Korra Cosplay: Armbands/Bracers

Believe it or not, progress has been made on my Korra cosplay.

In my last post I made Korra's pants; shortly after that I made the apron thing (haven't uploaded photos yet). At the moment it ties up at the back. I will probably put some snaps or belt carriers on the pants to hold it together.

One of my kind friends gave me some boots that are pretty much perfect. The material on the outside is plain fabric, so it will be easy to sew into. They also slouch down a bit, so I can put some suede of the right colour on it and it should have the baggy feel of Korra's boots.

I've also made a dozen or so muslins for Korra's top - I'll dedicate a whole post to that soon.

In the meantime I distracted myself by making Korra's armbands.

I didn't feel confident that I could sew some armbands that would stay up, so I opted to make something a little more solid - some fabric bracers.

I grabbed some black craft foam (you can pick this up from any craft store - I got mine from Spotlight) and some material the same colour as her apron. This fabric is made of stretchier stuff than the apron is, so it should be able to conform to the rounded arm shape.

I used Ados glue to bind the fabric to the foam - the stuff would seep through, so I only glued on the underside of the bracer.

Now I have a bunch of these things, called grommets or eyelets or what have you. I'm pretty sure that I only have the one half of the little things. As you can see in this tutorial the grommet consists of two parts - the grommet and the washer. I was missing the washers.

So I did the unthinkable and smooshed the grommets together. You can't really tell that I did this because the eyelets will be located under the bracer and you won't be able to see the extra metal inside of them.

Here's my test piece. The Ados bonded really well - I'm glad I didn't have to run out and grab any fabric glue.

Here's the final pieces with the fabric glued on. Making the pattern is pretty straightforward. Measure around your wrist and around your arm where the bracer will come up to. Then measure the length. Remove a centimetre from the horizontal measurements so you leave a gap for the ties.

After inserting the grommets. The fabric is a little wrinkly, but remember this will be stretched around my wrist so the fabric will even out.

After adding some string and tying it on. I think I need to lace it another way - the wrist and the other end should be pulling horizontally, not downwards.

The one part that is missing is the white trim. Since I opted to make bracers, I couldn't just attach some bias binding or white ribbing to the outside.

Since the string is kind of scratchy, so I thought I might make a couple of tight fabric wristbands and put them on underneath the bracers.

Pretty happy with the effect here. I'm wearing them around to make sure the trim doesn't slip below the bracer. To fix this I would add snaps or some velcro to secure it in place.

Rarr! I feel strong!

---

Next post: Korra's shirt, part one