Remaking my pinned post about making Ganondorf TOTK's robe bc it needs a read more thing, got too long
Here's what I'm making:
I've been wanting to make Ganondorf's robe for a long time now. I knew I wanted to do batik (wax resist dye painting) to make the design on the inside of his robe, but have 0 experience with that. It struck me one day that the time is passing anyway, so I might as well build up the batik skills along the way and start doing it.
I successfully made the gerudo insignia w the batik method. This was an incident of what I now know was beginner's luck
Sewing the thing is also a part of this. I had never made a robe before. Decided on a more Asian leaning shape for it bc it'll create less fabric waste and save me from a hellish experience making sleeves. I did a quick mockup using a robe I already had and it turned out so nice I just made myself a whole robe, 10/10
I used the master works art of G's robe as a reference to trace out the design onto my fabric. This required doing algebra (long-time enemy of mine), learning photo editing software on the fly, improvising light boxes, twice getting something wrong and starting all over again, so on. 4 days of tracing
I'm most excited for the flared & pointed sleeve to show a little flash of the inside when I'm wearing the robe :)
Next is figuring out what dye resist method I want to use. This has been torturous. Details TBA
The plan is to use batik, or whatever resist dye method I find that's prettiest and most accessible to me, to dye the design onto the fabric. Tests are underway. I'm working long shifts at the pissing me off factory
I tried the water based resist goop from Jacquard. These were the least shitty results from it. Don't waste your $$ on their goo unless you want to ruin your project. Moving on!
Returned to wax. I'm using literally wax from a candle lol like the candle is lit next to me and I'm dipping my brush into it. Still not perfect but def improvement
This second round of waxing & dyeing has been more difficult because of the residual wax left in the fabric, even after ironing the living shit out of it. The wax I'm applying needs to be hotter & I need to rub it in harder to get it to soak through to the backside of the fabric. I have more blue dye blowouts :( I'm trying to come to peace w the fact that there are just gonna be blowouts no matter what. Hopefully the finished robe will look good regardless
Not pictured: I took one panel and boiled it after ironing to get more wax out of it. It was definitely easier to apply new wax to that piece & it had less blowouts too. A lot of the red dye came out when I boiled it though, but I'll deal with that later
Everything has its first layer of green dye
