Dungeon of Elements V2 is being released on Steam today! This is exciting news and I’m going to be playing it for the rest of the afternoon. In honor of this event, I’ve decided to do a quick post on making the DOE Alchemist I wore to PAX East.

This is my Alchemist character, Katilist. She is wearing the Oceanic Mantle with an Aquatic Rod and Tri-orb as her off-hand. It’s a really pretty build and wanted to re-create it.

Step One: Find Fabric

The fabric on this costume is supposed to look like water and I couldn’t find anything like it in stores or online, so I custom designed my own fabric on the website Fabric-On-Demand. I started with a JPEG I found of swirling water and photo-shopped it until I had the perfect colors. It arrived in 10 days and I was ready to go.

Step Two: Skirt

This was my first time making ruffles, and I had no idea where to start making a pattern. So, I found a pattern that I thought I could customize for my needs; Simplicity 2693 was perfect! I’d never worked with a patterned fabric before, so I spent a lot more time piecing together the pattern pieces than I should have.

Once the pieces were cut out, and put together I realized I was out of time and didn’t have anything to show for it but three unfurled ruffles. My friend Daria came over and helped me finish assembling the top of the skirt and putting in a zipper. Bias tape created the dramatic line on the edge of the ruffles and was really easy to put on. I then cut a long rectangle of my remaining fabric to make the under layer of the dress for the final ruffle. I would have liked to make the last layer fuller, but I ran out of fabric. One problem with making your own custom fabric is that you can’t just run to the store and pick up more.

Step Three: Under-Bust Corset

I was out of time -at the hotel and supposed to leave the room for the con in an hour- out of time; so I cheated. Instead of starting from scratch, I sewed a piece of my fabric onto a Frederick’s of Hollywood under-bust corset I already had. I cut the fabric to lay over the corset and folder over the top and bottom. I hand stitched the fabric to the top and bottom of every rib of the corset. My friend, Liz Gmaz, showed me this trick and it’s great because I can undo it and re-use the corset if I want.

Step Four: Sea Shells and Netting

I found a fish net top on Amazon that closely resembled the picture. It even came with tiny underwear! But, the sea shells were challenging. I tried using real sea shells at first, but they were too heavy and I didn’t have a good way of attaching them. They were also a bit small…

Instead, I found a cheap plastic sea shell bra and painted it to look more like real sea shells. The shells are hot glued to an adhesive bra so the shells just stick to my cleavage. Which seemed like a really good solution, until I was at PAX and it was hot and I was wearing it for hours. Apparently, adhesive bras tend to pop off when you sweat a little, which made for some interesting times at PAX. I later went back and used the string that came with the sea shell bra to wrap around my back and add a little support. I had to use a sharpie to paint the string black so it would match the fishnet.

Step Five: Accessories

The arm cuffs were made by making a sleeve out of my remaining fabric and sewing a shiny lace overlay over it. I thought this created the “spun crushed sea shell” look from the armor description. I bought teal gloves to wear under the sleeves. Gloves are really hard to sew and come in a variety of colors on Amazon, so I rarely make them. Old boots were spray painted to match the gloves, but they didn’t dry in time, so I ended up wearing a pair of brown boots to PAX. The belt was a piece of brown fabric I had left over from my Yang costume.

Step Six: Weapons

The weapons for this costume were really easy. The Tri-orb is assembled out of a 3 Styrofoam balls and a small piece of wood I picked up at Michael’s. I used clear plastic rod I picked up at a plastic distributor to connect the two.

I painted the wood to match my gloves and put several layers of Gesso on the Styrofoam balls so they could be spray painted. Again, I was tight on time so my friend Mike Ahrens came over and helped me finish. He spray painted the balls and drilled a few holes in the wood to put the plastic rods in. It took a few tries to get the placement and angles of the holes right. I then glued the pieces together with super glue and they were ready to go. They didn’t look as good as I had hoped in pictures, but they looked great in person and had a real floating effect. I attached it to my glove using a magnet, so the weight of the Tri-orb would be offset.

The Aquatic Rod is a broom stick with 3 wooden rings on it. Mike sprayed the staff white for me and the ends gray. Then we hot glued the pieces together. I ran out of time before PAX to finish painting. Later, I was able to go back and add some purple shading to the staff.

Step Seven: Have fun!

Once I put it all together, it turned out to be really accurate. This is a really comfortable costume and so much fun to wear with the ruffles! I’m lucky I had friends to come help me finish. It was starting to feel like an episode of Heroes Of Cosplay at the end, when I was up all night trying to finish and barely made it to the convention.

Step Eight: Go back and make it even better!

While at PAX, I found out that Frogdice, the creators of DOE, is going to use this armor for their next game, Stash, and that they would have a Dryad character.

I re-did the costume as a Dryad for a photo shoot. Here are some pictures I took with photographer Patrick Calder. You can see that good photo editing can take a costume from good to amazing. He added some blast effects and was able to get rid of the plastic rods so my Tri-orb was really floating!

You can find more of my pictures on my Facebook Page.

Dungeon of Elements is a classic dungeon crawler using a Dr. Mario-like style of combat. Download it today on Steam!