Pacific Rim: Sasha Kaidanovsky

Because apparently my embroidered version of the Cherno Alpha eagle wasn’t enough fun, I felt the need to make a replica of Sasha Kaidanovsky’s jacket. Generally speaking, it was fairly easy. Just a lot of thrifting and safety pins.

Front of costume

Back of costume

The jackets used look pretty much like standard green army jackets, though in some photos, like the second one above, they look like they have a leather texture. I went with what was cheapest and looked good (as I usually do). If you have a military surplus store nearby, you can find these kinds of jackets anywhere between $20-40. I found mine for $25 at a thrift store in Montreal (where I was living for the summer). I found the faux-fur collar for $5 at another thrift store (Eva B: highly recommend that place). The jacket was a bit big, so I took it in on the sides and shortened the sleeves. If it’s only a little too big, you can get away with not taking it in. Big is still pretty accurate. I’m tiny and the smallest jacket I could find was a men’s’ medium, so I was swimming in it. The last details, other than the eagle design (more on that later) would be the stars on the shoulders. There are 2 on each shoulder and if you search “gold star appliqué” on eBay, you can find something that will work. I used 1 ¼ inches which I bought for $5.

Thrift store where I bought the jacket

Here it is in store before taking it apart

Inside of the thrift store

Outside of Eva B, where I bought the collar

Army surplus stores are also a good resource

    To start off with, finding reference photos of the complete jacket/costume is not easy. The actual safety pin details are not shown in the movie and the only full picture of the design available doesn’t give you an idea of how the eagle is positioned on the jacket and how big it is. The only hint I have is from this photo below where you can just see the tip of the eagle’s wing. From there you can pretty much guess that the eagle is positioned relatively high on the back such that the eagle’s wings span slightly lower than shoulder-to-shoulder.

the red bracket shows where the tips of the feathers are. The two red arrows show that there are two stars on her shoulder. Also a good view to get a sense of her hair style. 

 So what I did was I ordered the smallest safety pins available on ebay (19mm/size 00 if you’re curious, and no I couldn’t find any smaller. Wish I could.) You can get 1,000 for about $10-13 and I needed about 1,200 safety pins for the whole thing. 

This bag is 1000 safety pins. Doesn't look like much, does it?

Then I enlarged the photo of the design so that the pins in the photo were roughly the same size as the ones I had. The thing is, the eagle design uses different sizes of safety pins. The ones used for the head were smaller than the ones used for the body. If I made my pins line up to the ones on the head, the enlarged design would have been way too big for my jacket. So I matched my pins up with the ones on the central part of the body. It took a few tries, but eventually I got the right size. You might have to redesign it with fewer feathers or fewer stripes on the torso, but my philosophy is its always better to make it look good rather than making it 100% movie accurate. Depending on your body type, movie accurate doesn’t always look good. Like I said, I’m pretty tiny, so I wouldn’t be able to have a jacket large enough for a movie-accurate eagle design.

Another thing you might want to keep in mind is the eagle design in the movie is very oh-so-slightly crooked. Not a big deal in general, but on the jacket I’m using, there is a back seam which made it very obvious when something wasn’t symmetrical. By the time I realized this, I was roughly 800 pins into the design before I decided to rip them all out. Fun times. Anyways, to fix this I just copied half of the design at the size I liked it at and then traced its mirror image. Tada: symmetrical eagle.

First try: too small :(

Second try: Crooked! Also too low

Third try: juuuust right. 

If you look at the movie photo close enough, you can actually see there is gold paint underneath the safety pins. This fills in the spaces between the pins and makes the design look fuller. My gold paint of choice is Jacquard "true gold" acrylic. It’s more expensive than most gold acrylics, but it’s worth it. The cheapest I could find it was for $5 on ebay.

Finished version with gold paint under the pins. Haven't sewn the sleeves back on yet

Hairstyle was another thing that was difficult to find a reference photo, but behold!

The best darn view of the back of her head!

So here you can see her hair is sectioned off in three parts. The middle/top sectioned is gathered at the crown to form a regular braid and the two side sections are french braided.

Also another neat detail about her costume is the bling

I mean damn girl, look at those rings

Similar cheap ones can be bought for a dollar or two on ebay, but I recommend dousing them in clear nail polish else they will turn your fingers green. She also wears dog tags and a thick twisted gold chain.

Now, I almost missed this part, but it turns out that "Cherno Alpha" is written in Russian on her left sleeve. 

This is actually the only scene in the movie where you an see the details on the back of their jackets. Its only there for a second and you barely notice it.

Here is an example of the logo using the Russian script

Below are photos of my finished product! Interested in having one of your own? Check out my Etsy shop for details. Follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, and/or Instagram!

Pacific Rim: Cherno Alpha embroidery

The costume shenanigans continue! This time: in Costa Rica! (strangely enough, not having a sewing machine doesn't stop me)

So Pacific Rim is one of my favorite movies. Definitely my favorite movie of  2013 anyways. After doing some small embroidery details on my Arwen chase scene costume (see previous post) and after being inspired by Michele Carragher's amazing gallery, I thought I'd try to make a larger embroidery design. Go big or go home, right? (In the case of Pacific Rim: "Go big or go extinct!")

There are some really cool details on the costumes of the pilots of the jaeger Cherno Alpha. If you're not familiar with Pacific Rim, a jaeger is basically a giant robot. The pilots are Sasha and Aleksis Kaidonovky.

I mean come on, look at how cool they are

and this is Cherno Alpha. Aint she purty?

However the costumes in question are these ones below:

I believe this is from the art book for the movie

This design is on Sasha's jacket

Aaand this one is Aleksis'. If you look carefully at their jaeger suits, you can see this decal painted on their shoulder

The Cherno Alpha symbol

I decided on the eagle design because that's closer to the symbol for Cherno Alpha (unfortunately I didn't have access to an image of the Cherno Alpha symbol while I was designing the embroidery). As you can see in the above images, the designs on the back of their jackets are made out of safety pins. About $50 worth of safety pins. Embroidery might take a whole lot longer, but I didn't spend more than $10 on materials (I found all my materials at your generic local craft store).

I drew the design directly onto the denim vest I was working on (not one of my better plans, but oh well). Sadly I don't have many photos of the whole process, but it took me roughly three months to complete the whole thing.

Stage One. I freehanded the design on the jacket so its kind of lopsided

Above is the finished first layer. I used two tones of yellow/gold to give the design some more dimension. I also started to experiment with if and how I wanted to outline the eagle (see the beads on the first feather of the left wing? I decided I didnt like those so I ripped them out.) I also tried to figure out what I wanted to do for the eyes. The big blue bead looked gross so I ripped that out too. If you look at the tail just to the left of the center feather, you can see a metallic copper thread that I started to test out. I ended up going with that one for the outline.

Stage 2

So here you can see I finished the copper thread outline (actually you probably can't see it. It's not super noticeable. If you click on the photo, it will make it larger). I also embroidered some eyes that I liked and a star like in the Cherno Alpha symbol (again, freehanded so kind of lopsided). At the tips of the wings you can see where I started to add beads. They're a sort of brownish-copper color.

And the finished product! Well, as finished as it will get for now. I was wondering if I wanted to continue the beading around the embroidery, but I thought the design might get too busy.

Questions? Comments? Leave 'em here or email me at ghostpulse7@gmail.com!
Until next time...