Vampire Hunter D’s Jacket

With less than a month to go till the competition, I’m really starting to get nervous! Luckily the main pieces are now complete and I can start to make the final touches.

I’ll write a separate post about the cloak soon, but since I’ve been making it for over year I have to hunt down all of the relevant photos first.

As I required a sturdy base to attach the various fabric decorations and beads onto, I firstly made a velvet jacket base.  I enclosed all of the edges with black bias binding and piped the armholes with white silk, decorating the edges with wool and thread. The front and sides were slightly gathered to give the jacket shape and I used a zip to fasten it at the back.

The next step was to make the fabric pieces that hanged below the neckline. This included two yellow ovals, four white striped hemispheres and two black shapes which I would eventually attach the strings of beads onto.

These were all painted by hand and finished with piping cord.

The belt was made out of buckram sandwiched between faux leather. The edges were covered with bias binding and painted to match. Details were added with white russia braid and a button covered in white silk, then aged with acrylic paint.

The neckline was made with interfaced ivory crepe silk, gathered into a cotton lining. I added a two layers of piped decorated collars in pink cotton and purple taffeta. I would often pin the pieces together onto the base jacket just to check the overall look.

Once all the pieces were finished all that was left was to hand stitch each piece to the base jacket. When this was complete the last step was to decorate it with glass beads and D’s pendant.

D’s pendant was created using a large blue glass bead for the centre. The structure was created with wire on a cardboard base. I sculpted the details with milliput (epoxy clay) and once dry, it was painted with black enamel and acrylic paints.

I strung beads onto jewelery wires, chaining them together to from bead drapes between the pendants. I also strung glass beads and metal spacers together to decorate the neckline.

And here are the finished pictures. I’m really pleased with the result.