I just end up liking certain characters, even if I know nothing about them. Freya is a great example of this. I'm far from being a gamer and have never played FF9 or Chrono Cross for that matter. But then I got an art book for FF9 as a gift and I just thought Freya was so cool looking. Images of how I would construct a costume started flooding my brain.

Little did I realize how many problems I was creating for myself when I chose a really cool gray fabric for the skin. I wanted something that was sort of scaly looking. The material is actually textured with small bumps, making it appear quite a bit like reptile skin up close. The problem with it was that it didn’t stretch, which would make things very hard later on.

I started with the shirt, using McCall's pattern 8827. Next was the jacket, using several yards of red raincoat material. It was the perfect shade and sort of glossy like in many of the rendered scenes in the game make it appear to be. I made a pattern and made the jacket, which turned out to be too short (I still don't know what I did wrong) but it looked pretty good anyway. I bought large eyelets and put them in around the cuffs. I used some white cotton curtain braid that I dyed for the rope stuff that goes through the eyelets. The huge collar is trimmed in white ribbon. I forgot to put in wire around the bottom when I was making it. The bottom is supposed to flair out so without it, the jacket doesn't quite look right in most shots.

I made the knee breeches next, with elastic trim at the bottom and green maxi piping where they frill out a bit. The waistband has a drawstring. There's a hole in the back for the tail armature to stick through.

The feet required a trip to Payless to get women's high heels that I chopped the heels off of. My plan was to just walk on my toes the whole time in costume to give it a digitigrade look. I added sculpted foam toes with Friendly Plastic claws and covered it all in the material I decided to use for the skin. This was my first hint that I may have chosen the wrong material for the skin. Since it doesn’t stretch at all, it was amazingly difficult to cover the feet in it and not have wrinkles all over the place.

Next came the leg coverings, made out of brown vinyl with heavy-duty zippers on the inside of each leg. There is a black vinyl band I sewed around the front opening where the feet will come through. They leg coverings slide on over the feet and then you can step into the shoe and zipper them up. I shaped four oval foam pieces and covered them in the skin color material. These went through 4 oval cut outs I made in the vinyl and were sewn in place. They came out perfect.

Now, onto the crest. This required leather from Tandy Leather. I got all the buckles and dyes there as well. In most cases where I could hide it, I used small washers and rivets to hold the harness together. In other places I used snaps. The crest itself is some thick brown material. I used some iron on adhesive for all the colored sections and the designs of the crest. The sides have black vinyl that is folder over and sewn into place.

The shoulder pads are Plexiglas that I cut into the right shape with my Dremel and then heated in the over while they were resting on coffee cans. They melted to conform to the shape. When they were cool, I just spray-painted them. I glued them to leather strips with a 2 part adhesive and those strips then snap onto the harness.

The hat required a lot of pattern making trial and error. I ended up using the raincoat material and backing it with iron-on interfacing for stiffness. The wings are plastic mesh that I covered in a loose sheath of the same shape then stuffed on the outside. They got sewed onto the hat. The hat also has a 1/4" elastic band added in after I discovered the weight of the wings pulled the hat off my head if I moved more than 1" at a time. The cravat is basically just a scarf that I tied in the front and let the ends hand out.

The tail is 16ga. steel wire covered in brown satin and stuffed. The gloves are the skin material with hidden zippers to close them. The nails are Friendly Plastic. I colored them slightly with a marker and wiped the tips so they would be pink by the cuticle but fade to white about half way down the nail. The Wig was the only thing I didn't make. That was from witchwigs.com.

The mask was the hardest part. Basically I ran out of time to make a new mold so I used the mold I had for a fox mask and pulled a new mask. I sculpted some friendly plastic on it to make it look right. I went through several frustrating tries getting the material to go on without showing wrinkles. I used mostly spray adhesive very sparingly so it would not soak through and leave a mark. I really wish I had used spandex from the beginning because this process drove me nuts getting it right. For the eyes, I drew out their shape on paper and copied it to a sheet of Plexiglas and cut them out. I painted them white on the back. The iris is a lighting gel and the pupil is auto tint, so you have a descent area to see out of. I cut some black vinyl to make an eyelash shape and to cover up where I jury-rigged the Plexiglas onto a mask that was intended for those shapes to fit there.