Arya Stark cosplay — jerkin (part 4: edging)

← Part 3: Lacing

[reference images] • [my Arya cosplay] • [more Arya tutorials]

Sorry for the huge delay between posts! Don't you hate how life gets in the way of more important things, like cosplay?

So at long last, here it is: The edging tutorial! I thought this would be a quick task, but it took me nearly ten hours in total. So don't put it off to the last minute like I did! And pick a good show to marathon (I picked The Tudors, because... costume porn).

materials

Here's what you'll need for this section of the tutorial:

• Measuring tape
• Thin pleather or leather (doesn't have to be the right color)
• Thread the same color as your webbing
• Pins
• A sewing machine, unless you want this to take 100 hours
• Paper & pen

planning

Start by measuring all the sides of your pieces and marking them down on a diagram for easy reference. (You can see that there are question marks next to some of my measurements on the sleeves; this is because I put off lacing that weird gusset piece for about 8 million years. I'll go over how to do that piece in this blog.)

Then, cut strips of pleather to all of these lengths. Your strips should be about 2" thick (I cut all of mine significantly too thick, which wasn't a problem because I had more than enough pleather, and I'd rather be safe than sorry) and you should tack 2-4" onto the length of each strip if you have enough material for it, just to give yourself leeway.

sleeve gussets

I put this off for so long (thus why this isn't part of the "lacing" tutorial) which ended up being stupid because even though figuring out what on earth was going on in photos was difficult, the actual construction of the gussets (I guess that's what I'm calling them) was extremely easy.

step 1: Stitch and backstitch a few times over the ends of your gusset pieces, so they don't fray! This isn't imperative but unless you're extremely confident in the exactness of your edging and lacing, I think it's a good idea.

step 2: Lace the gusset to one half of the sleeve about halfway up. Then, lace the other half of the gusset to the other half of your sleeve the same way, so that if laid flat, the two halves of the sleeves lay over one another (see images; this is extremely hard to explain in words!)

step 3: Now line up the two halves of the sleeves, which will require bending the gusset. Lace the rest of the sleeve together as far as you can, as if the gusset weren't there. This will leave a gap between the gusset and the sleeve, where your lacing is a little stretched out. As weird as that looks, that's correct. This will allow you more freedom of arm movement (important for a water dancer!)

sewing

Okay, no putting it off any longer — time to sew that edging on! This is the part that takes forever, so pull up Netflix and settle in. For some of you, this method may be obvious, but I'm going to go ahead and explain it with a ton of photos anyway!

step 1: Pin the pleather to the webbing with the right sides together. I favored using too many pins over too few, just because the webbing can wiggle around so much due to how loosely it's laced up. (I spaced the pins out more when binding a vertical edge.) Sew this line straight across, making sure to give yourself enough of a seam allowance that your webbing fraying won't endanger the structural stability of the edge.

step 2: Fold the pleather back from your sewn edge, and tuck the excess under so you can't see the wrong side of the pleather from the front. Depending on how wide you cut your pleather strips, you might need to trim them for this step. (I trimmed about 3/4" off of every strip during this step.) Pin it in place.

Make sure that your pins from the back aren't going through the pleather on the front (instead, they should be just below it, like this). Your thread is the color of your webbing so that it will blend in with the webbing, since the edging on Arya's jerkin has no visible seams. This means you have to be very careful NOT to sew over the pleather on the front side when you're sewing from the back!

This is optional, but I found that it looked neater when I just sewed the back of the edging over the strips of webbing, rather than doing a straight line all the way across. It also reduced my risk of accidentally sewing over the front of the edging and having a visible seam. (Don't worry if you mess up! I did a ton of stitch pulling during the edging because I kept sewing over the front of the pleather.)

You'll want to do this for all the edges on the body of the jerkin except the bottom edge. The bottom of Arya's jerkin has a slightly different binding. (Also hold off on the sleeves, because those are a bit more complicated as well.)

step 3: Once you've done this for all the edges, you'll want to finish the corners where the strips of pleather meet. I did this by hand-sewing in a thread that matched the pleather (although I ultimately painted over the pleather, so the color of that thread didn't end up mattering).

step 4: The bottom! As you can see in this reference photo, the bottom edge of Arya's jerkin is about 1" tall, versus the thinner binding on the rest of the garment. This is also the only place on the binding where there are visible seams.

Start by pinning a 2"-ish strip of pleather to the front of the jerkin, with the pleather's wrong side against the jerkin's right side. Sew a straight seam along the upper edge of the pleather, where you pinned it, as close to the edge as you can get.

Once that was done, I sewed a quick seam straight across the bottom just to anchor the pleather to the webbing, and gave the bottom a quick trim to make sure it was neat and even for the next step.

step 5: Then just do the same binding we've been doing this whole time, layered over this wide strip of pleather. (I don't have a photo of this step... I was in the home stretch and was powered by adrenaline!)

You will end up with something like this:

step 6: The sleeves! You'll do the edging on these the same as on the rest of the jerkin, except that when it comes to the gussets, you'll want to include both the ends of the gusset strips and the flat edge of the strips in your edging. This means you'll have to create a sharp corner with your edging at the edge of each gusset strips, resulting in a (warped and misshapen) rectangular bit jutting out of the sleeve. This will fit into that rectangular hole in your body piece, where the sleeve goes.

lacing... again

Dang it, we're never done lacing, are we?? Now you'll have to lace the sleeves to the body, and lace the shoulders together. From reference images, you can tell that the shoulders are anchored with a single loop (I messed up mine a little; you can see that the neckline of the jerkin is one continuous binding, but I split mine, so I just anchored it with two loops). This is also how the outside of the sleeves are joined, although the sleeves have just one loop, and the tie is visible on the outside.

Don't worry if your sleeve is a little small for your jerkin body like mine was; there's a lot of pucker at the bottom of the sleeve anyway because of the gusset, so if you have to manhandle your sleeve into fitting, you really won't be able to tell on the finished product.

You're almost done now!! Your jerkin should, at this point, be fully wearable. All it needs now is eyelets for the front lacing (which you can use metal eyelets for if you like; Arya's are hand-sewn. I haven't done mine yet) and a hell of a lot of distressing!

Hope this was helpful! Next up will be a blouse tutorial, and after that a tutorial about distressing. Make sure you're subscribed to my website to get updates when the next blog goes up!