#but considering he makes the uniforms forges books and randomly paints Old Nate

[somestorythoughts]

Sophie went "Hardison we'll need to to forge a historical book for a con well enough to fool an expert, something you have never done before" and he went "goddamnit" and then did it, I can absolutely see him making his own cosplays.

Of course Eliot knows how to sew, between his military service, medical skills, and the likelihood that he's slept with a seamstress or two. He can, at minimum, hem a pair of pants and do most types of repairs.

Hardison, though? Sure, word of God is that he makes the disguises that the team uses during cons, which could just mean he's ironing "FBI" transfer letters onto windbreakers.

HOWEVER.

Hardison is a cosplayer in the early 2010s. I did my first con cosplay at AnimeNext in '08. Before 2013 or so, you could not Google a character and find sales listings for a ready-made cosplay. If you wanted to cosplay a character who doesn't wear readily available normal clothes, you had two options: you either found someone who could sew and were very, very nice to them, or you learned how to make stuff yourself. I know several people who taught themselves how to sew by taking apart thriftstore finds for cosplay, and I had a side hustle taking on sewing and patterning commissions.

Hardison could have commissioned his first cosplay, but I think he'd get sucked in. He'd get really excited about computerized sewing machines. He'd get himself a machine that he can hack and reprogram so it's got extra stitches, multiple buttonhole settings, automatic seam guidance, a controlled heat setting that does a fused edge finish on synthetic fabrics. He digitizes his own embroidery patterns.

At some point Eliot asks to borrow a sewing machine because his job is as rough on his clothes as it is on his body, and he nearly has an aneurysm trying to do a basic darning patch on Hardison's beeping whistling computer-monster. A couple days later, a second sewing machine shows up. It's an old one with sturdy metal innards and mechanical dials to set stitch length and width. It has no screen, no control buttons, and only a handful of settings. One of them is a darning stitch.