How to make your own superhero utility belt!

Hey Everyone! So this has been a much requested tutorial on how to make a utility belt! I have made a few in the last few years, and most recently my friend Ashlee asked me to help her with one for her Batgirl Cosplay! While posting progress pictures on instagram, I had a lot of you ask how we did it, so well here we go.

First off, this is a easy way to make the utility belt, there is a more detailed way where you sew all the pockets and what not, which I will do soon, but this one is more basic and simple. It can also be done with any utility belt, you just need to mod it for whatever you are doing it for, in this case we were doing the redesign of Batgirl, So this is what we were working with:

We took this picture with us while we went out to find everything we needed for the belt. I made a list of things we could use, that would work and tried to think outside the box a little. (ill show you guys what you can use besides what we did). First things first we hit up a local thift store, we wanted as little sewing as possible with this so rather than making the compartments we figured we would buy it, so I had the idea for the big side compartment to use one of those small purses, or clutches, we were in luck and after searching through tons of bags we found one that looked like it would look nice on the belt, it was a fake leather so it would match the shoes and everything else, but it was red, which was fine we could paint it. 

After that we to a few craft stores, and went in search for the actual belt. We had thrown around the idea of just using a normal belt, but then we would have to find one for her thigh too, so instead we opted for cloth belting from Joannes, it looks like this: 

But white, in hopes we could dye it (lesson learned, you can't dye that, it washes right out). So we used fabric that matched the shoes and cape (take whatever you are making with you so you can get the right color). Along with the belting we got the belt buckle clip, and some D rings just in case (if you can see in the picture it sort of goes with the belt) Now the hard part was finding the smaller compartments, I had a few ideas, like plastic containers you can paint (i used those to make my hit girl belt) things like these:

Those are great, cheap, and you can paint then any color you want to match the belt.

But we had found these leather tool compartments at the craft store for belts that you can do leather detailing on and clip to your belt that were the perfect size, with little clips on the back that you can slide right onto the belt, and she wanted those so we got those. Once we had everything to make the belt, then started the fun part, actually doing it.

As mentioned the dying of the belt failed, but its trail and error, you learn through the process, First we decided to paint everything, before sewing the little compartments together or modding the clutch to fit to the belt. We picked the color spray paint needed, primed the darker red compartment and did about two coats of spray paint. 

On the left is the clutch we got from the thrift store, and the other 6 pieces are to the smaller compartments that had to be sewen together (those can be opted out for the metos or other containers if you wanted), once they were fully dry and we could sew and mod everything, I wanted to attach everything to the belt before adding the fabric just to make sure everything was sized right and fit her, rather than just do it first and then find out we needed more, or did to much. 

For the big side compartment we cut two slits into the back of the compartment so that way we could slide the belt through. rather than sew it on or hot glue it on, this would mean she could move it back and forth and not have to worry about it falling off. I didn't take a pictire of it, but you get the drift with this:

Once that was done I added everything onto the belt, just to make sure it fell right on here, and we had enough belt to use, had her try it on, walk around it in with the pants and jacket and get a good feel for how it would flow. Once we were happy with that, we trimmed off the belt parts we didn't need and had this:

All that was left was covering the actually belt in the yellow matching fabric. I took off everything from the belt and measured the yellow fabric so it wrapped around the belt. Now you CAN sew this, but we were on a time frame and didn't want to sew much (because she still had to sew the cape) and since the part that would have the seem would be against her anyways, we just hot glued it. Hot glue is your best friend when it comes to projects, its handy, dries fast and pretty much can do anything. We both sat on her floor hot glueing the fabric to the back of the belt leaving a half an inch of extra fabric on the ends once we were done glueing we trimmed the fabric so you can barely see it was glued, and it looked just like we had sewn it to the actual belt. 

Then all that was left was attaching everything else to the belt like we did the first time, adding the buckle clips. and boom, hello utility belt!

All and all I believe this belt cost my friend $25 max, but could of been cheaper if she opted for the cheaper smaller compartments, but i loved how the ones we picked came out. You can do this with any kind of super hero utility belt, just switch it up to what compartments they have on it that fit your budget. Be creative and think outside of the box. You may even have a lot of these things at home!

Hope you guys enjoyed this post, and it helps you out in any way! I know I had a lot of fun making this belt with Ashlee, and she is going to rock this Batgirl cosplay at NYCC! Please follow my blog for more cosplay tutorials and other awesomness!!