started: Summer 2024 | con debut: Summer-Con 2024 | last worn: ECCC 2025
Helluva Boss did not initially grab me. Notably, neither did Hazbin Hotel, but it only took an additional episode to overcome my lukewarm response to Hazbin, where Helluva Boss demanded a little more investment before returning any enjoyment. The songs do not get good until a little later in my opinion, but the songs I like have earned heavy rotation.
Stolas himself is my clear favorite of the show, equal parts imperious and pathetic.
[the playlist]
This process started with the delusion that I had basically everything I'd need for this costume. Multiple people had suggested to me that I would make a great Stolas, then my friend[1] Kay proposed our first major collaboration, with me as Stolas and Kay as Vassago, who had just been teased in the Season 2 trailer, not yet appearing in any episodes. I had just made a red vest to revamp Alastor, had a flowy white owl-spotted shirt, long gloves, tiny red glasses (also left over from Alastor efforts), a red-lined cape, and some high boots that looked convincingly bird-legged. Basically already achieving a human-disguise Stolas with some makeup, I thought; style the wig and do some kind of tail and I'll be a decent demon-Stolas! Easy.
Kay and I discussed a seemingly somewhat harebrained scheme to make actual-feather tails. This would prove to be a fantastic choice. In the middle stages, while we were paying ~$200 then receiving several cubic feet of feathers in the mail, the sanity of this plan remained an open question.
I was picturing essentially one of those big maribou feather fans for the tail, but after some research determined we would need to start from feathers and figure out some attachment to a belt/ribbon to make it wearable and to position the feathers correctly. Bleached and dyed peacock feathers were long enough and stiff enough for this purpose. Gray and black peacock feathers for Stolas were available but we had to do some dyeing for Vassago. Keeping the heated dye on the 24-inch feathers required a little creative thinking; we ended up using a baking sheet as the only vessel long enough to immerse (still only most of) the feathers.
We worked on the wigs along with the tails, since we wanted to enhance the wigs with some shorter feathers for additional bird-ness. The wig I started with had been intended for Viktor Nikiforov, and I reshaped it into a more swept-back owlish shape, with feathers around the crown for extra volume where his head is widest. I used a few different lengths and textures of feather for variety.
Kay decided on a feathery ponytail to interpret Vassago's feather crest. They trimmed and styled the wig, and glued in short feathers throughout the body of the hair and the longer dyed quill feathers at the base of the ponytail.
After the dye work and alongside the wigs, the tails: we selected and arranged the peacock feathers, trimmed them to length, then glued them into a wide ribbon belt to sit at the waist. The feather shafts themselves, glued close together, provided plenty of structure so that we didn't need any additional stiffening materials. We were a little worried the feather tails would be single-use pieces, but they've been shockingly resilient to the stresses of con attendance. At the time of this writing we've each had to glue back in one or two feathers and I've snapped one more of the longer ones, after five total days of being birds at cons; a very manageable repair rate!
Our next focus was Vassago's jacket, which we interpreted as a blazer with contrast lapels and a high, structured collar. In the interest of time and not overtaxing our current capabilities, Kay ordered an appropriate basic-red-blazer base to modify.
We made a very sensible and limited list for a supply run at Joann Fabrics (RIP queen).
I ripped the collar pieces out of the base, copied the collar stand, measured and copied the attached edge of the collar upper, and used that to create the higher collar with a matching red fabric and very stiff interfacing, and applied gold fabric accent on the top edge. Then we sewed the black contrast fabric onto the faces of the lapels (we did not want to rip out the lapels, so I edge-stitched it on over the red).
We decided to interpret Vassago's star thing as a bowtie because Vivienne Medrano loves bowties. Then we decided these cosplays needed more feathers so we made feather bowties for both. We cut stiff interfacing into a star shape and covered with the same gold satin accent fabric as the edge of the collar, trimmed and arranged some wide feathers to make a bowtie shape, and glued this to a wide ribbon that would fit under the shirt collar.
For Stolas's "bowtie" I decided to attach it to the capelet instead of making a separate piece of neckwear. I found a nice gem and brooch setting and added fluffy gray feathers to the back, then attached this to a sturdy cape clasp.
I had a short red-lined cape already, and thought I would use this, but found a perfect astrology-motif fabric on our Joann run and decided that if I had time by our planned debut date I would make a custom cape. I didn't have a pattern but the fabric isn't very structured anyway so I just draped my tailoring form with it to figure out how to structure it. I marked a length that would show the right amount of tail and cut a nice even half-circle, took in the top a little bit to sit flat on the shoulders, and lined the cape in a fun semi-opaque burgundy.
I initially wanted to make a fur collar/shoulder cape layer thing, kind of a royal ermine fur on the shoulders which seemed like one possible interpretation of the canon cape design. I had a LOT of trouble cutting the faux-fur pieces and sewing the edges of the collar and the shoulders together, and could never make it settle correctly. I remember vividly the depth of despair in the early hours of the morning two or three days before the con, as I lost count of how many times my sewing machine had stalled in the snowfall of slow-floating white filament dispersed by the cutting/ripping of the cursed pelt of microplastics.
By the clarifying light of the next morning, I decided to pivot and make a short stand-collar instead. I draped, pinned, and cut one relatively quickly after the faux-fur ordeal. There's no interfacing in the collar since it didn't seem like it would stick that well during the sewing process; instead I rolled over the fabric a couple of times, so the collar is a little burrito full of stars.
I also made a pretty simple ascot with a matching satin, finishing the edges and sewing some pleats at the back of neck to make it sit nicely.
For Vassago's gloves, Kay found nice flared faux-leather gloves for the right silhouette, and we cut and glued red ribbon and black faux-leather for the stripes.
Kay could not find the right combination of boot shape and color to fit the vision, so they bought off-white go-go boots and had to paint them true white to match the gloves, which was a fun ordeal while I was going through Cape Crisis.
We had some Hellaverse makeup experience from Alastor cosplays and thus some idea about what we wanted to do; a white base with birdlike features, making sure to capture Stolas's and Vassago's signature eyeliner shapes. I was inspired by other cosplayers' approaches to Stolas, especially in figuring out what to do with the eyebrows. Given the newness of Vassago's announcement, Kay had somewhat fewer cosplay references to work from, and tried out a few "bird nose" shapes during the makeup test process.
The makeup to become birds takes SO LONG. We've gained some efficiencies in the process of repeated applications but it is still at LEAST an hour and a half. We allot two hours to prepare for bird time at cons and mostly go over by a half hour at least. The white facepaint application takes some time, and the crisp shapes of the eyes and mouth take a lot of precision, with adjustments/corrections requiring facepaint fill-in, so it takes quite a while!
We finished our planned bird pieces the night before our con premiere, so I decided that with so many hours to spare I might as well make props. I used paint-marker to draw the grimoire design on the cover and spine of a plain notebook, which turned out to be well worth it for photo ops and for getting the voice actor's autograph!!
The most heartrending episode to date had just released and featured the Asmodean crystal gift box so I had wanted to make that (and give some simple gold gems away as con gifts). I glued in some spare cape lining fabric and the gem to a jewelry box and brought a pile of craft gems to the con to break everyone's heart over and over again.
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[1] new friend at the time; now partner in creative projects as well as in life [^return]
