Here’s a detailed look at what went into making Zelda’s tabard for my Twilight Princess costume. There are plenty of other ways to approach this project, but this is my take on the design!
My pattern for this tabard is available in my shop! If you’re working on your own Zelda cosplay, check it out and save yourself some time.
I decided to work with leather and silk, which are some of my favorite materials. The purple, gold, and green are all pigskin leather, while the blue is silk dupioni. My supplies come from Silk Baron and Hide House.
Although I started with plain light blue silk (in the color “windswept”) I needed to apply a gradient leading into a darker blue. I did this with regular RIT dye, dipping continuously between a dye pot and clean water to create an ombre effect. I found that a low concentration of dye allowed me more control over how much pigment the fabric would absorb. I made several attempts before I ended up with the more subtle effect I was going for (far right in the above image). Trial and error is all a part of the process.
My tabard layers were assembled in this order:
a backing layer of white vinyl (to prevent any colors from rubbing off on the white dress below)
blue ombre silk background
green suede background (solid underneath the gold designs)
gold applique/binding
green suede binding
purple applique design
the brass triforce
All of the fabric/leather layers were held in place with basting spray and/or a fabric glue stick, which are both designed to temporarily hold fabric in place while you stitch it. This prevents the applique from shifting around, and it’s especially useful for materials you can’t put pins through, like leather.
The gold applique presented the biggest challenge. It is depicted as continuous -- simultaneously a border and a complex inset design -- with no seams from top to bottom. To accomplish this, I added a seam allowance around the border portion so that it could wrap around the body of the tabard like a binding. I treated the rest of the gold piece as a normal leather applique, top-stitching the edges.
The pattern in my store contains two versions of the gold piece -- both with and without the border seam allowance -- to accommodate other methods or materials you might choose instead.
Unlike the gold, the green binding is separate from the green background piece. I cut the green binding flush against the gold where they meet.
Wonderclips (the little red clips) are another excellent tool for sewing leather. They are a great substitute for fabric pins because they do not make holes in the material and they create less distortion as you feed your fabric through a sewing machine.
The finishing touch on this tabard is a decorative Triforce shape. I decided to use brass for this instead of leather so that it would stand out from everything else. It’s also a warmer gold than the applique/border color, which is consistent with the reference image.
My Triforce is made up of three triangular brass stampings I found on Etsy. I used a small jewelry hole punch to make holes at each corner, then riveted them through all layers of the tabard with tiny jewelry rivets.
Finally, my finished tabard vs the design it is based on:
Ultimately, this was my favorite piece to make out of the entire Zelda costume. Although topstitching everything neatly was rather tedious, I absolutely love the final look.
You can see more finished photos and tutorials by browsing my blog’s Zelda tutorial tag or visiting my website AtelierHeidi.com!
Thanks for reading! Let me know if you have questions and I’ll try to answer accordingly. <3
How to make custom lace appliques -- the “Frankenlace” method
A lot of people asked for more info on how I made the appliques that decorate the bottom of Zelda’s gown. Here’s my tutorial for the whole process! This method can be used to make all kinds of applique shapes and designs if you get creative with it.
These lace appliques are made out of other lace -- hence the nickname. To get started, you’ll need to collect a few lace trims to use as raw material. Look for styles that are similar or complement each other, because you’ll be combining them. This is some, but not all, of the trims I used. I bought these in the LA fabric district, but most are available at trimexpoonline.com.
Cut your lace down into smaller pieces that are more modular. Don’t cut up ALL your lace -- this is just an experimentation stage, to practice rearranging the design.
Using a template of your desired shape (I made mine digitally, but you can hand draw one too) practice arranging your pieces until you find a design that suits your needs. This is not my final design in the picture -- I went through several versions before I was totally happy with how it looked. You might discover that you need more lace, which is why planning and experimentation are so important. When you’re satisfied with how it looks, it’s time to start putting it all together.
You’ll need an embroidery hoop large enough to cover your whole template, plus some netting that is as close to transparent as you can find. Most generic tulle is NOT fine enough to do well with this technique -- the holes are too large and the tulle stretches too much when handled. Look for netting that does not stretch or fray, if possible. Put some netting in your embroidery hoop, tightening the surface like a drum. I taped my template to a small sheet of masonite to give myself a portable work surface. I also ended up using clamps to hold the embroidery hoop to the masonite, but forgot to get a picture. This is optional, but really helps the design from shifting too much as you work.
Tools for the next step: fabric glue (other brands work too), a small paintbrush, and a water cup. I watered my glue down a little to make it easier to spread with the paintbrush. Be careful not to add TOO much water, or your glue will be too thin, not grip well, and take a long time to dry.
Working in small sections, begin gluing your lace pieces onto the netting. Start at the center and work outward, if possible. Continue until all your lace pieces are glued onto the netting.
Here’s what mine looked like with all the lace attached! At this point, I flipped the embroidery hoop over and applied a second coat of glue over the entire back of the work. The netting is so thin that you can continue to apply more glue from the backside to get a more secure grip.
Optional: add rhinestones to taste. I used E6000 for this step. Not every applique requires rhinestones, but in this case I wanted Zelda to sparkle as much as possible.
Repeat to create as many appliques as you need! Zelda has 8 along the bottom of her dress. Here’s part of my assembly line.
When you’re ready to attach the applique to your fashion fabric, trim away some of the netting along the outside, but leave any “interior” portions that help stabilize the design. I simply glued my appliques onto the silk, but I later went back and hand-stitched them down for a more secure hold. After they are properly attached to your fabric, you can VERY CAREFULLY trim away the “interior” pockets of plain netting using small scissors.
The final look of my gown, after all the appliques and trim were attached.
This method is very time consuming and requires a lot of patience and concentration -- but I just love the results! I wanted to achieve the look of professionally-made applique, but without access to industrial equipment, this was the next best thing I could come up with.
The white-on-white effect is subtle, but matches the look I was going for. Photo by Vontography.
I hope this is helpful to some of you in your own costume projects. Let me know if you have any questions, and good luck!
Here’s an overview of the techniques that went into making these Zelda pauldrons! Although this tutorial doesn’t hold your hand through every step, I wanted to give enough information that a curious reader could easily do more research on their own. If you’d like to know more about leather work, try searching for any of the keywords in these steps to find way more detailed resources on how to apply these methods to your own projects.
Keep reading below for more info!
Patterns & Mock-ups
Veg-tanned leather can be manipulated and formed over other objects through a process called wet-molding. Before even touching my materials, I found an object that was very similar in shape and size to the lower portion of Zelda’s pauldron. For me, this happened to be a bedroom lamp, but you can use whatever object suits your needs.
The lamp is slightly larger than my shoulder, and flares out at the bottom in the same way I wanted the edge of Zelda’s pauldron to flare out. This makes it a great candidate to use as a wet-molding buck (aka, the base form for my leather).
The mock-up pictured on the right is the result of wet-molding leather over the lamp (I’ll go into more detail on that later). Once I had a prototype in my hands, I started drawing on the general shape and details, and trimming away the extra material to fit it to my shoulder.
I used paper and foam make a mock-up of the top piece, fitting it over the bottom piece and making adjustments to both.
When I was happy with my full mock-up, I translated it back into a 2D pattern by flattening out the leather and tracing it onto paper. This allowed me to clean up my lines, make everything symmetrical, and refine the shapes. I made a second foam mock-up based on this pattern to double-check that it could be molded back into the exact 3D shape I was aiming for. It passed the test, so I turned my attention to patterning the surface details.
Using a variety of reference images, I drew all of the design details by hand onto my flat pattern. I then scanned the images and traced them digitally, cleaning up my lines to create a final pattern. Here’s part of it below (I cut this on my Silhouette Cameo 3, but you can cut it by hand if you have to).
My digital pattern for this pauldron (and the rest of Zelda’s accessories!) is for sale at my store here: http://atelierheidi.tictail.com/product/zelda-accessories-pattern-pack-digital-download
If you’re using this walkthrough to make identical pauldrons, please consider supporting my work and teaching by purchasing a copy of my pattern.
Cutting & Tooling the Leather
I traced my final pattern onto 8-9 oz veg-tanned leather and cut out the pieces with a normal utility knife.
In the above image, the edges of the leather have been beveled on both the top and bottom with an edge beveling tool in Size 3. This tool helps round off leather edges for a cleaner finish. I also began going over my traced design (in silver here) with a swivel knife. This tool scores the surface of the leather without cutting all the way through it. It can be tricky to get the hang of, so make sure you practice first before cutting into your final pieces. Any accidental cuts cannot be repaired.
After all the swivel knife cuts were made, I used beveler stamps in a few different sizes to create deeper impressions. A beveler stamp pushes down the leather on one side of the cut, making the opposite side look like a raised edge. The exact stamps I used were Craftool B197, B203, and B935, all purchased from Tandy Leather. In the above image, the left piece has been cut with a swivel knife, and the right piece has been both cut and beveled.
This type of tooling also requires a mallet (mine is rawhide; other materials are fine), water (from a spray bottle or sponge), and a stone slab (quartz, granite, marble, etc) to use as a work surface.
The stone slab provides shock absorption as you hit your leather piece with a stamp/mallet. It helps muffle the hammering noise and prevents other items on your table from bouncing around as you work. I’m also using a rubber poundo board here in this image, but that’s optional. Also pictured is a tiny metal jewelry anvil that I’m using as a weight to hold the leather in place while I work, allowing both my hands to be free. You can use almost any small, heavy object for this purpose.
Water helps the leather permanently take on surface impressions. I used a small cup and a sponge to apply water in small sections as I worked.
In the above image, the left piece has plain beveled tooling. The right piece has been tooled with a background stamp to add extra surface texture. This smooths out some of the lumpier sections and creates more depth and detail. The exact stamps I used for this step were Craftool A104, A114, and F901 (again, purchased from Tandy.)
Wet-molding
With my tooling complete, I moved on to forming my flat leather pieces into the 3D shapes I needed. This brings us back to my trusty lamp.
Left: my badass lamp. Middle: Wet leather piece stretched over the lamp and wrapped tightly with gauze fabric. Right: Now dry, the leather holds its new shape on its own.
The more water you apply to veg-tanned leather, the more malleable it becomes. When tooling, you generally only need to apply a small amount of water to the leather’s surface. When wet-molding, you can apply as much water as needed to manipulate it into a new shape. For this pauldron, I held the leather under a faucet and let water run across the entire surface of the front and back. You could go as far as soaking the leather if necessary, but it’s better to start with a little and go up from there. I also recommend removing any rings or other jewelry from your hands, which can very easily scratch the surface of the leather when it is this wet! Be very careful handling it at this stage, especially if you have long fingernails.
After wetting the leather, I pressed it against the body of the lamp and used both hands to smooth it outward from the center. This gradually stretches the leather and molds it around the curved surface of the lamp. Continue working it until you have manipulated it into the shape you need.
You’ll need to devise a method of holding the leather firmly in place while it dries. Depending on your project, there are many viable solutions. In this example, I used a long strip of 100% cotton gauze fabric to tightly wrap the leather against the lamp. The fabric choice is important; cotton gauze is highly breathable, so the water can easily pass through it and evaporate. The fabric evenly distributes pressure across the entire surface of the leather, so that it doesn’t leave marks in the tooled surface. Keep in mind that if you strap it down only around the edges (such as with string or rubber bands) it would most likely leave a permanent indention in that spot.
After leaving it to dry overnight, I unwrapped the gauze to reveal my newly reshaped leather.
I purchased blue acrylic gems from All Star Co to use in this project. I measured and cut a window that was slightly smaller than the gem, then wet-molded the leather to create a raised lip around the edges of the gem.
Finishing & Assembly
Before painting and assembling, I used gum tragacanth and an edge slicker to burnish the edges of all of my leather pieces. This is a process of compressing and polishing the rough leather edge into a smooth, hard surface.
I assembled the pieces by stitching them together, hiding the seam along the borders of the top piece. Each stitch hole is punched by hand using a stitching chisel. I then sewed it together using waxed thread and two blunt-tipped needles. The stitch I used is called a saddle stitch, in which the thread passes through each hole twice in a double-helix shape.
The base coat for this gold color was Leather Studio’s gold paint. I then used Angelus bronze paint and several washes of watered down acrylic paint to add shadows and weathering to the paint job. Jacquard Lumiere is another line of excellent metallic leather paints.
After sealing the paint job with Saddle Lac and installing my gems, these pauldrons were ready to go.
My final Zelda costume, debuted at Katsucon 2017. Photo by Mindfall Media.
If you have any simple questions about the information in this post -- such as where to buy materials, definitions of terms, or how a tool is used -- I invite you to please use Google to your advantage. The internet is brimming with tutorials that cover each of these steps in greater detail. If you have specific questions about my personal decision-making process, you can direct those to my inbox here on tumblr. (I’m more likely to respond to questions that are not asked anonymously, just because I can answer them privately)
This tutorial is not meant to be a comprehensive guide to beginner leatherwork, but I hope it gave you some insight into how a leather armor project comes together.
For live demonstrations of these techniques, check out my YouTube or Twitch channel! I do educational livestreams twice a week where I show and explain various techniques of costume construction. Tune in at: https://www.twitch.tv/atelierheidi
For a digital copy of all of my Zelda patterns, check out my store: http://atelierheidi.tictail.com/products/patterns
If you found this post to be helpful, please consider sharing it! Thanks for reading and good luck with all your leather endeavors.
As part of my ongoing tutorial series over Twilight Princess Zelda, I decided to release some clear photos of my overlay pattern to help those who are also trying to piece together this rune design. My interpretation was cobbled together from multiple incomplete references that were at times contradictory and/or unclear. So it’s as accurate as I could manage given the circumstances!
I copied this pattern to my silk with a white fabric pencil, then hand-embroidered the design with a simple backstitch. The fabric is silk dupioni underlined with cotton sateen; the embroidery is stitched through both layers. I used a satin floss (DMC S712: Mother of Pearl) so that the thread would match the sheen of the silk beneath it.
If you aren’t feeling up to embroidering it, silk screening or hand-painting are also options.
The gold leaf designs bracketing the eyelets (pictured above) are made from small decorative brass stampings. I clipped the leaves from a larger stamping, drilled tiny holes with a jewelry hole punch, and hand-stitched them onto the dress. This is just my own take on the design -- Zelda has something of a leaf motif that I wanted to incorporate in areas where the references were unclear.
To see more of my Twilight Princess Zelda tutorials, check the tag on my blog! All of my other Zelda patterns are available in my store. Read on below for the free rune pattern.
I’ve been having some problems getting these images to display properly on mobile. If you’re planning to use this reference I highly suggest viewing it on desktop.
Here’s a full look at my final mockup for the overlay. This was made to my measurements, but could be easily adjusted to accommodate other sizes. All pieces include a 1/2″ seam allowance.
The center back piece includes some additional eyelets not pictured here.
The side back piece has an additional eyelet near the waistline, not pictured here.
The side front and center front both include eyelets that are placed extremely close to the embroidery design. I embroidered first and installed the eyelets afterward.
A final look at my complete Zelda costume. Photo by @saterialeproductions
For more Zelda tutorials, browse the tag on my blog! You can find more patterns for Zelda’s accessories and applique in my store.
Silk dupioni dress with a silk dupioni overlay and silk dupioni trim. Did you know that I like dupioni?
Every panel of the dress and overlay is interlined with broadcloth to give the silk fabric more weight. This creates a more flattering drape and smoother seams. I also assembled an interior foundation layer which isn’t attached yet. Once that is sewn in, the raw edge at the neckline will be taken care of.
As of last Sunday, this whole dress was a pile of uncut fabric. I’m tired, but unstoppable.
This is what the foundation layer of my Zelda dress looks like. I researched the structure of couture gowns during my planning stages of this costume, but this is my first time actually making something like this.
This is a boned corselet, which is designed to shape and support the exterior layers of the dress. Unlike the similarly-named corset, a corselet does NOT cinch the waist or shape the body. It provides structure to the dress, not the body.
Mine is made from power net with flat-felled seams, spring steel boning, and built-in bra cups. It’s attached along the neckline except in the very back, where is has a separate zipper. It eliminates the need for a separate bra, so I don’t have to worry about bra straps shifting around and showing.
I also wanted to add that I don’t have any special knowledge or training that enabled me to do this – everything I know about this I learned from Google. If you’re interested in sewing but you find these terms and concepts going over your head, just Google them. Read blog posts and articles and anything else, and try to apply that learning to the things you want to make. You might be surprised how much you can teach yourself.
This is made from genuine veg-tanned leather. The tiny rivets are functional. I chose rhinestones for the triforce because if I can make it sparkle, I WILL.
Three attempts at gradient dyeing silk dupioni. Each time I refined my techniques and got different results.
I initially thought that dyeing a larger piece of fabric would give me more freedom to position my pattern piece, but the larger fabric was much harder to control in my small dye pot. The third, most successful attempt (right) was achieved with a more diluted dye concentration and slower, more deliberate movements compared to my previous efforts. It looks subtle compared to the other results, but it is much closer to what I wanted and is still plenty vibrant in person.
