Ready for Battle

Photo by Raymond Madamba Photography

This costume was an interesting adventure for sure! To be honest, I actually was attracted to Shimakaze because of her striped socks...

This set of photos was actually taken after I had made several revisions to the costume. I rushed a little bit for Megacon, so there were quite a few things I was originally unhappy with. 

I started with her shirt and skirt. The skirt was just a basic pleated skirt made of Kona Cotton fabric which snaps together on the left side behind the gold button (someday I will get comfortable with making actual button holes and doing buttons the "normal" way). The skirt was originally about 1.5 inches longer than in this photo, and I am very pleased with the change. The shirt is a ponte roma knit that I had to alter a little bit after struggling with the "sagginess" of the armholes. The collar is made out of the same Kona cotton as the skirt with metallic gold ribbon hand-sewed on (the whole way around!!) I wasn't sure how the metallic gold ribbon was going to work, but it ended up looking okay. As a side note on the buttons: they are not functional and so they tended to hang down and look odd. I fix this problem by applying a small amount of super glue on the top part of the button and then gently pressing it toward the fabric. This is the best way I've found to prevent "droopy" buttons. 

The gloves I purchased off of ebay since I found no reason to go through the trouble of making my own white cotton gloves. Originally I hadn't planned on securing the blue cuffs to the gloves but I quickly found out that wasn't going to look so nice, so I ended up tacking them around the bottom, which worked out well. 

The black tie was thinned a lot from the first version, since it looked far too thick. The tie and "ears" are made out of the same black cotton fabric. The ears are made of wire around a headband that's just covered in fabric with a little hot glue. In order to keep the ears standing up straight, I put a single hair comb in the right side, which grabs on to my wig and wig cap, preventing the ears from sliding backward or forward too much. 

The wig is a platinum blonde wig from ebay which I styled slightly. The piece with the anchor attached is a separate piece that attaches to the underside of the wig with a strong name-tag magnet. The anchor is made from Model Magic and the chain is just painted chain pieces from a halloween decoration. 

The socks were purchased on amazon. 

The shoes were the most difficult part. I started with a horrible version that I debuted at megacon, but then quickly decided I wasn't going to be happy until I put more effort into them. I started with some ankle boots off of ebay that were the right color. I then painted the soles of the shoes with red nail polish. I hand crafted the back sides out of Model Magic with some googly eyes and then attached everything with super glue and painted it red to match the soles. I was lucky enough to find a very similarly colored stretch vinyl to make the boot "socks" out of. I really hate boot covers, so I improvised a little and decided to insert the extra boot part into the shoe itself. The thicker pieces of the boot were thick green craft foam that was hot-glued together and then covered. The front half-dome pieces are plastic balls cut up and covered with the same fabric as the boots, and then hot-glued onto the thicker pieces. 

Making Rensouhou-chan is another story...lol

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me!!!