Maka Albarn Boot Tutorial!
Hey everyone! Since I am working hard on my Maka Albarn cosplay, I haven’t been able to work on much of my cosplay blog tutorial-ness to help you all out. Which I am sorry about. I didn’t mean to neglect you guys. I hope you can forgive me with the next tutorials I have planned out. Also this tutorial is a bit image heavy.
So this project you will need the following:
Black Boots (can be knee highs or shorter but not to short since you need them a bit above your ankle)
Good pair of fabric scissors and normal scissors
white chalk marker or pen
measuring tape
sewing needles
Black thread
White vinyl fabric that looks similar to leather in a way
Fabric double sided tape
White Paint (can be acrylic)
Krylon sealing spray
Tutorial time!!!
First thing you will need is a pair of black boots that look like maka’s or as close as you can get to them. Please do not spend too much money on getting these, I went to cheap stores to find a pair I liked.
Next thing, you will need to do is measure how high you need the length of the boot to be. Make sure you give yourself an inch on top of where you like it to sew down that seam line.
After that, you will want to hand sew the top part of the boots. This can be hard if you got a pair of vinyl. I had to use a thimble for my thumb since sewing the top part of the boot proved to be tougher than I thought.
You will need to start vinyl white bands that go on the boots. You will need to have reference pictures up to help you figure out where the white bands on Maka’s boots are located. Depending on what type of boot you get, you might need to play around with the bands until you get them in a similar spot. I used double sided fabric tape to put these bands on the boot, it sticks very while to the boot fabric.
Just a note for dealing with the double sided fabric tape, do not use a good pair of scissors on it since it can stick the scissors blade together.
This part will take a while so plan for that. You will need to start painting the bottom part of the boots white. I used a paint primer on bottom of the boots to make the acrylic stick better. After two or three layers of primer, I used the whit acrylic paint and a very small painting brush to get all the edges of the bottom boot. You will need to wait about 15 to 20 minutes for the paint to dry before putting another layer of paint on. This helps with seeing how the paint is cover the black plastic. If you feel that it hasn’t covered the black within a few layers, its ok to add more.
You will need to do the belt looking part on the boot with the same vinyl fabric you did for the band parts. This can be a bit pain stacking because you will need to make the holes for the belt band to go though and the width of the band for it will be need to be a bit bigger than the other parts you just did. I cut about 43 inches in length for this part than I folded the raw edges and sewed down the length of it to make something like this:
Before you attract the belt band at the top of the boot, make sure you put holes in it for the belt to go through. I used buckle that looked similar to hers but I had to do a bit of altering on it.
This image is before I altered it.
I had to open the middle piece and turn it so it looked like a buckle. Note you will have to cut the metal so it can fit through the buck holes.
Next you will need to attract the belts to your boot, I used the fabric tape to do this. Which looked like this when you add the belts to it:
After that I decided it didn’t look quite right without a end tip piece. So I made that out of craft foam and thermoplastic. You will have to draw up your own belt end tips for this. Mine looked like this after I attracted it to the vinyl with my heat gun.
Once you like how it looks, you will need to add some primer and paint to make it look like a metal belt end tip. like so:
You will need to use a sealing spray to keep the paint on the boot. You will be walking around a con with this boots and you want to make sure your paint doesn’t flake or becomes ruined by whatever weather is happening at con time. The spray I used is from Krylon which is called: UV-Resistant Matte
Lastly, the buttons on the sides. I used embassy’s small circle black buttons for this part, image below for what they looked like:
Now attract them to the boot. I used fabric glue to do this. Also note I had to cut the parts off the back which you would normally sew through for normal buttons.
Once that is done it should look like this:
Congratz! You have now made a beautiful pair of Maka styled boots. I hope all your cosplay turn out amazing and that my tutorials help in whatever way they can. See you next tutorial!
Kimeyos <3