Kisuke Urahara cosplay WIP

 Hello frens!

I finally got around to compile the work in progress post of how I made my Urahara cosplay from Bleach, you know, the sus shopkeeper with the funny hat. Although I gotta say I didn't take very many photos of the process, partly because I forgot and partly because this was a last-minute rush project. We all know how real the con crunch can be so please cut me some slack lol.

 

Oh, and all the photos are taken with my phone's not-so-good camera so yeah, I'm sorry but the quality is a lot more shit than usual. I didn't have my SLR camera with me at any point while I was working on this cosplay, so no can do. Bad photos are still better than no photos and thus no WIP post, right?

Anyways, let's go!

Kisuke Urahara reference.

 

Okay so, this cosplay materialized in a very short amount of time. I had to finish it no later than one and a half week before Nekocon as that was when I left home with mom and stepdad to attend my cousin's wedding in the other end of the country, which meant my cosplay came with me to Gothenburg and from there to Kuopio on our return trip. I don't like doing anything with a really stressful time frame but stress is also a good motivator to get things done.

Because of the lack of time I didn't have time to visit a fabric store. Thankfully mom used to have a fabric store many years ago and what remains from it is in her attic, so basically there's a fabric store at home whenever I visit her. So I went and pillaged the sortiment and almost immediately found a perfect green cotton fabric and a sufficient dark green polyester fabric. 

I know, Urahara's haori is most often depicted as black but mom didn't have any black fabric (unless I wanted a really porno PVC haori lmao) so I had to use something else that seemed passable. My options were dark grey, dark brown or dark green but I found dark green first and decided to roll with it because the colors went nicely together.

Fabrics, check.

I immediately spread out the fabrics on the kitchen table and started measuring and cutting out all the pieces. Urahara's outfit consists of a samue (kimono-like top and pants) set, a haori, traditional geta clogs and his signature hat. I only used a pattern for the pants, the rest I just winged because kimono are basically just rectangles sewn together.

Fabric laid out.

Pants pants pants!

All the pieces laid out plus elastic, cord and threads.

That's all the progress I did on the first day, it was quite late. The next day I used mom's serger to go through all the raw edges. I have to be kind to it as it's as old as I am and if you go too fast it will squeak a lot. Poor thing has seen a lot of use but it's such a trusty, convenient lil' machine. <3

Saumuri goes brrrr

While I was working on my cosplay mom was using the sewing machine to do some embroidery gifts for the wedding and that's when the worst thing that could happen happened – the machine died! Like it would start up but it would not sew a single stitch and just make this infernal noise instead. It was panic galore. Like please not now, we literally don't have time for this! T_T

So I had to ask Sallukka for an emergency visit to their place so I could continue on my cosplay. Mom drove me home and I packed my stuff for the wedding trip. I also frantically searched for Urahara's hat because I knew I had seen it _somewhere_ but I had no idea where as it was literal years ago. I bought it many years ago at a con just for shits and giggles and now I needed to find it for some real use.

After rummaging through all thinkable closets and storages I found it inside a large black plastic bag that smelled like yesteryear!

 

Hat and wig found, wohoo!

I also looked through my shoes and low and behold – I had the perfect pair of geta clogs that I didn't even remember having! I can't believe my luck, I was ecstatic!
Also, I somehow found a suitable wig in my wig stash and no, I have no fucking clue what I originally intended to use this wig for; it was just existing in there. xD

 

Later on that same day Sallukka came to pick me up after they finished work for the day. I sewed the haori together in my friend's comfy abode in Kemi and did some paint tests. We also watched a bit of anime and had a good time.

 

One coat of paint, freshly applied.

Same single coat but dry. Insane difference.

On the photos above you see what a world of difference it makes whether or not the fabric paint is made specifically for dark fabrics or not. This is the same brand with ordinary white on the left and "for dark fabrics" white on the right. The ordinary white is hardly even visible after it dried while the other white is super opaque! I didn't have to think twice on which one to choose.

Mom came to pick me up from Kemi after she got her sewing machine repaired. It warranted a trip to an old gentleman in Oulu with 40 years of experience repairing all kinds of sewing machines.

Back at mom's I started to prepare for painting those salmiakit rhombic patterns. I wanted to make a stencil to guarantee that the symbols would be as identical as possible and for that I needed some kind of plastic or cardboard etc as a base. Mom had no suitable scrap cardboard available but my stepdad had a big leftover roll of 'rakennusmuovi' (builders plastic, construction plastic?) that he used while building the house they live in. It turned out to be just what I needed!

I made my stencil out of this plastic roll.

Stencil design measured and sketched.

I wanted to paint by hand with a pencil so I didn't do the usual stencil approach and instead used the cut-out shape as a measure, drawing along the outlines with tailor's chalk. 

It was quite a nightmare to figure out how many symbols I could do while having the space between each one as identical as possible throughout the whole width of the garment. I almost had a meltdown fr, it was so frustrating because it would never line up just right, no matter how logically you tried to measure and calculate beforehand and then you had to redo and redo and redo and yeah, I just wanted to cry lol.

This was my "spacing them out" approach. It was pain.

Finally got it to be as symmetrical as possible!

One coat of paint later.

The fabric paint was so good that I only had to do two layers to have an opaque, covering result. And this is on synthetic fabric, which I found extra impressive as the paint didn't even specify that it would work on synthetics – only naturals like cotton and silk etc.

Sealing the paint.

I let my paint job dry overnight and then heat-sealed it the usual way. I personally use baking paper for protection when sealing fabric paint on synthetics because the recommended heat-setting is usually "cotton strength" (aka three dots or max heat) but synthetics rarely can withstand that high heat without taking damage. Using baking paper as a barrier also protects the iron itself so it's a win-win in my book.

After that was done I went to try on the haori in the mirror. I noticed quite soon that my sleeves looked dumb as hell because I had apparently had a brainfart when I had sewn them and yeah, I had hemmed the edges the opposite way from how I usually do and I had completely forgot to factor in that the sleeve mouths are quite wide and so the fugliness of my flappy flap flap seam was very visible!

Fix that awkward mistake!

 

On the photo above you can see what I meant by hemming the opposite way of how I usually do. The left sleeve (which I'm correcting/sewing on the pic) is how I usually hem everything and the sleeve laid out to the right is the epic fail brainfart deluxe sew-it-together-in-the-middle-of-the-night abomination that knows no bounds nor decency.

After that hotfix my haori was done, this time for real. Now what was left to do was to sew together the samue. I didn't take any photos because it was really simple and basic stuff. The only thing I did that's worth mentioning is that I took some liberties with leaving slight openings at the armpits, this to make attaching a straight sleeve to a straight body of fabric as easy as possible and, secondly, to make the cosplay a bit more breezy – aka less sweaty to wear. I did the exact same approach while attaching the sleeves to the haori too. I figured it won't really be that obvious unless I lift my arms a lot and well, it's not like Tite Kubo followed many traditional kimono rules when he designed the outfits for the characters anyway so it's not like I'm comitting any terrible kitsuke police offenses here either by just making cosplay life a bit more comfortable for myself – by deviating from references ever so slightly.

Sleeve opening shenanigans.

 

I had originally cut out the okumi panel (the front "add-on panel") for the samue to get extra width in the front for overlap, but upon closer scrutiny I noticed that the okumi seam is completely absent on reference arts and well, Urahara wears his samue rather sloppily anyway and it only narrowly overlaps in the front so yeah, I decided to leave it out as I determined that the extra width wasn't needed after a test wear.

To add the little cords (the ribbon tie) keeping his top closed I just put the almost finished garment on my body, looked in the mirror to figure out the approximate placement, marked with pins and then sewed them on. Of course I acupunctured myself with the pins too.

The pants were super easy to do, just basic 3/4 length trousers with an elastic waist. I used a basic loose-fitting pattern mom had already cut out from a sewing magazine earlier and modified the pant legs a bit shorter and added extra length on top to make the channel for the elastic to reside in.

Measuring and readying the waist for elastic insertion.

And with that my rushed cosplay was finished. 8D Considering how ass-on-fire this whole project was it turned out pretty okay – luckily Urahara is not a very complicated costume to make so yeah, the risk of absolute unhinged disaster was low. I'm still happy I got it done on time as the cosplay turned out to be comfy and fun to wear and yes, breezy too. 

For photos of the completed cosplay check out this mini photoshoot I did during Nekocon. ^_^

Thanks for reading, stay crafty you nerds!

~ Shiro Samurai

Throwback Thursday: Byakuya cosplay from InuYasha!

Hello everybody!

Last Thursday I started a new Throwback Thursday themed blog series on which I'll go through some of my early cosplays. In case you missed the first post I wrote about my Ichigo Kurosaki (Bleach) cosplay I mentioned there that, even though I started making Ichigo first, he actually wasn't the first cosplay that I was seen wearing at a convention – and that cosplay, my debut one, is what today's post will be all about!

Ever since I found some really old cosplay WIP photos in the deep dark corners of my laptop I've been wanting to do something with them – like, for example, show them to the world because we all started somewhere. Yes, I totally took progress photos before I even started cosplay blogging. 

This means that, once a week, on Thursdays (because it's called Throwback Thursday for a reason), I will invite you all to experience a 'blast of the past' with me – featuring old cosplay photos, WIPs and stories ranging from late 2009 to 2011. Fasten your seatbelts, we're gonna be riding the time machine and you'll get to backtrack into my cosplay history and see some never-published-before photos on this here blog!  
Be warned that this, naturally, means a lot of (potential) embarrassment for me and highly varying photo quality for you. ;) I only had a crummy compact camera back then and didn't even notice if a photo was blurry or not...

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Byakuya. InuYasha.

Byakuya, I did him before it was cool. Or well, it was never really cool to cosplay him (he's a rare character to see done) but what I mean is that I did him way before the Final Act anime came out and when he had only recently shown up in the Finnish release of the InuYasha manga. This means that when I originally did this cosplay, back in mid 2010, I had really limited references to go by and only one or two colored images (manga cover/back), if even that. This means that back then I didn't really know what his lower legs and shoes looked like and thus it's a bit inaccurate; I couldn't even find another Byakuya cosplayer to check how they had done things, lol.

I had started working on Ichigo when I suddenly, around midway, decided on a spur of the moment that I wanted to do an InuYasha cosplay for the upcoming Uppcon in Sweden. Back then Uppcon was Sweden's biggest convention, sadly it doesn't exist anymore – the last one was held in 2012, R.I.P. ;_; But yeah, I'm not sure why exactly I suddenly wanted to start another cosplay project while I had an unfinished one still in the works; the only possible reasoning that I can think of is that the tenth Uppcon (2010) was to be my first big convention (I had only been to Kemi's manga days and possibly one Kitacon before) and I might have wanted to cosplay from my first manga, as if to honor it. Now, InuYasha wasn't technically the first manga that I ever read but it was the first one that I got into and the first one that I started collecting. I own every single volume in Finnish. InuYasha will thus always have a soft spot in my heart.

I'm not even sure if I had any specific reasons for wanting to do Byakuya of all possible characters. The only ones I can think of is that he intrigued me (and he was a new character) and had a pretty design – I guess I wanted to be a little hipster as well. I remember that originally I wanted to start with Sesshoumaru and, well, I can only say one thing to my old self – THANK THE HEAVENS THAT I DIDN'T. Sesshoumaru is a really precious character to me and his outfit is quite complicated and, well, I wouId have ruined my husbando had I done him back then. I'm so fucking relieved that I decided on saving him for a later time, heck, even today I feel like I'm still not skilled enough to do him justice... :'D But yeah, Byakuya's not the easiest cosplay to pick either, especially as a cosplay beginner, but thankfully I already knew how to sew and make swords out of wood; I've always been creative with my hands and Byakuya's costume required me to think to figure out some of the problems that it presented once I started working on it. 

I don't remember of I started sewing or making the sword first. I remember that back when I made the sword it hadn't been revealed in the manga yet that, in actuality, Byakuya's sword doesn't even have a blade until he uses it. I couldn't have known this back then and thus I made the sword with an ordinary blade... and not even a katana-style one but more of a western one. Not like it matters anyway because when I cosplayed him I never drew the sword, mostly because it hadn't been revealed yet what it looked like and thus I kept it sheathed at all times, for the sake of accuracy. Good thing I did. xD

Old photo of the finished sword.

Close-up of the handle.

It's made completely out of wood, all self-made. That golden paint that I used on the tsuba sucked elephant dong and I remember that even back then I hated it because it looked fugly and, no matter what one did, it didn't apply neatly. Sadly it was the only gold paint that I found in all the local shops back then and so I had no other choice... >_> 

A recent photo showing the sword in its sheath, all props attached.

I made a gourd for him. The dents are damage it took during Uppcon.

The sheath is made of some kind of thicker fabric, the kind that is water-resistant, has an obvious texture and is synthetic. It's not the best but it's easy to do and it fills its function. Luckily with Byakuya the floppiness, if I took the sword out, wasn't a problem because I didn't have to unsheathe it at the con. I used a violet textile cord to carry the sword over my shoulders.

The brown gourd I made by taking two styrofoam balls, carving out the bottom of one with a knife and then gluing them together. I used some red bias tape as decoration and to hide the attachment spot (and to fasten it to the sheath). The little 'mouth' of the gourd is actually a cork from a wine bottle. x) Recycling for the win!

Regarding the sword I feel a need to mention that it broke into three pieces after Uppcon, thanks to Arlanda airport's (Stockholm) carelessness. I flew to Uppcon with my brother and mom (I was underage and Uppcon was really big) from Kallax aiport, in Luleå, and there they were kind enough to have the aircraft workers personally taking it into the aircraft, to assure that it wouldn't break during transit. Please note that my sword was only stored in a sword-carrying bag and thus would likely have broken if, for example, a heavy suitcase was placed on top of it. Kallax special luggage service was amazing, I can't complain because they went out of their way to make sure that my prop would get to Stockholm intact. The same I can't say about Arlanda, they told me it would be fine at the special luggage counter and then just proceeded to flung it into the same space as all the other passengers (heavy) stuff. I think I might even have paid extra for special treatment. I even saw from the window, later on in the terminal, when they shoved all kinds of luggage into the plane, including trolleys and bigass sport bags... and then I saw my puny sword bag and got a clump in the throat. Back at Kallax when I went to claim my prop from the conveyor-belt I could see already from a distance that it was broken. It was disheartening and frustrating at the same time. I went to complain and the woman I talked to gave me a number and told me to call it and ask for a compensation for a broken hand-made item. I tried calling it later and never got anywhere and yeah, I'm still kinda annoyed by it all because they gave me a number that wasn't even up to date...

I sadly, once again, don't have any progress photos – only pics of the finished product. All of these costume detail photos ahead are recent. For Byakuya I didn't originally take any outfit photos (just like with Ichigo), save for those first two sword photos and the one farther down that shows the fake flower that I got for him.

Byakuya's kimono and haori. Front view.

Back view.

Just like with Ichigo I made Byakuya during the time when I either didn't know everything about accurate kimono construction or, alternatively, didn't think (nor care) that seam placement was that important. *smacks former self* :) Luckily because the haori is so dark in color one doesn't immediately notice that it has shoulder seams –and the yellow applique covers a part of it– and the haori itself, in turn, always covers the light blue kimono's shoulder seams. Phew. Otherwise I might just have been pulling my hairs right now.

I hand-painted the flames with fabric paint.

I'm sorry that the whole outfit (and especially the sleeves) are so wrinkly – this cosplay has been untouched and in storage ever since 2010. I quickly took it out to take these photos before the sun went down. Hello kaamos my old friend ~

Side-ish view of the haori.

As I mentioned above those yellow parts are appliqued on. I originally cut them out as complete wobbly oval-ish shapes with those 'inner lines' but, as I started sewing them on, they started to misalign/shift themselves because of the big size of the applique and the large area that I was sewing them on to. Of course this only started happening once I had already partly sewn on the yellow details and the only thing to do, to keep the original intended placement, was to cut the design into pieces at specific areas, align/replace them and sew them on – this created seams around the design.

Close-up photo of the seams of the yellow design, aka
where I had to cut it to get it to align properly.

Sewing on the yellow shapes to the haori was by far the most tedious and hardest part of the whole costume. It took a really long time and a fair share of patience and carefulness.
On the back of the haori I made a slit, lined it with bias tape for a neat finish and I also added that little ribbon at the top, which sometimes was visible on Byakuya in the manga. A cute little detail.

Showing the back slit and the little ribbon.
(this is a flash photo, hence the color difference)

The kimono and the haori are made of cotton fabric, the yellow parts are perhaps a cotton blend (I'm not sure) and same thing for the wannabe-hakama pants.
Speaking of which, I'm still not sure what the fudge I was thinking when I made these pants. :'D I mean, I did know what hakama looked like (I was practicing kendo for fuck's sake!) but still I decided to not make these in a proper way and instead made them.... hakama inspired. *dun dun duuuun* Just let me cringe for a moment. No but really, I decided to completely skip the side openings and the koshiita. I could have made a more proper tattsuke hakama but no, I didn't. I'm still not sure if it was just pure laziness, a weird expectation that real hakama would be sooooo hard to make or a case of "the sides will never show because of the long haori so I can't be bothered to go the extra mile". I was horrible. :)) So yeah, while these atrocious pants have five pleats in the front and two in the back, just like regular hakama, that's pretty much the only thing they have in common. The ties on these start from the sides and the legs have elastics in them. The sides are sewn close like on regular pants.

My horrible wannabe-hakama. :DD
This is mighty embarrassing to show...

Fun fact is that I think that the Hakama Gods™ saw what I was doing and took revenge on this blasphemy of a creation. You see, during one of the two cons that I wore Byakuya to, can't remember which one, one of the sides on which the ties were attached literally ripped. And no, I don't mean that the seam gave in, I mean that the actual fabric tore next to the seam – most likely because of too much strain. Ouch.
So yeah, the sin punishes itself it seems and, if anything, then that was the ultimate way of showing my older self that if you need to make hakama, make them right or your fake-ass pants will tear.
I can attest that ever since this failure I've never even considered lazying out if I had to sew a hakama. You learn from your mistakes and yada yada.

One iconic thing with Byakuya is that he's almost always holding a flower whenever he appears. A flower that, to my untrained eye, looks like a peony. I could be horribly wrong likely am but whatever the case I found a really suitable fake/plastic flower from a Finnish store called Tiimari back in the days. Tiimari has since then disappeared, which is a shame because it was a good mixed craft/hobby store for cosplayers... although it was expensive at times.

An old photo showing the prop flower.

I have no idea where this flower currently is. What I do know is that I've sold my original Byakuya wig though. It was a black Ivy from the old Cosworx, aka cosplay.com's own wig store. The thing is that the wig was good quality and all but I was a stupid sack of cucumbers who didn't know that you can't just simply by a long wig and expect to be able to pull it up into a high ponytail just like you do with real hair. :) Needless to say that at the con I only managed to keep the wig in a loose low ponytail and I was too scared and clueless to even cut the bangs into the right length.
So yeah, the costume itself might have been impressive but the wig and my face really made it crash and burn. Heck, this was during the times when I strictly refused to wear any kind of makeup, except for powder. *vomits profusely* The truth is that I didn't even know how to use makeup and, even though I could pull the man card, it's not really an excuse because even guys do use makeup for cosplay – everyone is recommended to use makeup for cosplay because it really does one hell of a difference.
You know what makes it even worse? I didn't even know that filling in your eyebrows was a thing and well, just imagine a black wig and my naturally light-colored eyebrows... :) Add to that a makeup-less face and... just no. Fucking no.

I managed to find some old photos of me wearing Byakuya at Uppcon 2010. This was the 10th Uppcon and it was held in Uppsala, Sweden, in a big building called Uppsala Konsert & Kongress. I have really fond memories of the con itself (we had an InuYasha cosplay group!) but I'm so goshdarn ashamed of how bad I was at doing facial expressions for photos and yeah, I just had to censor my face on these two images below as well. Even if I had some really basic posing knowledge I had no idea how to position myself and, especially, not what to do with my face. Half the time I was either staring into the camera or staring away from it in such a way that it looked like I had spaced out into the moon or something. A third variant was an unintended(?) killer glare. It was really that bad. Killer glare was almost like my neutral face for years, no wonder people were afraid to approach me.

Taken outside Uppcon's entrance. I cropped
out my brother.

I used to be proud of that photo above and now, whenever I see the uncensored version, I feel a violent urge to slam my face into a wall. :DD During the 7 years that I've been cosplaying I have, after all, improved quite much and it's really noticeable when I find this kind of old shit and compare them to the new stuff that I do. It's maybe not an astounding lot of improvement in terms of sewing but, even more so, in posing and using makeup.

Only back view photo that I have. Notice
the low ponytail and the props.

I'm not sure how noticeable it is on these two oldie pics but I actually bought high-quality pointy ears for this cosplay. I find it amusing how, back then, I could pay a lot of attention to some small details while I chose to ignore others – especially if I didn't consider them important enough for whatever reason.

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So there you go, my debut cosplay. I'm still happy with it in general (except for a few things, lol) and I would definitely rewear it once I have remade the hakama, bought a new wig and fixed some other stuff. I want to have an updated photoshoot with this cosplay because I obviously don't have any presentable photos of it currently, thanks to it being of an embarrassing 2010 model and thus before I realized the importance of makeup. >.< Byakuya will definitely be seen at a future convention!

Current status of this cosplay: In need of repairs/update and a new wig.

Stay tuned for next Thursday's episode!

Shiro Samurai out.

Cheshire Cat cosplay shoes

Hello my friends!

You've probably by now seen that I reviewed my Cheshire Cat cosplay costume from a game called 100 Sleeping Princes and The Kingdom of Dreams, also known as Yume Oukoku to Nemureru 100 nin no Ouji-sama in Japanese. Yeah, long name is long. Thing is that I didn't get any shoes with the costume and so I decided to make some myself... or well, modify from existing shoes.

The hard part was to find suitable shoes that I could use as a base. I had to plow through all second-hand stores in both Tornio and Kemi on several occasions (under a half year period) before I had a lucky strike at a second-hand store in Kemi called Viikkotori. I found a pair of suede boots in a lilac-tinted brown color and, although they were a size smaller than what I'd normally wear, they were still wearable (much to my surprise) and not as uncomfortable as I would have expected! I have quite small feet to begin with, for being a guy at least (EU size 40), but luckily that works to my advantage in this kind of cosplays when I have to look for women's shoes because men's shoes just don't have the kind of heel that the costume requires, lol.

Here's the shoes before any modifications.

I think they cost 5 € and were in surprisingly good shape – no obvious signs of wear and tear. I especially wanted suede boots because suede looks softer than leather and that's how I imagine Cheshire Cat's shoes. It was so hard to find fitting shoes and I'm still surprised that I even found these boots because they are as close to perfect as I could possibly have gotten. Thanks luck.

Cheshire Cat reference.

My original idea was to use worbla to cover the heel to make it have a more "metallic" look to it but yeah, the more I started thinking the less it felt like a good idea and the more it felt like me just wanting to avoid painting suede because I had no idea if one could even paint it successfully. I'm not sure if said boots are made of fake or real suede (there were no labels/tags to help) but before I started painting them I did a fabric check on an inconspicuous spot to see if the fabric paint I had would work or not. I've heard that if it's real suede it would soak right in and barely tint the material, but if it sticks then it's faux suede. So yeah, I did a paint test on the upper part of the heel's inside and the paint seemed to stick just fine – I was relieved!

Painting time ~

I started to paint all the golden parts. Fun fact: I had lost my main set of paint brushes so I only, of course, found the smallest detail brush ever and had to make do with it; it took forever and was tedious af. I did two layers to get better coverage and avoid the "brush stroke" effect that a single coating did. On some parts I took artistic liberties because, as far as I know, there's not any other official image of Cheshire Cat that would show his shoes from a different angle and thus I can't know how those swirls look on the other side.
The paint I'm using is a water-based universal paint with a metallic effect, for your information. It's hobby paint in a small plastic bottle, by a German brand called Efco.

After I was done with all the painting I needed to make those little cute silver cat head decorations that he has on his shoes. Good thing I had some leftover polymer clay lying around since the days I made Ibuki's little amulet thingy – now I finally got some use for it!
One little problem though that showed up was that I have no own oven and the only one there is in this building is the one in the common kitchen. The problem is that said oven hasn't been working properly (or at all) for a long time now and I certainly don't trust it after a few previous bad experiences. So yeah, I asked my good friend Sacchan if I could come over during a weekend and borrow their oven – green lights!

Polymer clay cat decorations in the making.

I was a bit worried that the polymer clay might have hardened over the years but luckily it was still workable after some kneading. I made two flat cat faces, a couple centimeters long each. It took me a while to get them as identical as possible but I didn't strive for perfection this time because that would have taken way longer than I had patience for, lol.

I used that little tool to punch the eye holes. Efficient!
This is taken after I had baked the clay, btw.

We had some ridiculous issues with baking them because the description says about 30 minutes in 110 °C but that didn't do jackshit to our creations (Sacchan also made an accessory for one of her cosplays). Then again, the oven doesn't close completely so that might have played a part too. We had to keep them in the oven a lot longer but luckily, at some point, they actually hardened and changed color.

When I got home I went ahead and painted them with silver spray paint and hung them to dry in the shower. It didn't occur to me then but I noticed afterwards that even long after the paint should have been completely dry the cat heads felt... sticky. Not sticky in a non-dry way but sticky in a more greasy way. At first I was confused but then I did some research (should have done it before, oops) and came to the conclusion that one should avoid painting/sealing polymer clays with petroleum-based paints. Pretty much all spray paints I've ever used are alkyd-based and not water-based so, yeah. :| I read something that it might over time damage/dissolve/soften/whatnot the clay (depending on brand) but oh well, it's done already and it's not like it would be much work to replace these cat charms afterwards, if needed. I'll see how long they hold and remake them if necessary.

Spray painted and hung to dry.

After some time the charms had, surprisingly, dried enough to not feel greasy anymore. I didn't think they would but seems like at least Cernit brand polymer clay does...

Now the only thing left was to attach the kitty charms to the shoes. Hot glue might have been an option but I much rather wanted to sew them on, especially since the eye holes allowed for it. I dug out my old leftover fishing line and used it as sewing thread – it's amazing because it's super strong and transparent, which means that the "thread" is close to invisible!

Finished Cheshire Cat cosplay boots!

That's all for this post! ^_^

Shiro Samurai out.

Samurai Deeper Kyo's Hotaru cosplay progress part.2

Oh hiya!

I've started working on my next cosplay – namely Hotaru from Samurai Deeper Kyo. On this here second part I'm gonna go through the making of his two kimono and the "obi" (sash). :) If you missed the first part of the progress you can read it here: part.1 progress post

I started out by making the inner kimono. It's always pictured with some kind of chequered pattern, so that's what I went for. I picked a close enough fabric from mom's attic (because eff yeah, free fabric!) that is white with dark red small chequered design all over it. I would have preferred an orange fabric but mom didn't have any... Oh well, if it starts bothering me in the future I can always just sew another one.

Hotaru, as seen in the manga.

His inner kimono rarely shows more than just the collars peeping out. I decided to make a very basic kimono pattern (even though it's not really needed since it's all just rectangles, more or less) just to have it for future projects, to save some time and headache.
I decided to make the sleeves short –like on a martial arts gi– to save fabric and make it easier to wear; they won't ever show anyway lol. So yeah, I just cut out all the pieces and started by overlocking all around the edges on everything.

I apologize for the crummy cellphone-quality photos ahead; I didn't have my SLR camera with me in school during this project. Most photos show the colors inaccurately.

This is all the patterns I needed for the (knee-length) kimono. The biggest piece
is the body panels (only half of actual length), okumi panel, collar piece
and sleeve. Note that the sleeves are budo gi style.

I then just naturally continued by sewing the pieces together, starting with the back seam and then the sleeves. I had some problems with the point where the sleeves meet the body, aka the armpits; for some reason I just can't get this area neat no matter what I do – it's the bane of my sewing existence lol. >_> Oh well. At one point I couldn't work more because I didn't have any interfacing fabric so yeah, I had to wait until I got that from mom before I could fix the collar. I decided to do the sash meanwhile so that I wouldn't waste any class time.

Fabric for the obi/sash.

Nothing to say about the making of this – I just took a long strip of fabric (the whole fabric bolt width) that was approximately 15 cm wide, folded it in half and sewed it shut after zigzaging around the edges. Oh and yeah, I had been to the fabric store earlier and I had found this perfect orange chequered fabric and guess what? >u< The best part was that it was on a permanent sale for only a puny 3 € per meter, zomfg!!
I had not seen it before in the store Eurokangas, y u hide stuff from me? but I obviously bought it for the obi on the same go when I went to fetch white cotton twill for Hotaru's main kimono there anyway. I was wondering if I shouldn't buy the orange fabric for his under kimono too (because it's so cheap) and make another one...?? I can't decide!

But yeah, back to the inner kimono. Because I started with rectangles for the body panels I had to make room for the collar so that it would fit. I cut two slits into the shoulders on the very top of the front side. I later rounded the whole collar area, using the slits as reference, so that the collar would fit nicely.

Slits cut for the collar placement.

I went to pick up some interfacing fabric and some orange fabric for Hotaru's outer kimono's collar. Of course I picked the same orange fabric that I had used for his pants on the earlier post.
But yeah, next time in class I continued to sew the inner kimono. I started by ironing on the interfacing fabric to the collar and then I sewed on the okumi panels to the front. After that I sewed on the collar and cut off the excess when I reached the end point. The raw ends of the collar I just folded inside and ironed in place so yeah, the bottom ends are not actually sewn shut.

Collar end folded inside and sewing.

Lastly I fixed the hem and then ironed all the seams open, for a nicer finish. I noticed when done that this kimono ended up shorter than I had first thought – it barely falls to my hips. This is actually not a problem because I'm just gonna tuck in the hem into the pants anyway so yeah, the less fabric there is the less bunchy, unfomfortable and ugly it will look. :'D But yeah, what I hadn't thought about was that because of the short length the collars are shorter too, which just miiiiiiiiiight be a problem. I can't tell just yet – I need to try everything on once finished to be able to judge.

After school I went to buy fabric paint in town for the Yin-Yang symbols on Hotaru's main kimono's sleeves and well, much to my lack of luck there were like all the colors except fucking orange. I mean, there were even several different shades of "light skin" colors (the pale peach-y shades) but not a single orange. Are you kiddin' me? -.- I don't know what's with this cosplay – nothing goes as I had planned it, not even the easy things that I should be able to do in my sleep go without errors! #badluckcosplay

Art from one of the "chapter pages" (163 to be precise) in the manga.
I'm assuming that this one is a fan coloration though...

I settled for buying a shade called "chestnut" which is like... err, if that's the color of chestnut then I've never seen a chestnut in my whole life lol. ._. It's a dark orange, close to the reference photo above (that's why I'm showing it) but with a very slight hint of brown. It was the only color available that was even sort of reminiscent of orange lol. It sucks to live in a small town where there's little to choose from when it comes to crafty stuff.
The thing is that because I'm doing the manga version of Hotaru the colors are inconsistent as hell – on some photos those sleeve symbols can be red, on the next bright orange and on the third a "sketchy" style filled-in gray. My personal preference is leaning towards orange so orange it is; luckily I already have some white fabric paint at home so I can lighten the orange paint, if needed.

Back at school I cut out the pieces for the white kimono using the patterns I had made earlier. I decided to make the sleeves really long since Hotaru's sleeves vary in length from panel to panel but yeah, most times they do look wide and flowy. I also wanted to have biiig sleeves because it's awesome. Period.

Flowy sleeves are flowy.

What has harder to find out though was what shape his sleeves had – on most images it was impossible to make out what the bottom shape of the sleeves were. I thought for the longest time that his sleeves narrowed down to pointy tips but yeah, I wanted to be sure so I started scrolling through the manga. After staring at countless images of Hotaru and thinking it through I decided to go for square sleeves on my cosplay of him, mainly because that's how real kimono sleeves are. I could just as well have opted for doing more fantasy-like pointy sleeves (it's not like Hotaru is the only one who took some liberties from "kimono rules"!) but nah, I'd rather do a bit more of a "what if Hotaru was a liiiiiiiiittle bit more accurate" approach. Hahah. Well... that accuracy thing gets thrown in the wall anyway because of his sword and tengu geta, but we'll get to that maybe later.

I even made a quick comparison collage!

Open in full-size to get bigger version.

Oh, and this is of course just how I personally interpret and view his sleeves on every single image I decided to use; you might view them differently and that's okay too ~

But hey, I had just enough fabric to get all the parts I needed (2 meters) with no scrap pieces left, phew! Before starting to sew anything together though I decided to paint the Yin-Yang symbols on his sleeves; I did this at home because, ironically enough, I'd have more table space for painting in my ridiculously tiny apartment than on the big shared table in the sewing class. ._. I also dislike being stuck sitting between two other strangers and having their stuff scattered around mine on the table so that I can't rotate my fabric –and move around the table– to get the best painting angles...

Yin-Yang design sketched onto the sleeves. I used those circular
objects to get perfect circles ~

Painted sleeves, booyah!

Because I didn't have a perfect fabric paint color I was constantly mixing the dark orange with white while I painted on the fabric. I always did the orange first and then took some white and blended it in before the paint had time to dry – this made the end result look more lively because it's not all just a single shade. :) I'm satisfied with the outcome. Oh, and I of course set the paint after it had dried completely by ironing on the "wrong side", 5 minutes per sleeve.

Hmmm...

I'm starting to feel like this post is getting long (no shit Sherlock!) so I'm just gonna split it once more and save the rest for a third part. ^^ I'll maybe include some wig testing on the next part so stay tuned!

Shiro Samurai out! ~