So I had to continue where I left off.

The first I did was to paint the main pieces. For a base layer I used the brand Cospaint in espresso gold. The good thing with cospaint is that it is a bit flexible and it also works as a primer so you can paint directly on foam with it, you don't need to seal the foam first. 

I felt that the espresso gold was too brown though, so I dry brushed a layer of antique gold acrylic paint on top of the espresso gold. This gave it a beautiful brass colour. Now if you follow the 501st legion CRL for this costume they have an example of a mask that is very brown copper, but if you look at the reference pictures of the actual costumes they are much more brass than copper.

With that all the base paint was done. 

I then sanded off the paint on the pieces that I was going to glue to the connecting "bone" pieces. For glueing I used contact cement.

Where I glued the "bones" to the square pieces I got a bit of a gap. As I mentioned the "bone" pieces were done back in 2014 or so, today I wouldn't have assembled them like that. The gap was filled in with foam clay. And the good thing with cospaint working on foam is that I could then paint the foam directly once it was dry.

The squares, and bones, were glued to a backing piece of canvas using contact cement. I also had to bend the top bone pieces so that they can fit to the curved mask. Here is where I noticed that when I cut the bones I hadn't taken the curve into account, so today I would have cut them longer.

Once the glue had dried I cut the backing canvas to just follow the outline of the harder mask. Then it was time for the fun that is weathering. I dry brushed a mix of verdigris and ivory black acrylic paint, I also used a paper towel to wipe off excess paint when it was on. In some places I felt that I went a bit overboard and then I dry brushed some more antique gold acrylic and cosplaint in copper over that.

And with that the mask is finished and ready to assemble so I can wear it, and then it's time to start on the hood itself.

The yearly costume recap 2023

 So it is time to sum up the costuming/sewing year of 2023. I have definitely felt that I haven't made a lot of things, especially for myself. The reason for that is very simple. I haven't been been happy with myself, and most of my costumes that I have done over the years have been too small. I mentioned earlier on the blog that I made a gastric bypass in November. Now most of 2023 I have been aware of that I was going to go through with the operation, and that has just made me even more uncomfortable in my own body, and sad over the fact that I couldn't wear the costumes that I used to wear. I even skipped the yearly NärCon cosplay festival, even if it was also because I wanted to spend my whole summer holiday with my husband. I did do some events though, and one of the biggest events I've been part of.

It started with Star Wars Celebration Europe in London over Easter. Since 2023 is the 40th anniversary of Return of the Jedi I brought my ROTJ Mon Mothma for the Rebel Legion photoshoot.

I am the ROTJ Mon Mothma in the front, just behind the ewok

I also brought my jedi costume, which is a really comfy costume to wear at conventions, and the one new costume I brought was my fandom fashion take of Constable Zuvio.

SWC23 involved a lot of walking so I switched the high heeled boots that I had bought for the costume for sand coloured sneakers instead.

I have used the dress as an everyday dress since then, I quite like it as a comfy regular day dress.

After Celebration it was all focus on getting dressed for the 500th anniversary of king Gustav Vasa's triumph parade in Stockholm, and that meant meaking sure that David had something to wear. I first made him a pair of joined hose, a black cap and a faux double and gown.

It's faux in that the double and skirt is actually one piece of clothing instead of separate, still I thought it looked pretty well. I also made a coif, a shirt and trousers for our friend Björn who wanted to walk in the parade as a peasant.

Björn borrowed a doublet and for the day itself David chose to wear his older coat instead of the faux doublet, also because of the fact that it was 25 degrees warm and the coat is cooler. Under the coat you can also see the vest that I made to attach the hose to, so that they didn't fall off. This is also a bit unhistorical since it would have been a sleeved doublet in the 16th century, but I wanted to keep it as cool as possible so I skipped the sleeves.

For myself I decided to wear my 1520s court gown, but I had to add strips of fabric in the sides to make it bigger. It is hidden under the arm though so it wasn't too visible.

After the big parade it was time to prepare for medieval week. My one project for the year was to make a bathing shift.

It was a really good addition that made it so much easier to go bathing and keep clean during medieval week. I also made a new simple shift and a small untergollar, or partlet, to cover the neck opening of my yellow kirtle. I have had to make it bigger, and with that the neck opening had become so deep that I needed to fill it in, or risk being undecent.

Here I am, with the rest of the cooking team of Stockholmsfänikan, in my outfit that I wore the whole week, which is basically the yellow kirtle, new shift and partlet.

I did one last dash of sewing ahead of the annual Christmas market, where our 16th century guild is present. David needed new and warmer trousers. By now the joined hose that I had made for him had fallen apart totally, I also added a new furlined hat for him and mittens and a wool partlet for myself. Most of these items were lined with the fabric from the worn out hose.

I am really happy with this photo since it is the first time in a long time that I could fit into my green gown, so I am hoping that the coming year and with more changes to my body I will find the joy of making costumes for myself again in 2024.