Ta-da! They’re not completely done yet - still need a bit of accuracy cleanup and the springs, which I’m making out of aluminum and need to cut with a bandsaw so it might be a while before I get to them.
This was my first ever pair of boot covers, but it was about time I fixed up my Chell cosplay and it’s not like I was going to find a pair of boots that could pass for these. Ideally, I’d make these out of hard plastic or latex, but I don’t have the means to work with hard plastic and am not quite confident enough in my latex skills enough yet to try something like this. I used vinyl-coated woven polyester, no-roll elastic and basic plastic zippers.
To make the pattern, I started by draping muslin over my base shoes:
I pinned the muslin, stretching it to get a good tight fit, then traced the outline in pencil. To make the pattern for the piece that would extend up my leg, I draped muslin over my calf, pinned and traced, then matched that piece with the boot drape piece.
Now that I had the general shape of the boot, I could draw out the different pieces. My final draft looked like this:
This has become my favorite way to draft - I draw out all the pieces I need and then trace them all on other pieces of paper to add seam allowance. Makes for much less confusion, especially with something like this where it’s not always obvious which pieces go which way and where.
I ended up making the covers two separate pieces: the base cover and the overlay that goes up the calf. The overlay also goes under the base of the shoe. I was originally not going to make it a full cover and was going to try to figure out some way to attach the hem of the cover to the shoe, but I realized quickly that that wasn’t going to work, which meant attaching a zipper in the back of the cover. No big deal.
The hardest part of this project was all the tiiiiiny little details - particularly since the overlay is fully faced, which involved a lot of turning and hand-stitching the little details. Overall, though, I’m happy with how they came out and hope to not have too much trouble walking around in them at FanimeCon this year, since I’m terrible in heels.
I might be posting more about this cosplay later, so stay tuned!
