Hello everyone!
I already promised on my last post that the next one I'd write would be some yapping about the captain's haori, aka coat, repairs. :'D So for those who don't know Ukitake is my fourth cosplay (fifth in order if we count the first version of my OC Yuuto, which was a closet cosplay back then) and I originally made this costume way back in 2011. I wore Ukitake extensively to most cons I attended during my early congoing days in 2011-2012 so yeah, this costume has seen its fair share of life lol. But of course with so many outings also came accidents – the most notable of which happened during Finncon-Animecon 2011, which was my second time wearing Ukitake out after his debut at Uppcon in 2011.
I remember it so well – I had put on the full costume at the hotel on the morning and was walking towards the con area, it was a rainy day and I had with me an umbrella and didn't think much more of it at the time. I used the umbrella of course to shield myself from the rain but what I failed to consider was that it had rained so much so that the rain and dirt water was pooling up on the streets... and well, walking around with zori-style sandals made me unknowingly fling up all that shitty water into the back of my costume with each and every step I took. I remember when I finally arrived at the con area and people were looking at me and my awful condition (yes, it was very anxiety-inducing); I was aware of the disaster and extent of damage my cosplay had taken and while my memories are kinda blurry of what happened after I do clearly remember a Rukia cosplayer appearing out of nowhere and patiently helping me get off the worst of the dirt by blotting wet paper towels etc while I was quite literally having a meltdown crying. I was so shaken and upset with myself and I felt massive guilt over ruining my nicest costume. Some of the stains were so bad they were impossible to get off and I just had to wear it as-is for the rest of the convention day. To this day I still don't understand how I managed to keep myself together as well as I did and how I managed to even have fun despite how visible the damage was. Knowing myself I just know that had something similar happened in this day and age I would have immediately gone back to the hotel to change out of cosplay and my day would have definitely been 100% ruined lol – back then the hype and excitement to cosplay beat anything life threw at you. I kinda miss that resilience and drive, those starting years were different.
When I got back home from Finncon-Animecon I threw the coat into the washing machine. Should maybe mention here that I never prewash fabrics because most costumes feel too detailed and intricate to wash safely after completed so you just air them out. And I couldn't be arsed anyway because I just wanted to get to sewing lol.
Well, except this was the one time I maybe should have prewashed. You see, what happened was that the outer fabric, aka the white bridal fabric, shrunk a lot while the inner red satin lining didn't. This screwed up how the coat looked because the red lining was now constantly showing up on the sleeve edges, looking "rolled over" and the hem was raised with the red lining peeking out when worn too. It really didn't look good but yet I wore Ukitake out a few times more even after thatin my defense I didn't have many other costumes back then.
I stopped wearing Ukitake after one last outing at a tiny anime event in 2013. I had grown too unhappy and self-aware of how the coat looked and it felt like an impossibly daunting task to even try to fix at the time. And I guess I had some kind of mental barrier blocking me from even trying because I was blaming and tormenting myself so much for not preventing it by taking a taxi to the destination or changing into cosplay once at the con etc. Hindsight is a curse and although I know I had valid reasons for not doing said prevention measures (I couldn't afford a taxi and my anxiety ruled out using changing rooms) it was hard to get the self-blame to dissipate. I had ruined my proudest creation and that was an insurmountable obstacle to sit with.
Time flew by. I cosplayed other characters, got into other fandoms and so on. Yet over the last few years I've felt this increasing urge of wanting to revisit and rewear my older costumes for many different reasons. And then one day it hit me that I actually missed cosplaying Ukitake, said costume used to be so defining and important to me. I remembered exactly why I hadn't worn it but time had dulled my memory of how bad the damage actually was and so I pulled it out of my ancient cosplay box in the storage room to take a closer look. The lining shrinkage issue was just as bad as I remembered but there were also prominent large water stains along the hem, discoloration and a lot of yellowing along the collar, makeup stains etc. It looked even worse than I remembered, in fact. Yet at this point I thought "fuck it" and threw it into the washing machine for another loop with a generous scoop of baking soda this time, 14 years after the first wash. I wasn't even sure if it would do a difference after all this time or if all the crap had permanently set in but I thought that since the fabric had already shrunk it couldn't get a lot worse at this point. #yolo
I remember it so well – I had put on the full costume at the hotel on the morning and was walking towards the con area, it was a rainy day and I had with me an umbrella and didn't think much more of it at the time. I used the umbrella of course to shield myself from the rain but what I failed to consider was that it had rained so much so that the rain and dirt water was pooling up on the streets... and well, walking around with zori-style sandals made me unknowingly fling up all that shitty water into the back of my costume with each and every step I took. I remember when I finally arrived at the con area and people were looking at me and my awful condition (yes, it was very anxiety-inducing); I was aware of the disaster and extent of damage my cosplay had taken and while my memories are kinda blurry of what happened after I do clearly remember a Rukia cosplayer appearing out of nowhere and patiently helping me get off the worst of the dirt by blotting wet paper towels etc while I was quite literally having a meltdown crying. I was so shaken and upset with myself and I felt massive guilt over ruining my nicest costume. Some of the stains were so bad they were impossible to get off and I just had to wear it as-is for the rest of the convention day. To this day I still don't understand how I managed to keep myself together as well as I did and how I managed to even have fun despite how visible the damage was. Knowing myself I just know that had something similar happened in this day and age I would have immediately gone back to the hotel to change out of cosplay and my day would have definitely been 100% ruined lol – back then the hype and excitement to cosplay beat anything life threw at you. I kinda miss that resilience and drive, those starting years were different.
When I got back home from Finncon-Animecon I threw the coat into the washing machine. Should maybe mention here that I never prewash fabrics because most costumes feel too detailed and intricate to wash safely after completed so you just air them out. And I couldn't be arsed anyway because I just wanted to get to sewing lol.
Well, except this was the one time I maybe should have prewashed. You see, what happened was that the outer fabric, aka the white bridal fabric, shrunk a lot while the inner red satin lining didn't. This screwed up how the coat looked because the red lining was now constantly showing up on the sleeve edges, looking "rolled over" and the hem was raised with the red lining peeking out when worn too. It really didn't look good but yet I wore Ukitake out a few times more even after that
I stopped wearing Ukitake after one last outing at a tiny anime event in 2013. I had grown too unhappy and self-aware of how the coat looked and it felt like an impossibly daunting task to even try to fix at the time. And I guess I had some kind of mental barrier blocking me from even trying because I was blaming and tormenting myself so much for not preventing it by taking a taxi to the destination or changing into cosplay once at the con etc. Hindsight is a curse and although I know I had valid reasons for not doing said prevention measures (I couldn't afford a taxi and my anxiety ruled out using changing rooms) it was hard to get the self-blame to dissipate. I had ruined my proudest creation and that was an insurmountable obstacle to sit with.
Time flew by. I cosplayed other characters, got into other fandoms and so on. Yet over the last few years I've felt this increasing urge of wanting to revisit and rewear my older costumes for many different reasons. And then one day it hit me that I actually missed cosplaying Ukitake, said costume used to be so defining and important to me. I remembered exactly why I hadn't worn it but time had dulled my memory of how bad the damage actually was and so I pulled it out of my ancient cosplay box in the storage room to take a closer look. The lining shrinkage issue was just as bad as I remembered but there were also prominent large water stains along the hem, discoloration and a lot of yellowing along the collar, makeup stains etc. It looked even worse than I remembered, in fact. Yet at this point I thought "fuck it" and threw it into the washing machine for another loop with a generous scoop of baking soda this time, 14 years after the first wash. I wasn't even sure if it would do a difference after all this time or if all the crap had permanently set in but I thought that since the fabric had already shrunk it couldn't get a lot worse at this point. #yolo
 |
| Coat's a bit big so it takes up the whole drying rack lol. |
I let the coat dry for a few days while praying to a various assortment of cosplay gods to give me their blessings. I was quite nervous because if I couldn't get those water damage and other stains out I would have no choice but to remake the whole thing and I wasn't quite at peace with that idea. Especially since that perfect bridal fabric I used is long gone from mom's attic so I would have to settle for a fabric that likely wouldn't look valuable enough to fit a Bleach captain's status.
Thankfully the second round in the washing machine actually made a bit of a difference. The massive water stain outlines disappeared and the yellowing got slightly improved, it was still there but it got a bit lighter at least. So I guess I could say it made it better at least, not worse.
Once the coat was completely dry I took it to mom's so I had access to better surfaces to work on and a sewing machine.
 |
| Just showing how bad the lining issue was. |
The photo above is to show how much of the lining was constantly overextending, that amount of red that you see was how much was always visible, even when the sleeve was relaxed and I didn't try to pull or tug it in any way. It constantly looked like it was rolled up and bunching uncontrollably, it was legit awful. Before the uneven shrinkage issue happened the red lining didn't show at all and was like a lining should be, aka only visible on the inside.
I started the whole reparation process by taking out the seam-ripper and undoing the seams on the sleeve ends. I know, I could have just made it easy for myself and save time by cutting it off with scissors but I was too concerned about how much losing those couple centimeters of fabric (especially the white one) would affect later on when I reassemble the lining. I didn't really want to shorten it because it would look wonky if the shihakusho black and white kimono sleeves were a lot longer than the captain's coat sleeves were. Every centimeter was precious lol.
 |
| This took ages but at least the ripper was ergonomically shaped. |
Once I was done undoing the seam I just stared at the lining unraveling before my eyes. I was also quite surprised that I hadn't done any kind of fraying prevention measures on the lining fabric, it was just raw edges all over and that made me uneasy and judgmental of my former self lol. Nowadays I just couldn't, I'm very anal about zigzaging all edges even if they technically couldn't unravel. It just bugs me so much to leave something undone.
 |
| Notice how much longer the lining is, oh god! |
On the photo above you can see how much the white fabric had shrunk compared to the lining because the inner and outer sleeves were aligned at the corner in this photo. This amount of excess explains why it looked so bunched up and just wouldn't behave no matter how much you tried to force it to stay down.
Another thing I was baffled by was that back then I hadn't even treated the edges of the white fabric?! I had just folded them in and been like "this is fine" all because the lining would hide them from view lmao. It feels weirdly surreal because I used to have this pure mental image that this cosplay was done so carefully and I had zero memories of skipping any corners so yeah, taking seams apart and finding raw edges staring back at me was a real 'what the duck' moment. :'D
 |
| Zigzaging all the edges reeeee– |
I had some struggles with deciding on how to reassemble the sleeve mouths. Originally they were done in what I'd like to call the "default lining" way aka what happens when you attach the lining to the outer fabric's edges and then turn it over, press it down and do a decorative stitch around on top to make it crisp. So basically it wasn't folded or hemmed and looked like on official character references. I originally wanted to replicate this but figured that it would be a lot of extra steps because I'd either have to remove and reattach the whole lining (which would also mean trimming the excess down before refitting which would have been a lot of extra work) or do some fidgety precision folding techniques by folding both the outer fabric and the lining separately and then have them line up perfectly against each other and stitch them down and hope they don't shift while doing so, which would surely have been an exercise in carefulness and frustration. I figured that the easiest and most doable approach was to fold in the excess lining fabric enough times to make it have the same length as the white fabric (I didn't cut off any fabric, just folded it inside) and then fold the white fabric on top to seal the red fabric underneath it. It's a bit hard to explain but I hope that makes sense? xD
 |
| Ended up doing this approach to finalize the sleeves. |
I worked on both the hem and the sleeves simultaneously but I decided to post the sleeve progress first to make it easier to follow. But yeah, I did a similar approach when opening up the hem, meaning I first undid the stitches to free the two fabrics from each other.
 |
| Ripping up the hem in progress. |
The hem came with the additional problem of realizing that of course the lining fabric was larger in all directions than the white fabric that had shrunk. Ideally this meant that, for a perfect result, I should have removed the whole lining, trimmed it down and then reattached it but this would have meant that I would have needed to remove the whole collar as well because the collar attached to the lining on both sides on the front. I wasn't quite up to this task and so I stood there facing the issue that, due to the collar being attached to the lining and thus locking me from handling it from all directions, that if I didn't remove the collar I would have to be creative about how and where to cram and hide the excess lining. There were a lot of back-and-forthing at this point on whether I should make a strategic cut to avoid the otherwise forced wrinkling of excess lining at the corners but I eventually decided against it and just made a vertical fold in the lining, near the ends of the collars, to hide the worst excess bunching and then I folded in the rest at the hem in a similar way as I did on the sleeves.
 |
| Lining excess hiding aka sneaky folding in progress. |
Of course it wouldn't end up flawless because I didn't do it in the most time-consuming way (aka remove the whole lining etc) but I feel like this approach worked surprisingly well while also sparing my sanity lol.
It was a bit of a risky choice but to secure and attach the newly folded and prepared hem I had to sew on the upside of the coat and that's because I noticed on my first try, when I tried to sew on the underside (to see that the needle hits where it should), that despite measuring and retracing the former stitch lines I still ended up having the stitch not aligning with the original stitch on the upside and this was a problem because the white thread was really visible if it crossed over one of those black
 |
| This was a nervous moment lol. |
After that I was finally done repairing this part of my Ukitake cosplay. It's such a relief because yeah, despite the coat having been neglected for over a decade it wasn't beyond saving. I proved to myself that I could do it despite how daunting it seemed. I also got it done in time for Kummacon where I also had a quick mini photoshoot and yes, it was such a blast to be Ukitake again! I really need to repair his twin swords next and although that's probably an equally ennerving project to tackle, if not more, I now feel more confident to try my best!
Thanks for reading! Have you ever repaired a cosplay after an accident, did it work out?
~ Shiro Samurai out.
~ Shiro Samurai out.
