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...