Compared to my Joxter costume, Muddler has more pieces of clothing; seven different garments plus the “skin” parts, which include the tail and the ears. From top to bottom, Muddler wears a pot (as a hat), shirt, vest, muffler, trousers, legwarmers and “socks” as shoes. He also has a giant safety pin holding his muffler.
The vest is made from similar brushed cotton as Joxter’s anorak, only deep navy blue. I altered the pattern from the anorak pattern, lined the whole thing leaner and re-styled the hem and the front. We chose to do a normal hem, not a sliced one as seen in the animation. I thought that it would look bit ridiculous after all the effort of making the duo look realistic.
Yoki painted two big plastic buttons brown to imitate wood. The other one act as an attachment, while the other is there for esthetic reasons and also because one of our references showed that there could actually be two of them. As an addition Yoki sewed poppers underneath the second button to secure the attachment.
For the undershirt I chose forest green linen, because of the nice attributes of the material. For the first time I used a ready made pattern for cosplay, because I wanted to make the shirt look like something recognizable. The design of the shirt is from old peasant shirt with button list, low collar and wide cuffs on the sleeves.
The trousers are based on the basic pattern, with straight leg, zipper in the front and a waistband. We had bought beige corduroy because it was on discount on our local fabric store. Obviously it was wrong color. I dyed the fabric based on a hunch with antique grey and extra material to make the color lighter. The result was more than I expected. We ended up using the wrong side as a right because we wanted the trousers look different from Joxter's and because Muddler had already lot going on texture-wise.
The muffler and leg warmers Yoki knit from orange yarn. Label was “Seitsemän veljestä”. The stripes on the leg warmers were achieved by knitting a wrong layer in middle of right layers. The muffler was right trough the whole thing. The safety pin is bended aluminum stick and horrible “molding material”, which is painted pink.
The socks were real pain. I had to redo the pattern twice before Yoki was satisfied. Yes, I’m a type of a person who doesn’t settle for “yeah, they look OK”. The shape of the pattern was achieved by making shoe covers and mixing some glove pattern in them. The material is pale yellow linen, a bit thicker that linen usually is. Inside of the sock is a base shoe, painted yellow so that they would not shimmer trough the light fabric. Before the base shoes were put in the sock, the toes were stuffed with cotton.
The skin parts on the costume are recycled leather. We came to notice that hot glue and basic wood glue works well with leather. We will explore the possibilities with them in the future. The tail is made from two pieces of leather, rolled to form a tail. The seam part we hid underneath gauze, we thought that the tail got pinned in the coffee jar's lid. The tail was sealed with hot glue and sown in the back of the trousers. Inside the tail we put some rice to maki it move more realisticly.
For the ears I made pattern according to references but the scalp was bit harder. In the end I just estimated, taped the pieces together and fitted it on Yoki’s head to find the correct shape and size. I stiched the scalp together with zigzag and reinforced the seams with glue. The ears I zigzagged on the scalp after they were stuffed with cotton and rice. Inside of the ears there are holes were Yoki stuck her ears trough so that they would not be visible from any angle.
The sauce pan in Muddler's head was hammered from an aluminum pot. The handle was replaced by one drawn based on the references. The scale is not right, because if it were Yoki would wham people in their faces. The construction of the handle and the beating of the pot was done by our metal expert Esa.
Specific make-up weren't needed for Muddler. Yoki had basic foundation with eye make-up, emphasis on the lower eye-lid. The whiskers were cut from fishing tackle and attached with mastix.
All the parts from the chest set. Here you can see how the chest itself is constructed from four pieces.
Front.
Back obviously.
