Are you a Game of Thrones fan wanting to cosplay the first of her name? I've created a dress inspired by Daenerys Targaryen out of fabrics from CosplayFabrics.com. Read on for the details!
I chose to use Cosplay Fabric's Hand-spun Indian Khadi and Basketweave fabrics for this project. Both are materials you'd see used in Star Wars costumes, but I've chosen to use them in a Game of Thrones inspired cosplay to show some of the versatility these materials have for projects based on movies & TV.
Indian Khadi, in particular, shows up in a lot of film costumes. It is a premium material and has a beautiful, hand-spun texture. Cosplay Fabrics carries this hard to find material in several colors. If you are looking for an easy to work with material to add texture to your next cosplay, consider splurging on this.
My first step was to draft a pattern and test it out in muslin. Once I was happy with it, it’s time to cut out the real thing! Working with the Hand-Spun Indian Khadi was like driving a luxury car. It is very easy to cut and sew. I assumed it might have some fraying issues, but I was wrong. I probably could have gotten away with just pinking the edges, but overlocked it anyways. When working with the basketweave, overlocking was a must. It will unravel on you if you don’t use some sort of stitch on the edges, so zig zag or overlock this material before constructing your costume.
I chose to use basketweave on small portions of this dress because the costume it is based on has a considerable amount of dragonscale smocking on it. While I’d like to try out this unique type of smocking at some point, for this costume I’m aiming to show off alternative construction options. Using textured material is a beginner friendly alternative to tackling advanced techniques and a time saver. It isn't screen accurate to Daenery's dress but in most photos it creates a look-alike texture after beading is added to it. If you'd like to learn how to create dragonscale smocking, the embroidery artist for Game of Thrones has a wonderful blog post on how to do it!
After the dress was constructed and lined, I got to work on the dragon designs on the shoulders. For this, I opted to bead the design on using matte black magatama and seed beads.
To create the design, I first put down basting stitches in a contrasting thread to act as guides.
I alternated seed beads and magatama beads randomly in rows, and repeated the process until the design looked right to me.
For the metal bar clasp on the dress I shaped something out of Worbla scraps and painted the raw material with 3 different acrylic paints. I used Satin Black as a base color, covered the piece in Pewter paint, and lightly brushed on Silver to highlight it. I used gloss Mod Podge to seal the paint. After it was dry, I sewed it on to the finished dress.
I created Daenery’s hair style using an Arwen Lacefront Wig in Titanium Blonde from Arda Wigs. I shortened it in the back a bit first. The front hairline was pulled back into a few inches of french braids and tied off in the back with clear elastics after braiding.
So of course after I finished constructing this dress HBO released images of the actual costume and it is so different! When you have only a few seconds of time to work with getting references for a costume this is bound to happen. Some of the fun of cosplay is adapting a character to fit your look and skill level, so you don’t have to get hung up on ‘perfect likeness.’ Making it your own can be more fun and interesting than just pure copying. Maybe someday I will alter it to be more like the real thing. For the sake of this blog post and photoshoot, I’m happy with the results!
Big thanks to CosplayFabrics.com for providing me with the fabrics to make this dress! If you have questions for me about working with these materials, leave them in the comments. Thanks for reading!
Post Update:
This post has been relocated in its original form to my new website hosting in January 2021. Previous comments on the post were not migrated.