Making Ichito's kimono overcoat

Hiya!

I started this cosplay project on 31th March, meaning I have the whole April, May and beginning of June to fart out an Okita and Ichito cosplay from scratch – here goes!

Character reference.

I decided to tackle Ichito first because he is the more complicated of the two and will take longer to make. Surprisingly when I showed mom a picture of the character she went "oh god that's so pretty!". Truth be told I was pretty sure she'd be disappointed in my choice because it was yet another kimono-wearing character but nope, she wasn't. :'D

So to my joy we already had three meters of white fabric lying around in the house that I could use for his kimono overcoat thingy, I gotta admit here that I don't know what the proper name for this type of traditional garment is – hitatare? Chihaya? If anyone knows please enlighten me in the comments! I'm just gonna call it a jacket from here on to make it simple. 

I started out by cutting out the pieces needed and yeah, I forgot to take a photo of this part. But to my defense it's just straight rectangular pieces so there wasn't much to show, lol. I borrowed mom's old serger for the first time; I was scared to use it at first but gosh, this thing makes sewing so much easier! It cuts off excess fabric automatically and it makes the seams look professional and stuff; I'll need to use it more often in the future. 

The very first thing I started putting together was the large sleeves. Okay, so first mom helped me count I'm ass at math lol how many "full patterns" (read: every different "ribbon loop" before it started over again) I could fit into each sleeve. This was not easy, needed some revisions. After that was done I had to decide how close to the arm opening I wanted the ribbon to run, how big I wanted the buttonholes to be and stuff like that.

Mapping out the placement for the ribbon.

Mom helped me to check how the memory function on this black sewing machine worked, but because we couldn't find the physical manual (old machine is old) I had to search online for a machine part explanation. we couldn't find the manual we got it to work. She then set the memory function to make same sized buttonholes and showed me how to make a few and then I took over.

Making buttonholes...

... a shitload of buttonholes.

After what felt like forever my huge sleeve was filled with buttonholes. So many damn buttonholes. Despite the measurements for the hole being locked into that memory setting thing the machine wasn't consistently doing that exact lenght. I ended up getting several bad and outright wonky buttonholes were one of the sides was a lot longer and it just looked really ugly!

Case in point. :C fffuuu fffuuu

At worst I got three of these failed ones in a row and yeah, might have had a moment of rage. xD Oh well, I kept doing them anyway because I mean what else can I do? Sure I could take out the seam ripper I guess but like, ehh, I'll put it this way – I had more buttonholes with some degree of deviation than I had actually perfect ones. It would have been a lot of work and I just didn't have the patience to sit and go through with that.

It was positively trolling me, I swear.

43 buttonholes later my sewing machine's trollface arc was over. I swear machines know when to mess with you lol! But at least I got it done and could move over to the next step, which was using a seam ripper to open up the secured buttonholes. I gotta say here that I'm always hesitant to make holes in fabric, like I'm so worried I'm gonna mess it up somehow and then I'll have a literal hole in the fabric that I can't undo. That, or if the fabric would start to unravel in all directions, that would be a nightmare!

Open up all the holes carefully.

I made the slits and then threaded blue satin ribbon through them, making sure it was loose enough not to bunch up. After the ribbon was in place I just burned the ends and tied them together.

Threading through the sleeve!

After the ribbon threading was done I repeated it on the other sleeve of course too and then I attached the sleeves to the body of the garment and hemmed everything. I left the sleeves open on both sides and the body of the garment is fully open at the sides too.
Now I just had to do those chest cord decoration thingies he has in front. I went to our outside storage and cut out a tiny square of this leather-ish plum colored fabric on which I then drew the shape of those flame/flower/whatever decorations and cut them out.

Used a template to get them identical.

I attached each cut-out to a piece of the same satin ribbon by sewing them on. In hindsight I should have handsewn them on because sadly the presser foot left marks on the leathery surface. :( It's not too noticeable on a quick glance but it feels like something that could easily have been avoided and I guess that's what bothers me about it. Oh well, it's always easy to be smart after the unsmart part, lolol.

Assembled tie decorations.

I sewed them onto each side of the front collar and made sure to get them to sit at the same height, wouldn't want to have asymmetry! I intentionally left them untied and not fixed so that I can just tie them whenever I'm wearing the costume. Mom did point out I could have made the ribbons longer and I kinda agree, oh well.

Ichito's jacket finished.

I like how it turned out despite the buttonhole hell episode. xD This was a good learning experience and even though it was yet another kimono garment it had enough new elements to it to be an interesting project. 

Oh, one might notice that I left the jacket's bottom straight although on the character reference the tips come down at a slight angle. I thought I'd just adjust them to look like that when worn by folding up the fabric and stuffing it under the belt. But in case that doesn't work properly I'll probably return and cut them to shape. We'll see after I do a test run.

Next up I'll do the decorative flap thingy, stay tuned!
Shiro Samurai out~