Ho-Oh Progress

So I've been working on some details for my Ho-Oh gijinka, with the eventual goal being to enter this cosplay into some competitions. I've been beading a Rainbow Feather/Wing onto the bottom of the back, inspired by the Rainbow Wing item from Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal. It's my first beading/embroidery project like this, the closest thing I've done before is the beading on the bra piece, which wasn't nearly as complicated. I was also sure to (fairly accurately) keep track of how many hours everything took.

About half an hour of work; I'm slow

 I started by drawing the feather on a piece of paper and pinning the paper to the fabric. I've seen progress photos from other cosplayers that basically do this, but they use patterning paper or tissue paper, which makes sense, it's thinner, but I didn't have any, so I went with binder paper. I sewed the beads on top of the paper just on all of the lines.

After tearing away the paper

 After finishing the outline, I tore the paper away. It was a little nerve-wracking because I kept worrying that the strings were going to break. It worked out though, just like I thought it would, the holes in the paper from the needle and thread made sort of perforated edges and made the paper pretty easy to tear. I had to pull some small pieces of paper out from under the beads with tweezers. Then I cleaned up the lines, basically by running a string through all of them. I made a little diagram thing that maybe explains a little better. I hope it makes sense.

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With cleaned-up lines

 Then the hard part began, filling it in. I didn't have an embroidery hoop (yet), so it's kind of messy, and because the fabric kept bending, I made too many rows of beads, so it curves a little bit. All things considered though, I think I did pretty good!

10.5 hours of beading

 
And I'm nearly done now! Eventually I borrowed an embroidery hoop, which helped me speed up so much! I'd still like to clean up the edges some, there are parts sticking out that I'd rather not, but other than that, yippie!

Twenty-two hours later...

Also, I re-did the chain on my headpiece. I don't have any close-up pictures of what it looked like before, but basically I changed the chain to a more detailed one and added a chain across the top to help keep it centered. I was worried that the extra detailing would be too overwhelming, but after messing around with it, I decided it looked much better than before.

Of course it sits funny on the wig head.