Cosplay ALREADY!

Queen Elsa is FINALLY starting to loosen her icy grip on Cincinnati (Elsa, honey, you got your Oscar. You can stop letting it go now) but my thoughts have already turned to summer, and summer means Gen Con, and Gen Con means cosplay!

And I totally didn’t mean to do this, but I may have finished one costume already. Okay, granted, it’s Pie’s cosplay, and it’s a pretty simple one, at least compared to last year. But still. It was the second day of March, and I had one out of three costumes pretty much done.

Pieface has decided she wants to be Kiki, of Delivery Service fame:

See? Pretty simple. Dress, hairbow, flats, broom, cat.

One of the hardest things, surprisingly, was finding a good dress pattern. Most commercial patterns for girl’s costume dresses are full of puffs, ruffles, frills, and other frippery that would be out of place. Kiki’s dress is a plain, loose-fitting, simple shift – and, as Kiki spends a noticeable amount of time in the film bemoaning her lack of bright, pretty clothes, adding frills was a no-go.

I finally settled on Simplicity 1584 – underneath the trims and accessories was a good, plain A-line dress.

I did very little by way of customizing the pattern – the only change I made was to make the sleeves shorter, wider, and gathered at the shoulder, to make them puff a little. (I also changed the order of the sewing directions, but that’s because I always set sleeves in flat – before sewing the side seams – if I can get away with it.)

For fabric, I took Pie to Hancock Fabrics and we wandered around, looking at all the purple fabric we could find. (Kiki’s dress is technically black, but straight black is a very dead color. As an art student, I was cautioned against using black paint out of a tube, because it dulls a painting – we were encouraged to mix our own blacks out of the other colors we had. Animators avoid actual black for the same reason – it looks like a dead spot onscreen - hence Kiki’s purple-black dress.)

It took some looking to find a purple fabric that was a) suitably dark, b) suitably heavy/opaque, and c) suitably soft for a child’s dress. We settled on this Ponteroma knit in Deep Purple. It’s got a nice weight, a slight ribbed texture to add some visual interest, and a bit of sheen, to appease the Pie’s love of shiny fabric. (I had to pull her away from some purple lamé.)

From a length of fabric and an uncut pattern…

To this…

Took less than 24 hours. Shoulder seams, bias-tape collar, hem/gather/set in sleeves, sew sides, sew center back seam, sew back opening, press up and sew hem, and attach back button. 24 hours. That is insane. There are doll dresses that have taken me longer to make.

As for the hairbow… I picked up a lovely, bright red, crepe-back satin out of the remnant bin – I didn’t have a definite plan on what to use it for, but it was pretty* – and it just so happened to perfectly match the red satin headband I picked up at JoAnn’s to be the base.

*This, by the way, is why I have a huge stash of remnants, although I haven’t sewn anything for dolls in ages.

I used this fabric bow tutorial to make a big, shiny, floppy bow, and some hot glue to attach it to the headband.

Hairbow!

Now, all that remains is accessories. Pie already has a child-sized broom, so that’s checked off the list. Kiki wears bloomers under her dress, but Pie has flat vetoed the idea of bloomers, so she’ll be in plain tights. Her shoes will be purchased at a time closer to August, to avoid unpleasant growth spurt surprises.

Lastly (and most importantly to Pie), there is the matter of Jiji, Kiki’s talking black cat. From the frequency of questions regarding Jiji, if I have found a plush Jiji for her, if I am going to make a plush Jiji for her, etc., I sometimes wonder if Pie didn’t decide on a Kiki costume just so she could add to her stuffed animal collection!

 (In the “before” picture above, the role of Jiji was filled by Kuroneko-sama, who is also a black cat character from an anime – “Trigun”, that is – but Pie insists on having an accurate Jiji.)

There are official licensed Jiji plushes out there - but, being imports, they are all slightly ridiculous in price. Thankfully, I have some time to weigh my options!

(I also have time to work on my own costumes. I went ahead and bought one very necessary wig...

(Still getting used to the whole "having bangs" thing. I grew mine out at 13 and never looked back.)