Wearables Crafting Cullen's Clothes

I currently have a temporarily-wrong-headed body for Cullen in, let us say, a post-Wicked Grace-game state. What I want is a mostly-accurate replica of how he appears in Dragon Age Inquisition. So the man needs some clothes. And a proper head, but that's a side-project.



My plan for him is to have three outfits with some pieces carrying over. His typical Inquisition fit, the formal wear from Inquisition/Trespasser and my most guess-filled one, an outfit from one of the epilogue slides drawn by Matt Rhodes where he can only be seen from the back. Some things are going to need tweaking but that's just a function of him being a video game character where we're not shown how he gets his clothes on and off.

Inquisition Daily Wear (in rough order of difficulty)

Spoiler: Reference

1 pair brown trousers - Have Fabric
1 pair socks - Have Fabric
1 brown gambeson-ish garment - Have Fabric and batting
1 red & furred cloak/wrap thing - Have Fabric & Fur
1 pair boots - Have Leather
1 belt - Have Leather
1 pair vambraces - Have Metal
1 pair pauldrons - Have Metal
1 breastplate with gorget - Have Metal
21 pair wrist length black gloves - Need Material and hands.

Formal Wear

Spoiler: Reference

1 blue sash - Have Fabric
1 pair trousers - Have Fabric
1 red coat with cream/gold accents - Have coat fabric. Need lining fabric.
1 light brown belt - Have Leather
1 pair thigh high boots - Have Leather
1 pair elbow length buff gloves - Need Material

Epilogue

Spoiler: Reference

1 pair trousers - Have Fabric
1 pair socks - Have Fabric
1 shirt - Have Fabric
1 belt - Have Leather
1 pack? Or single pauldron? - Need to Work Out
1 pair boots - Have Leather
1 jacket w specific construction - Need to Decide Fabric
1 pair gloves - Need Material

The coloured items are the ones that are duplicates of the same item. I've decided to merge the epilogue belt and the Daily wear belt because Cullen's everyday wear doesn't really have anywhere to put his sword and he should. Likewise the epilogue boots and the daily wear boots since the armour bits seem to be detachable.

Some of the things I'm changing are: probably the colour of his gambeson so it's not quite so similar to the colour of his trousers, I'm also going to give it a collar to get the man some neck protection from the gorget.

I have absolutely zero idea how I'm going to make teeny tiny gloves but I'm as stubborn and overconfident as I am easily distractible. I think I'm going to have to use pleather for those because even the beautifully thin leather I do have is probably too thick for tiny doll fingers and I don't dare try and thin it further.

Where I can I prefer to use natural fabrics so the trousers will be linen, the shirt will be a linen/cotton blend, the boots will be leather, the gambeson will probably be cotton, I have a nice thin wool blend for the wrap/cloak thing and the coat. I also want his armour to be real metal, so I'm going to need better hearing protection, a soldering iron and some slightly thinner aluminium.

Lots to do if I want to get him to this



One thing I am going back and forth on is whether I want to dye the body. I love it and I'm glad I got this colour not the light tan because I think that might have been a little too dark, but it's still just a little pale. Since I only want it ever so slightly darker I'm wondering whether I could achieve the same effect with body blushing. I also I realise I cannot make that decision until I get the head because I'm already going to have try try and match the head to the body.

 

I am hoping to do sort of weekly updates to keep myself on track. So here's the progress I've made in the past week.

The Head - I'm at about 90% completion of my sculpt for his head barring only part of the headcap which I'm fiddling with and the fact that I want to 3D scan the body's neck to make sure my head's cup works well and that the S-hook can fit through the slit I've designed.

Something that is going to make my life about eleventy million times easier is that Resinsoul 1/4 jointed hands fit beautifully on the body so not only does that reduce the amount of gloves I have to make - since I was going to have to do a pair for each set of hands, open and gripping - but it also massively reduces the difficulty of getting the gloves on the hands, which was worrying me. So I'm still going to need thin and slightly stretchy pleather but it's going to be less nightmarish to make them removable.

Clothes.

In the past week I have made the pair of trousers, a pair of socks that I forgot to add to the list and am very close to finishing a shirt. The socks are an absolute necessity as the leather I have for the boots has an underside that leaves a fine black residue. I'm planning on minimising this by glueing some black cotton duck that I was surprised to learn I already own as an inner layer but I still wanted to make socks. They're ugly as sin and not at all accurate, being made from a pair of trainer socks, but the one thing I cannot do on a miniature scale is knit or crochet anything, let along socks. They're also not lying right because to get them to do that I need to take the trousers off, put the socks on first and pull the trousers up over them. Which I am going to do but not right now.

I'm proud of the trousers, they fit him really quite well and still leave him room to bend his legs or even ride a horse. The insides are a bit of a mess of Fray Stop because while I enclosed all the raw edges I could, that wasn't possible for some of the seams and I had to step away from the game design to improvise a closure. In this case hand sewn eyelets, lacing and a placket underneath. I just have to be careful when I bend and then straighten his legs that the trousers don't get caught in his knees.





My first time counter hemming the shoulder seams together because the linen cotton blend is just as prone to fraying as the pure linen of the trousers. It was surprisingly fun once I got my head around it and I think I'm going to do it more. Everything else was just backstitched together, apart from the hem where I stole it from the original pillowcase the material came from and all other raw edges will be coated in Fray Stop. I also managed to put gussets in under the sleeves without accidentally sewing the wrong edges together which has happened before. I still need to finish the collar and cuffs as well, so it's not completely done but it's nearly there.

Please disregard the hooks for hands, getting it on him requires taking his hands off and since I was taking the shirt back off immediately, I cba to put the hands back on for the photos.






I've also picked out the fabric for his gambeson thing. It's not brown, but it's a nice dark grey which I think will fit with the outfit but without blending in too much with the trousers. I'm going to quilt it with some very thin batting so it at least looks like there should be some protection in it without adding too much bulk.

 

I've got pretty much everything I need except the material for the gloves, which is probably going to be the worst thing to do. How are you feeling about the announcement of the new game?

Me too tbh.

 

So here's where I am two weeks later. I've been a bit too busy and away from the computer with Blender on it to make any real progress on the head, especially as what I need to do to finalize it involves taking the temporary head off the doll which is a massive palaver since the S-hook is too big for the slit at the bottom, so I have to take the S-hook out of the elastic completely and try and stop the elastic from snapping back into the doll while I extract the head and replace the S-hook. Fun times. That's on a bit of a pause until probably the week after next.

I finished the shirt displayed in week 1 and then promptly decided I didn't like it so I made a version two out of some stretchy knit. I also managed to find some almost perfectly coloured fabric to be a more game-accurate gambeson thing - which I think in the actual game is textured like leather but I am not doing that. So now he's got this on and I'm pretty happy with it. I need some sort of fastening at the neck but I'll think on that a bit further.



I'm also coming to terms with the fact I'm going to have to line the formal wear red coat. I washed the wool I intended to use - something I rarely bother doing for doll scale clothes as they're not going to get washed at all once they're made - and it bled a lot so now I'm worried about colour transfer. I'm going to try washing it a couple more times to see if that tapers off but for the sake of not accidentally dying my doll's entire torso red, I'll probably line it anyway and I'm thinking in something cream/gold to match the other accents. And he'll get a shirt underneath the coat as well, much though I was hoping to cheat and not do that.

I've also done some research into ear protection and soldering irons so those purchases are going to happen very soon, which means I can proceed with the armour next. I really want to make his red over-wrap thing with the fur collar but with the embroidery that's going to require, I don't want to have to redo it because it's too big or too small, which means I need to do the breastplate first.

 

I might repurpose the linen shirt to go under the red outfit so it wasn't entirely wasted.

Yeah, this is all being done by hand. I find hand-sewing soothing and also, most of the time I cannot be bothered to get the machine out, set it up, change bobbins out to sew things which aren't all that big and in some cases would require hand-sewing the fiddly bits anyway. If I had a setup where I could have a machine out permanently, I would use it more, but at the moment it gets brought out for long hems or fancy stitches.