I'm trying to post a bit more frequently, but it's hard when weeks pass by so quickly! Yesterday was the Summer Norcal Cosplay Gathering, which I was lucky to be in the area for! These gatherings happen four times a year, and they've always seemed really exciting and fun, but I've never had a chance to go for some reason. This was my first time attending, and it sounds like they're getting bigger and bigger! Maybe it will be its own convention before we know it. For the time being, it does great as a gathering. I love the Norcal cosplay community for things like these. People want more chances to dress up and hang out with friends from all around the area, so they go out and just do it. It's really inspirational!
When I was trying to decide what to wear to this gathering, I was looking through schoolido.lu to see if there were any cute and simple summer outfits I could throw together to feed my Hanayo cosplay addiction. At the time the Marine outfits were in the process of being released, but Hanayo's wasn't out yet. I loved all of the available outfits, though, and I thought having a water gun at a beach meetup would be really fun! I waffled on which card to do, thinking that if I waited for Hanayo's Marine card I might not have time to finish. I had already done a fair amount of online window shopping for other outfits when Hanayo's card was released, but it was so cute, I knew I had to do it! Overall, I'm really happy with how this costume turned out. It wasn't too time consuming or expensive, but the design is really cute, and I feel like I can see the quality of my work improving with each costume I make, which is really exciting.
Unfortunately, I didn't take many progress pictures of this costume, but I'll give a brief rundown of how I made this come together!
I got most of the fabric from Jo-Ann. I wanted to make most of it out of cotton, but decided on a stretch knit for the white trim and sleeves. I did this partially hoping that the frill would turn out looking a bit softer this way, wrinkling less easily and having a bit more weight to hang down, but I also figured I might not have to hem the trim this way, which might have made it too stiff to hang right. Looking back, the unhemmed stretch knit, while not at a risk for fraying, does look a bit messy, so this might not have been the right move. But I think overall it had the effect I was going for.
The top took a bit of fiddling, but still only took about two sittings, a couple of hours for the collar and then maybe 5 more for the shirt. I have a kind of strange method for making princess seam tops, but I've done this several times now and I think it works pretty well. I like to use shirring in the back when possible partially because it pulls the whole thing tight, giving it a nice fitted look without having to take any exact measurements, and partially because I just really like how shirring looks. A friend of mine suggested I add shirring when I accidentally made a dress too small, and I've been in love with the look ever since!
So, to make my shirred princess seam tops, I'll create a tube of fabric shirred in the back according to my widest measurement (typically my bust). The exact measurements are up to you, but I tend to make 5 panels roughly 1/6 my bust measurement, and one panel which is about 1/3 my bust measurement, but shirred down to 1/6 as well. This takes a bit of playing around, depending on where exactly you want your seams to lie, and your best bet if you're unsure is to make them a little bit bigger than needed, and then take in the seams until you're happy with where they lie.
Then you turn it inside out and put it on, and pin along the princess seams (the ones going over the bust) until it feels like it fits you pretty well. Then you just sew along where you pinned, trim the excess, and shape the neckline however you like.
Once I had a base top like this, I simply attached the sailor collar to it, creating a sort of halter top.
Then there were boots. I didn't feel like making boot covers again so soon after my last boot covers adventure, so I opted for a slightly easier route. I managed to find some plain brown gogo boots at the thrift store for $20, so I jumped on them. They wear these weird peek-toe boots, but it was pretty easy to cut through the boots using an x-acto knife. I miraculously found matching vinyl at Jo-Ann and cut out a big t-shape to cover the toe and serve as a fake lip. I carefully sewed along bias tape (well, painstakingly ironed ribbon, since I couldn't find any nice looking gold bias tape myself) along the T to create the illusion that the T is actually peeking out from under the boot, and glued the whole thing on using craft glue. This was certainly not the optimal glue to use, but unfortunately I'm not too knowledgeable on that. At this point the gathering was the next day so my boots weren't everything they could have been. If you're not lazy like I am, this is when you would make the straps out of matching vinyl and sew them into the boots. In my case, I was worried that the glue might still be drying, and didn't want to risk touching them any sooner than I absolutely had to, so I left them off. If you have some extra time, another nice touch would have been to use some felt to cover the exposed insoles, which might have some white peeking through from where you cut out the toe where it meets the sole.
The rest of the details were mostly dumb luck finding the perfect charms or fabric at Jo-Ann, and just having things lying around the house. The only other notable technique I used was to make the bow on the hat stay upright, I put clear packing tape on the inside as makeshift interfacing. Maybe not the most long-term solution, but definitely cheap and easy for a last-minute fix!
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| This will have to do for the final product while I wait for my photoshoot pictures to come back. |
The gathering itself was really fun. My real-life childhood friend was cosplaying Rin with me, and although we didn't have exactly matching outfits this time, it's always really fun to cosplay with her, and it's even more fun cosplaying characters that embody our friendship so well. Later in the day we bumped into a photographer I like and got a nice photoshoot in by the beach. I can't wait to get the photos back!
I've been admittedly slacking on my fashion endeavors recently in preparation for this gathering. I still have some smaller cosplay plans in the works, but mostly I'd like to try and push through the second half or so of my wardrobe so I have something workable while I have plenty of summer weather ahead of me. I've got a couple of afternoon projects ready to go, plenty of thrift store trips, and probably some sort of taobao group order if I can find some more friends to get in on it with me, so look forward to that!
Until next time,
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