Yes I Made That Dress: Five Nights at Freddy's

Aside from writing and doing character interviews, I actually have another huge hobby: making costumes.  These entries are meant to be image heavy, going through the different methods I use to make my costumes.  If you have questions about how I do any of it, feel free to ask!

Some history:

My partner discovered Five Nights at Freddy's on tumblr last year and couldn't stop looking up information on it.  Turns out, or those who might not know, it's an indie game where you're basically a security guard at Chuckie Cheese and you have to try and survive the night on limited power while the anamatronics wander the building.  The catch is, if they see you, they'll try and stuff you into a suit like them - which would kill you.  It's a simple horror game, but very effective with making you paranoid about the creatures and the jump scares always get you in the end.

We don't have Steam, or a computer strong enough to play the game, so we ended up watching Marklipier's play through and loved the game.  The idea to cosplay from it followed soon after - as usual - but this time it came with the fun idea of designing them myself and adding little bits of my own style.

(Incidentally I'm calling my style like this 'Patchwork Witch', you'll see more of it in the future.)

I wanted something cute and simple for Freddy and Chica that would be recognizable as the characters, but also could cross into every day wear if I wanted.  Also, as an added challenge to myself, I wanted to buy as few new materials for these outfits as possible. Since these are technically Halloween costumes, I have a tradition around Halloween of altering already made clothes from Savers or using only scrap fabric to build the pieces I need.  It gives the holiday a specific challenge, to see what I can make under limits and forces me to come up with creative ideas I can incorporate overall into my costuming skills.

For these outfits we purchased the tops we both wore and already had Freddy's top hat.  I made both skirts, plus her little fur accessories for Freddy and Chica's bib.  Shoes were found at Savers and awesome creepy makeup purchased at Ulta.

Making the Dress

The main part of the two outfits are the skirts.  I started by grabbing every piece of yellow and brown fabric I had, patterned and otherwise, and laid them out to pick the ones I want.  For the Freddy skirt we found enough fabric to make the ruffle and bought the main brown fabric and a sting of fur for the edge.   For Chica, all the yellow fabric was found and the ruffle is made from scraps of a bunch of different yellow patterns all sewn together in one long strip.

If you look in the Chica picture you can also see the pattern I used for the Chica skirt.  Feddy's skirt was a simple rectangle with an elastic waist band. 

Both finished skirts:

Next came the props!  Since we didn't have a Bonnie and Foxy to cosplay with, I bought two stuffed animals off of Amazon and gave them teenie alterations.  Bonnie got a red bow while Foxy got an eyepatch. 

And then there was the pizza box.... 

My 'real life' job has a cafe on the main floor of the office building, so I was able to get a blank pizza box from them.  Then we search online for the most official looking pizza box style art for the game.  We finally decided on the design by NinjaInk and I printed out a copy large enough to fit on the pizza box.  The next part was to slowly cut shape by shape out of the picture I printed so that I could draw the design on the pizza box in marker. 

The final design and the plushies?  All ready to play! (of course with a credit on the pizza box for the original artist)

Back to the sewing, it was time to work on Chica's bib, which I decided to make an apron for the skirt.  Once again I used scrap white fabric I had, some random lace I had lying around and some pink ribbon to make it look a bit more fancy.  The words are drawn on the apron in fabric marker because I didn't have the time to applique them and wanted the 'sketched' look instead.  Sadly means I have to make sure I don't get the apron wet, but it comes off the skirt, so that shouldn't be an issue. 

At the last minute we decided that Freddy needed one more accessory, and I had some fake fur lying around, so we made her two small hand pieces with fur and some clip in ears. 

A special shout out here to my wifey and her amazing makeup skills!  She's been learning a lot in the last year and came up with her own Freddy makeup.  She also inspired me to do a broken doll look for Chica.

Finally, with the purchase of cute tops from the local thrift shop, the costumes were done and it was time for con shennanigans!  

These costumes were premiered at Youmacon 2014, and I'm sure that won't be the last time you see them.  Next convention we'll be at this year is Anime Milwaukee in Wisconsin.  If you're going, look us up!  Next costumes?  We have several coming in 2015 year, so you'll just have to wait and see!

You can follow our cosplay hijinks on this journal, or on our cosplay pages!

SnowCosplays  BrichibiCosplays