Sooo why did I choose Garnet? Well to be honest I've wanted to cosplay as her ever since I got into cosplaying, but never had the skills, guts or money to! So after a year of cosplaying I found that there was a FFIX being held at expo and instantly thought 'Hmm, I wonder if I could pull off Garnet *ponders*' and thus I have made a Garnet cosplay xD. It helps that FFIX is one of my favourite games ;D Plus I wanted a real challenge, her coronation dress seemed perfect and plus I could use my own hair ohohoho

Materials used:
- 5-6m of polyester stretched [not so stretchy though xD] satin
- Boning
- Craft Foam
- Bake and Bend Sculpey
- Fimo
- Metal chains
- Heart shaped pendant
- Silver string
- Acrylic paints
- Glue gun

So the making:
For the crown it took me 8 attempts to get right. I used a variety of different materials such as fimo, das, hot glue and bake and bend sculpey. In the end I made my final crown out of bake and bend sculpey, the centre out of fimo and backed it with a piece of wire and a helluva lot of hot glue! Then I glued it onto a plastic headband, painted the crown grey and finally glued on the chains [which constantly gets tangled up lol xD]... I must say the crown gave me the biggest pain xD

At first I wanted to make the bodice and skirt seperately... til I saw better reference pictures and noticed that they weren't seperate at all! But I bought new fabric anyways as my second attempt at the bodice was hideously shiny! [However I did use the old bodice for an underlayer to make the dress more fitted and warmer ^_^ So the fabric was not wasted!] We went up to Trago Mills and I bought a ton of the fabric I have now which isn't too shiny ^__^ I actually used my first pattern for the bodice... Believe me it took me ages to try and figure out what to do... I used McCalls 5321 for the bodice and then lengthened the bodice loooads to make it a one piece! The pattern was then embroidered on, which was my own design because the reference pictures were terrible! Even after watching the FMVs loads it was still nearly impossible to see the pattern on her bodice and skirt clearly! I just did the best I could to follow the references ^_^;

The underskirt was be just fiddling around with it hoping for the best, which led to a VERY messy train xD So I had to shorten it loads - the train is now fairly neat but not as neat as I'd like... I can't be bothered to fix it now though otherwise I may end up making the underskirt shorter than the overskirt! XDD So I just painted on the gold details which was my own design, I started off using a stencil... this proved to be a hassle though so after about 5-8 prints I just painted them on by hand, I'm suprised it looks somewhat okay ahaha!

The armwarmer type things was a very lucky estimate! I just got a piece of scrap fabric, measured the top of my arm, and blasted it through the sewing machine not even taking care to see if it'd fit or not! And it actually did fit me perfectly XDD Once again I embroidered a pattern onto the armwarmers

Next was the armbands, I made them out of craft foam - Whoooo! I'm such a cheapstake! 8D Painted with acrylics and glued on the chains... the armbands were my own frickin' design as well... seriously it's so hard to find decent references of the odd things! D<

The rest of the jewelery were hand made also. The crown for the necklace was made from fimo, the waistband was made from half bake and bend sculpey and half fimo with string attached. Then finally I borrowed two rings from my friend as I found at the very last minute that Garnet does indeed have a ring on each middle finger! *shakes fists* I hate wearing jewelery >_>;

Last was the shoes, oh boy, I had a lot of trouble finding the suitable shoes for a cheap price! I WAS just gonna borrow special-pleb's Esther shoes... But they were way too big for me and it was physically impossible to walk in them even with fabric stuffed inside! So I ended up using my ballet shoes XD