Leah's Cosplay Blog

Another long period with no updates... oops! I have done quite a bit recently though, so let's get up to speed...

Firstly, the last time I updated I mentioned I was making a Team Rocket Grunt costume for May Expo. Despite assorted work issues trying to get in the way, I did get the costume mostly sorted out, and here's how it looked in the end:

( Pic and video behind cut )

Right now I'm concentrating on Aya costumes, which is as you'd expect with just four weeks left till I have to pack up and head to Coventry! I'm going to London to stay with kuro2shiro the night before the con so I'm operating on an "if it's not done by then, it's not getting done" basis. Fortunately, I think things are going quite well. I'm working on the following costumes:

- Ginrei (Giant Robo)
- Viola (Eternal Sonata)
- Crona (Soul Eater - for Luke)
- Medusa (Soul Eater)

Haven't started on Medusa or Crona yet but they're both pretty straightforward costumes, so I've been concentrating on Ginrei and Viola. As it stands, I've styled Viola's wig (yay!) and have an almost-complete base dress for Ginrei, as well as appropriate shoes for both characters.

( Pics )

So, that's all I have to show off right now. I do also have wigs for Crona, Medusa and Ginrei but I haven't styled them yet so I'll keep those for another time!

And now I just have to keep working at the pace I've been going at and all should be well...!

Long overdue update is looooong overdue. Damn that pesky "real life" thing!

Anyway. Minamicon was great (I think I had the most fun at this one that I've had at any con ever), kuro2shiro's costume was finished in time for the masquerade (even if I did have to borrow an iron from the hotel reception and finish it in the room... bad Leah! Bad!), and even though I didn't have a new costume for myself, I got to wear Chun Li again (with improvements!).

So anyway, Luke's costume was the main event pretty much, so here are the pics of the finished costume!

( Medicine Seller )

Shortly before Minami I read on Cosplay Island that there was going to be an SNK vs Capcom group, so I figured I'd fix Chun Li up a bit and rewear that. I remade the embellishments on the dress, this time using Bondaweb instead of interfacing, and it worked much better. The sleeves are now fully puffy because there's no stitching going through them and the bits on the front and back aren't fraying like crazy anymore. They're still not perfect, mainly because the Bondaweb doesn't hold to the dress fabric very well (yes, I do have to squeeze into the costume and then iron my boobs every time), but I do like how it looked on the day, and it was cool being in a group since that very rarely happens with me :P

( Street Fighter photos, all by Luke )

So, anyway, lots of fun there! I really did enjoy being in a cosplay group for a change, so much so that I've agreed to be in a group at London Expo in a couple of weeks' time. I'll be there to do some interviews but have volunteered to be a Team Rocket grunt for a masquerade skit on the Sunday, since the costume isn't very complicated:



I went to Bristol on Monday and have actually bought almost everything I need. The hat needs to be dyed (it's white, but should take black dye just fine since it's made of cotton), and I've got some grey gloves on their way from eBay (also found some boots that look almost spot-on on there, auction doesn't close for a few days yet though), but the top and skirt are both fine and I just need to make the R for the front. Yay!

Beyond London Expo I have a few definite plans - I'll be finishing off Machi for Luke and remaking my Lamiroir cloak so we can finally do those costumes together at Ayacon, and we're also doing Medusa and Chrona from Soul Eater (I have some interesting ideas for Chrona, if I do them right it'll be awesome). I'm determined to get Viola finished for Ayacon too (how perfect are these shoes as a base?!), and hopefully shift enough weight from my stomach to feel comfortable wearing the costume! I might do another costume too, but I'm undecided as to what it'll be - we'll see how things go in the run up to the con I guess.

Anyway, I have work to do now, so off with me...

I have to begin this entry with some sad news (for me, anyway). My Viola costume will, in all likelihood, not be ready in time for Minamicon. Sad as I am to have to put it back on the shelf until Ayacon (especially since I'd wanted to have it ready for Amecon last year and am still annoyed about having to put it on hold then), I'm telling myself that there are many advantages to this. I've got another five months to get into better shape, I've heard that there'll be an Eternal Sonata group at Ayacon that I might be able to latch onto, and if I keep working on it now anyway then I'll have it well underway in plenty of time for the con (and thus not getting in the way of the Chrona and Medusa costumes I've committed to).

kuro2shiro, however, is much luckier and should have both his costumes done within the next week. Since finishing the Machi wig I've mostly been concentrating on the Medicine Seller because it's a lot more complex, and it's going quite well - I'm now more or less at the stage where there are two or three big jobs left to do, and all the rest are either fairly small or just involve buying stuff. So, here are some photos:

( The Wig )

( The kimono and sleeves )

So, that's one of the costume's biggest jobs almost finished. Hooray! Once this is done I have another big job, and an unexpected one at that - artificially lengthening the kimono, which I'll cover in another update assuming it goes to plan. Then I just have to make the obi and attach the lining and it's all small jobs from there on in!

Another update will follow soon...

Yes, I have completed the styling of my first ever wig - the Machi wig for kuro2shiro! And I'm enormously pleased with it. I'd only ever had one bash at wig styling before and it came out looking like this:

( Click for the horror! )

Yeah. The most horrendous costume I've ever made, and it's almost entirely because of the wig (a better wig and some makeup and it wouldn't have been all that bad, I think - just goes to show how important such things are!). We don't talk about that cosplay anymore, except in hushed tones followed by hysterical laughter. Anyway! Since then I've done a lot of reading about how to style wigs properly since they don't behave like real hair, and when it came to styling Machi I was more than a little bit nervous about screwing it up hopelessly. But, I didn't - yay! So, partly out of my own pride and partly because it's a tricky style, here's my photo walkthrough.

( Photos and details beneath the cut! )

And there you go, done and dusted! I haven't been brave enough to put the wig on Luke's head yet so I'm hoping it won't all fall to pieces when we try, but we've still got a decent amount of time before the con so if something goes wrong now, at least I have time to fix it up.

I still have two more wigs to style, but I feel much more confident about them for having finished Machi. And now I just need to get on with making the rest of the costumes...!

And I'm only two weeks late. Again. Ho ho ho.

Anyway. I've been having a nice little break ever since the cosplay ball but with Minami ony ten and a half weeks away, I'm starting to get back into the swing of cosplay. I've got five costumes to make for Minami, two of which are for kuro2shiro, so I need to get cracking. Fortunately, making those five costumes isn't as big a burden as it sounds. Here are the costumes, and my reasons for not being particularly worried about finishing them:

1. Lamiroir. This is more or less finished, to all intents and purposes. The only thing I need to do is to fix up the cloak properly. I didn't line it the first time around, but it really needs the weight, so I'll be doing some lining for it. I've found a really easy way of remaking the hood so it looks right (just needs some assistance from someone who knows what they're doing with a box of dressmaker's pins), and then all I have to do is paint constellations all over it, which will probably be the last bit I do on this costume.

2. Machi (for Luke). Already well underway because it was originally planned for the Cosplay Ball before our original wig fell through. I've bought a replacement wig now and am going to have a bash at styling it myself, which should be fun. The only time-consuming bit I foresee now will be making the shoes.

3. Ginrei. I'm going to use the same Chinese dress pattern I used for Chun Li, and I already know from experience that that was an easy pattern to work with and the construction time was very short. I'll need to borrow a sewing machine that can handle applique so I can do the rose on the breast, but that's no problem. The biggest concern is the wig, since I found one that was absolutely perfect in terms of both length and colour on Cyperous, but they've stopped doing international orders. Boo :(

4. Medicine Seller (for Luke). Also well underway already - I have the base kimono and its lining all done and just need to obtain some more fabric so I can start doing the patterns on the kimono. I have a wig for this as well, which requires some simple styling, but I should be fine with that. This'll also require me using an applique-ready sewing machine.

5. Viola. This is the one I'm really anxious about, mainly because I don't have a pattern. I've got some interesting wig-styling experiences ahead with this, and making all the accessories is going to be fiddly, but I suspect that the top and skirt at least are far less complicated than they look. I expect the worst bit of this will be gluing all the feathers to the back of the skirt.

So, I'm cautiously optimistic. I'll be really disappointed if I don't finish Viola since it's literally almost a year since I agreed to do her, and if I don't get Luke's ones sorted I'll just be depressed. I'm actually OK with the idea of ditching Ginrei if I have to, although I will be sad to miss out on the retro theme of this year's con.

Anyway, I think the things I made most mention of above are wigs, since all but my Lamiroir costume require them. Three of them I already have, and although I think I've already put pics of them up here before, I'm going to do a quick run-down here. All wigs are modelled by Esmeralda, my wig form.

( Piggy Wigs )

So that's how everything sits with me right now. Expect plenty of updates between now and the end of March!

Hehe, only two weeks late ^_^

Well, the Grand Cosplay Ball has been and gone, and apart from a couple of small annoyances, I had a good time. Unfortunately, owing to a problem with the wig, kuro2shiro wasn't able to accompany me as Machi in the end, but he did look very smart in a suit - and hopefully we can be a Lamiroir and Machi couple at some other time. Maybe the party at Minamicon or something. I'd certainly like to rewear my costume, mostly because I think it looks pretty, but also because there are many fixes to be made, and I'd like to show my costume off again when it's at its best.

So, how did the costume look in the end? Here are a couple of photos Luke took in our hotel room before we left:




And here are a couple that were taken at the ball itself:


Taken by nert


Taken by Marta Stoyanova

I actually paid for a photo session with Marta, and also had some photos taken by kazzoo, so I'm looking forward to seeing how those come out!

Now, you may have noticed a few issues with my costume. Firstly, no, the cloak doesn't have any stars on it. I ran out of time to paint them on, and reasoned that I would much rather go to the ball with an unfinished cloak that I could do properly later on, than rush to finish it and risk screwing up the lovely lovely fabric I had bought for the cloak. I'm investigating a few different options for doing that right now, but it'll be finished properly before Minamicon I imagine. And yep, the hood is a bit odd looking - that's another thing I'm going to remake. Typically, I thought of a really easy way to do the hood just the way I needed it after the ball was over, but fortunately it is a really easy fix, so I'll be sorting that out soon.

There are some other fixes that need doing. I completely miscalculated the measurements for the off-the-shoulder straps, so they tore away from the bodice or rose up my shoulders whenever I tried to lift my arms too high. I'll be fixing that by resecuring them at the front, and reattaching them a bit further apart in the back - no-one sees that bit because of the cloak, anyway. Hopefully the end result will be a bit less ropey-looking! I also discovered just how slippery crepe-de-chine is when my cloak kept trying to escape from my shoulders. Again, an easy fix - I'm going to sew some ribbon loops on the inside so I can just slide my wrists through and keep it all in place. Unfortunately, I have to take the cloak to be dry-cleaned first because some jerk at the ball tipped almost an entire pint of beer down me before legging it - suffice it to say, if I ever find out who that was, they'll soon come to know how annoyed I was. I've made assorted threats of varying severity all over the interwebs, so I'll leave that one menacingly vague :P

Also, yes, I know I did my hair wrong. I need to have some better photos taken as it is, so when that happens, I'll do my hair right. I need to make a bit of a tweak to the hair cuffs too because, although I'm pleased with how they looked in the end, they kept falling off (as you may be able to see in Marta's picture). Fortunately, that's a really easy fix compared to everything else!

So, yes, it all went quite well. I had several people telling me that I looked good and that the lack of constellations on my cloak didn't matter (even met a Phoenix Wright cosplayer who didn't notice that there were meant to be constellations on it). Had a couple of other small annoyances - namely a prat who stepped on my skirt at the bar and didn't seem to register anything when I was thumping him on the back to get him to move, and the fact that Luke and I seem to be the only people in attendance who didn't get to meet Yaya (many people have told me she was on the dance floor and happily chatting to people, but I never saw her at all - and I wanted to get a picture of her with me and Luke purely so I could put it on Facebook with the incredibly lame gag caption of "Luke, Leah and Han". Sads). But other than that, I had a lovely evening, and if I'm still in the country when they hold another one, I will definitely go!

And now I'm going to go have a bath and enjoy the rest of my evening.

So, it's a week till the Cosplay Ball and I am mildly panicked, but I'm soldiering on. I'm planning to spend all of today sewing as much as I can (my dress is very close to completion - more on that in a moment - and I know what I'm doing with my cloak, so it's just kuro2shiro's stuff that requires a lot of work) and as long as I don't have too many late nights at work this week, I should be OK.

But this entry is a rant, and the subject of that rant is... flounces.

Not the kind of flounce you get on the internet when someone decides that they're taking their toys and going home, no - this is the kind of flounce that, on a dress like mine, may also be described as a "ruffle". They adorn the skirt, and in their most basic form, they look like this:



OK, I'm lying slightly - this one's been stitched together at the centre point, so the most basic form of a flounce is a quarter-arc. But that's not terribly important. Now, here's why flounces are an enormous pain in the bum:

1. They take up far more fabric than you'd think. I swear I bought the correct yardage according to the pattern I'm using, and I still had to go back to get more fabric - TWICE. In fact, the second time I went back to my favourite fabric shop (Husqvarna Studio in Bath, if anyone's curious) they were all out of the polycotton I'd been using! Fortunately, lovely people that they are, they were really nice about it and discounted their cotton to the same price as their polycotton for me. There's a reason why they're my favourite fabric shop!

2. They're huge. Possibly not surprising given point one, but even the smallest of these flounces is massive. I know it's going to make the skirt look nice, and I know I work with larger pieces of fabric when I'm making skirts or shirts, but their shape makes them rather unwieldy.

3. Hemming. If I had all the time and money in the world I'd just buy a load of lining fabric and line them all, although it'd probably look rubbish. Hemming these things is... well, I don't want to say it's a nightmare, because it's not a complicated business. It's just very time-consuming and tedious. To hem these things, you have to do the following: 1. Draw a hemline in, half an inch from the edge of the fabric. Not much of a problem on the straight edges, but it's a tricky business on the curves. 2. Stitch straight along the hemlines marked - not complicated at all, but again, time-consuming. 3. Snip off the corners, fold the fabric over at the stitch line, press the fabric. Easy enough on the straight edges, rather more tricky on the curves. 4. Stitch the hems down and snip off the excess fabric. Aside from this taking at least the same amount of time to do as step two, once you hit that curved edge the fabric starts folding over on itself and messing up your stitching. Yes, I may well be doing it wrong, but it's still frustrating.

4. Attaching them to the dress. The pattern indicated where the flounces needed to be placed, so I traced those lines onto my skirt fabric. Unfortunately, at the time I was using the wrong kind of pencil, so I put my lines on the inside so they wouldn't be visible on the finished dress. Good plan, yes? Except for the bit where I can barely see the lines on the other side of the fabric. D'oh! So yes, pinning these things has been a pain. I also suspect that I won't be able to put them through my little sewing machine, so I foresee much hand-stitching in my future...

5. They're all different sizes. Not surprising, since they need to work their way down the skirt, and all I need to do is make sure the biggest one goes at the botton and the smallest one goes at the top. How is that an annoyance, you may be asking? Well, let's put it like this. You know that optical illusion where they put two quarter-arcs next to each other and ask you to identify which one is larger, when in reality they're both the same size? Funnily enough, it seems that if you put two quarter-arcs of slightly different size next to each other, they seem to be exactly the same size. Trust me, I've seen it for myself.

6. There are loads of them. My skirt has seven rows of flounces. My deviation from the pattern instructions in order to make the dress more accurate means that I have 14 of these things to contend with. So imagine doing steps 1-4, 14 times over. I could also add in that the pattern required me to cut through four layers of fabric in order to get one row of flounce, so in effect I've had to contend with 28 of these buggers, all in different sizes. Is it any wonder I hate this bit?

The particularly annoying factor that encompasses all of the above is that apart from these flounces, my dress is basically done - it's just waiting to have the lining attached, get a zipper put in the back and have the shoulder bits made and attached. I know it'll all be worth it once it's done, really, but I'm still allowed a bit of a moan in the middle of things :P

Anyway, back to work now...

With the Grand Cosplay Ball now less than a month away, the weekend was spent making some serious progress on my Lamiroir costume. I've been going round to kuro2shiro's place after work for the last week or so and taking advantage of his floor space to go through the boring-but-essential job of cutting out patterns, pinning them to fabric and then cutting them out again, and by the weekend I had everything I needed to put together the base dress for my Lamiroir costume. And here it is (excuse my lack of makeup):

( Pictures behind the cut )

Things that still need doing: it needs to be fully lined. It needs to have the flounces attached to the skirt (I'll need to buy more fabric for this). I'm still in two minds about whether or not to put boning into the bodice, but that's a possibility. I need to make the shoulder/arm straps. I need to put a zipper in the back. And the whole thing needs an iron.

After that I just need to make the cloak, the face mask, the hair bands and the brooch and I'm done. With the progress being so good on this, I can now turn my attentions more fully to Luke's Machi costume, which I'll (hopefully) start work on tonight. And apparently I should have some wig pictures by this weekend. Yay! And in the meantime, I can quietly avoid thinking about making Luke's shoes...

Almost a month since my last update - time for another one!

For a start, I've reached a point with kuro2shiro's Medicine Seller costume where I can't go any further without buying more fabric. I have a base kimono, and I have lining for the base kimono. I can't sew up the sleeves until I've gotten the applique fabric and I can't attach the lining to the kimono until I've gotten the fabric for the collar, but it's looking good so far:

( Cut for your convenience )

I'm pretty much putting my Minami projects on hold now - I counted 25 weeks this morning till the weekend of the con, so I can afford to give them a rest for now, and I'm still a bit scared about starting work on Viola. This'll be my first costume made without a pattern to adapt and I'm more than a bit worried about it! Besides, there's just under two months to go till the Grand Cosplay Ball and I have work to do for that!

I've started out by finding suitable patterns to adapt for the costumes - both out of print, so I found them on eBay. Here they are:

( Pics and details behind the cut )

There are also assorted accessories that I need to make/procure for both characters (not sure how I'm going to make Lamiroir's hair cuffs, for example, and Machi's shoes will be interesting). I'm using my own hair for Lamiroir (although I'll have to buy some kind of hair extension so I can do the hair curls around her face), and I've commissioned Seph at Seph Wigs to make Luke's Machi wig (or I will once Paypal stops quibbling about exchange rates, rassum frassum).

I can't buy any fabric until the patterns arrive, which may be in another week since they're both coming from the other side of the Atlantic, but hey, I'm making a start!

Oooh, it's been a while since I've updated on here.

So, anyway. I'm pretty much settled in with what I'm planning to do cosplay-wise for the next six-or-so months - I'm not making any plans beyond March 2009 simply because I'm applying for JET this year and can't be sure that I'll be able to get to any other events or anime cons until I know whether I've been accepted onto the programme.

Basically, there are only two events/cons I'm definitely going to - the Grand Cosplay Ball and Minamicon. I'm giving the October London Expo a miss because, even if I just rewear an old costume or two, it's a big added expense that I'd rather avoid. Depending on how things go, though, I might go to the May Expo next year, and I might make a costume specifically for it - which isn't something I normally do because as much as I like going to London Expo, it's not a proper anime con, is it?

Anyway. I don't usually give away what I'm planning on doing for any specific cons until I know for sure that I'll have them done in time - I feel guilty about saying what I'm planning to do and then having it fall through (even though my costumes are usually based on characters that hardly anyone knows or cares about :P ). But equally, publicly stated that I'm going to do something commits me further to doing it and spurs me on, so here we go!

( Grand Cosplay Ball plans! )

( Minamicon 15 plans! )

( London Expo May 2009 plans (possibly)! )

Phew. So that's a busy few months. Hopefully I'll be able to do them all (or at least most of them)...!