Mistborn Mistcloak

Tutorial for the Mistcloak I made for Halloween. Enjoy!

 Next, the most important part of the Mistborn outfit: the Mistcloak. The mistcloak is described like this:
"He pulled open the pack, then whipped out a dark grey cloak. Large and enveloping, the cloak wasn't constructed from a single piece of cloth -- rather, it was made up of hundreds of long, ribbonlike strips. They were sewn together at the shoulders and across the chest, but mostly they hung separate from one another, like overlapping streamers."

Well.. that was pretty intense. I didn't have the resources to do something quite that cool.. I didn't have 'hundreds' of strips on mine, but I htink I did pretty well.

I started out with a hooded cowl. If you'll remember, i made one of those earlier this year, and I said the second one I made looked like it was designed for cosplay... well, look who ended up using it for just that!

This is the pile of leftover material I had. Luckily, it was more or less a rectangle, which made strips of cloth quite easy.

 Actually cutting strips is a long, tedious, obnoxious task that I didn't feel like doing, so I cheated. Rather than cutting my strips, I ripped them. On almost every cloth, there are two directions you can rip the cloth, as long as you have a ct to start the strip out with. so, I cut about an inch and a half in, and ripped it. I kept doing this until I ran out of cloth.

 This is what one of the strips looked like after I first ripped it.

 And here's my pile of strips. I didn't have hundreds, not even close, but I did have 50+. Close enough for me, at least for now.

 I decided I didn't care about hemming the strips, mostly because that many would have made hemming such a nightmare that the costume wouldn't be worth it. so, I sewed them directly onto the scarf. The only thing to remember when doing this si to put the seam on the part that will be towards your neck. You can tell this because of the wasy the hood seams go. As illustrated in the photo.

 I decided how far I wanted the strips to go around by measuring how the scarf fit around my shoulders. This is entirely subjective, but I chose to go 13" in either direction, which is why that strip is there. I sewed one on either end of where I wanted them, and one in the middle.

 When I actually started sewing all the individual strips, I did it like this. I didn't have them right next to each other, I overlapped each of them by ~1/2". I went all the way around, then tried it on.

 This is a front view.

 And a side view. I decided it wasn't quite enough strips for me, which is fortunate, since I still had around half my pile left.

 I sewed the next half on the same way, except that I overlapped them a bit more than the first ones, and I put this row of strips about an inch up from the other ones.

 Front view.

 This is the only 'action shot' in the whole post. As you may or may not be able to see, this was just with me walking. When I ran, it looks even more epic. Even with only ~50 strips, this is a really cool costume piece.

This is the point at which I tell the problem with my method: anti-fraying fabric, whether via burn/melting the edges of each strip, or hemming each one, or sewing them into tubes and turning them inside out... whatever you do, it's very important if you don't want this coming apart very quickly. I thought I'd just leave it, but it started coming apart, and I spent upward of 4 hours burn/melting the edge of each strip. This would have been MUCH easier to do before they were attached to the cloak.... so just make sure you do that, if you ever want to wear this more than once. or if you get irritated by threads getting stuck everywhere.

In these practice runs, I realized that the cloak was a bit too long. This shows about how much taller than me it was- the part on the ground in this picture is the part that was also one the ground when I wore it.. so I chopped about 4 inches off the bottom.

 As you can see, it's off the floor now. I had to re-burn all the bottoms, but it was better than having it fray, and also better than constantly wondering who was stepping on my cloak only to realize it was me.

Tadaa!