Embroidering Korra

The devil is in the details, they say, and for Korra that really proved true for me. Since you can't really see it when the costume is on, I feel like this deserves attention. 

I knew from the moment I decided to do this costume that I wanted to add embroidery to it. There is nothing in my mind that says "indigenous people" quite like some form of decorative embroidery. Of course, there's nothing like that in the original artwork, so if I was going to add any in, I wanted to do so subtly. 

Looking at what I would embroidery, I knew it had to include the Water Tribe mon. I considered moons and fish and eventually settled on two designs, one for the top and bottom of her forearm bands. I wanted the thread to be close to the same color as the background so that it didn't break the lines of the original costume, just add depth and detail.

The difficulty became that I already knew those were going to be leather, but I'd never embroidered on leather before. In fact, from some internet research, very few people had- and most of those only by machine. 

Then came a ridiculously long period of trial and error. I'm putting what I learned from those trials into a series of posts about how to embroider on leather by hand, the first of which went out last fall. 

I do want to return and add the rest of the details to the armbands. I was rather proud of how it all came out, especially since I had to do so much experimenting to make it happen. 

Even though others may not notice it, I'm glad I thought to add in little details like this. I know they're there, and that's really all that matters.

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