GE Elementalist Bolero Jacket

After a month (Or so) of working, I finally finished another part of my Granado Espada Elementalist costume! This time, it’s the jacket. I call it the bolero jacket, because it is, and it was hard to finish. Thanks to breaking the jacket into workable sections, making the jacket wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be and I was able to finish the jacket sooner than I thought. It was still a hard project to work on because my sewing machine broke while working on it. This meant that if I wanted to finish the jacket, I would have to hand sew the rest of it.

Anyway, onto the jacket! Here’s the front….

Here’s the side…

And the back….

The jacket is made out of white satin, brown satin, orange chiffon, and tan chiffon over orange satin. I used Simplicity pattern number 1819 for the jacket and Simplicity 1771 for the sleeves. The fabric drapes are self drafted. There are pearls sewn onto the jacket by hand (My hand didn’t like it much…). There are over 2,000 pearls on the jacket, probably more like 2,500. Originally I wanted to make the jacket out of white diamond pin tucked taffeta and sew the pearls onto the pin tucks, but after failing to find pin tucked taffeta in a white color I used white satin and quilted it in a diamond design. In the quilted groves, I sewed the pearls on by hand. For the record, I can than the first three disks of season one of Arrow for getting me in my pearl sewing. It would be miserable without it. XD

I plan on quilting another part of the costume so it can look the same way as the jacket, but I’m not sure when/if I’ll be able to do it. When I quilted the jacket, I did it on my sewing machine before it broke. Until my machine is fixed, the only way to make the quilting on the other parts of the costume is to do it by hand. And I’m not happy about it. Correction, my hand is not happy about it. The rest of me is happy because it means I can watch more Arrow. 😉

There are problems with the jacket, but they’re mostly picky “Your costume isn’t accurate to the reference photo!” problems. If you see me wearing this costume and don’t have the reference photo nearby, it won’t matter very much. 🙂

I think that’s about it for the bolero jacket! Next part is the bodice. I already started to work on it prior to working on the jacket, so all the pieces are cut out and some are already sewn together. It should take time to make, but not that much.