Even literal spawns of Hell need a little help looking fabulous every once in a while!

In a series of unfortunate events, someone ended up needing a cape for his amazing Spawn cosplay the night before the convention. So with 6 yards of fabric, a Hello Kitty Sewing machine, and a few hours in a hotel room, this is what I came up with. I had no real experience making capes and no pattern, but I'm really happy with the finished product!

Special thanks to my friend Hellsfire Cosplay for advice, support, and the awesome weathering job done on it! She also made the axe and all of the armor for his cosplay, and absolutely nailed it!

Photo by the amazing Danny Brown Photography!

(as previously stated, this project was done in about 5 hours in a cramped hotel room late at night. I did the best I could with taking pictures, but they're not the absolute highest quality!)

Step 1: Supplies

These are the supplies I used to make this cape! For reference, the model is approximately 5'6", and the cape just touches the ground.

6 yards of red fabric. I purchased this fabric from Joanns, and the weight was really great for flowing nicely!
1 yard of really stiff interfacing
Matching thread
Skull cape clips and chain. The ones on this cape are the ones made by Wishmaster Capes on Etsy.

Step 2: Cut Panels

I folded the fabric in half and cut 5 panels approximately 54" long. The shape is outlined in green in the picture because you can't really tell from the photo!

All panels were sewn together lengthwise to form a really big almost rectangular piece. I used so much fabric because Spawn needs a cape that can wrap fully around the cosplayer. This meant that the neckline was WAY too big, but that gets fixed in the next step!

Step 3: Pleats & Edge Finishing

Because the neck length was so huge, I needed to make it actually fit around the model in an appropriate way. Instead of taking it in at the seams, I added pleats to the neckline, with most of them on the back panels. The pleats added a cool shape all the way around, and made it flow nicely in the back! The finished neckline is approximately 20" long.

Adding the pleats simply involved folding over a small portion of fabric, pinning it in place, and sewing a seam all the way around to hold it down.

The next step was to finish the edge of the neck. This would usually be solved with an extra strip of fabric after the collar is attached, but because of the time crunch, this wasn't very viable. So I turned over the seam to hide the raw edge, and sewed it down! This turned out to be a really thick seam that my machine struggled through, but the finished product was nice and clean!

Step 4: Collar

I drafted the basic collar shape by figuring out the bottom length based on the length of the neckline, and created a diagonal upwards to create the longer side. The edges of the collar are slightly curved outwards.

I cut 2 identical pieces out of the red fabric, and 1 piece from the interfacing. I basted the interfacing to one of the collar pieces, then sewed all 3 with right sides together.

Because Spawn's collar forms to all sorts of crazy shapes, I wanted to add wire all around the edge. Before trimming my collar's seam allowance, I sewed a second seam parallel to the first to create a sort of channel, and fed wire in between the two seams. After I added the wire, I flipped the whole piece so the right sides were outside. This method of wire worked great overall!

Finally, I sewed the collar to the neckline by flipping the rough edges of the collar inside to create a nice clean inside seam! The cape clips were attached by cutting a small hole for them to go into.

The collar definitely had some issues staying up all day, but it worked really surprisingly well, and lent itself to being easily adjusted.

Step 5: Weathering

The entire edge of the cape was cut, torn, frayed, and painted with watered down acrylic paints to add a weathered look to it. All the work was done by the amazing Hellsfire Cosplay!