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Magical Girl

By Nardack

 

 

I had seen this design and the more fancy counterpart many moons ago, before I ever even started sewing my own costumes. So when Koi-ishly asked if I wanted to do this costume with her, I was very excited to try and use my skills to recreate a design I had seen before I even had any skills at all! This costume is by far one of my favorites and deffinitely one I'm proud of!

I debuted this costume along side Koi-ishly at Katsucon 2015.

 

 

Construction Notes

Wig- I used an Arda Chibi in Sliver as the base and bought some long wefts and braided clips in the matching color. I first stubbed the wig, then I used batting (the sheets of stuffing quilters use) in order to create those horns shapes on her head. I glued them to the wig, and then used more glue to attach the wefts around the batting shapes. Once I had covered the whole shape with wig wefts, I wraped the braid clips around the cone where I wanted them and glued them into place. The bangs were trimmed to match the characters and fake flowers were glued on to finish the wig

 

Wings- I used stiff felt to make the wings since it was cheaper and easier for me to control then actual fethaers. I started with a drawn pattern of the wings and once I had the scale right, I moved to cutting the feathers out of the felt. I glued the feathers to a foam wing base that I bought from Yaya Han's website, the foam from her pre-made wings offered a nice base to glue my foam feathers on to, and her wire understructure functioned perfectly to keep my wings upright. In order to add the circular embellishments, I used a wire circle (found in the flower wreath type section of Hobby Lobby) wrapped in fabric and hot glued yellow gems, 3-D filagry scrapbooking stickers, and a fake flowers to recreate the decorations on the wings. I attached my wings without any straps, I just tucked the 'U' part of the wings into the corset I wore under my dress.

 

Sleeves- I used slik organza to make my sleeves. I cut out my sleeve shape using the bishop sleeve pattern I had used for the sleeves of my totoro dress. I hand dyed the blue to black/navy ombre into my cut out sleeve shapes and once I sewed them together, I added elastic to the top and bottom of the sleeves to make nice puffy sleeves. Once that was done, I moved on to those rather embellished sleeve caps. I luckily found the perfect mesh ribbon at A.C. Moore and used that as the base. I glued a black ribbon to the base of the white mesh ribbon, added the flowers, and attached some satin scallop trim I made using Heat-n-Bond.

 

In order to create the scallop trim, I first drew the scallop pattern. I then attached the heat-n-bond to a peice of white satin that was a little bit larger then my pattern. I traced my design to the paper part of the heat-n-bond, cut it out, peeled off the paper backing, and viola! Nice shapely trim with no fraying. Once the paper is removed, there is still a layer of glue left on the fabric, but since I wasn't planning on ironing the trim to anonther peice of fabric, I  just ignored the waxy glue and it just gave my fabric some extra stiffness. 

 

I hand stitched a string of pearl beads and some rhinestone beads to the top of the sleeve cap and added velcro to the caps so that they would stay in place on my arm, but still be over top of the organza sleeves. Once the seelve caps were done, I glued flat-back pearls all over the cap and the sleeve. The white cuffs at her wrists I used the same method as the scaoolp trim I made on the sleeve caps. I used Heat-n-bond on the back of white satin and just cut out my shape, leaving the last layer of glue alone and letting it add some stuffness to my fabric. Velcro was added to keep the cuff tight around my wrist. All three of the peices are seperate, but when worn together looked like one peice

 

Dress and Collar- I started the dress by patterning it out in muslin first. I found this dress rather challengin because it was slouchy like a potato sack, but was still a little fitted in the waist. Working in muslin, I cut out a large rectanlge and added elastic at the top and bottom, then I gradually began to take in the waist until I got a shape I was happy with. Once I had the shape down, I took apart my muslin mock up and used those as the pattern peices for my dress. The fabric I used for my dress was a bargan fabric my and Koi-ishly found while fabric shopping one day. It was a rather stiff satin with a black pattern all over. It was gorgeous, but kinda odd. The fabric had a fusible interfacing on it adding extra stiffness to an already sturdy fabric, I picked off the interfacting before I sewed my dress because I didn't like the extra stiffness the interfacing added. Using my muslin pattern peices, I cut in to the pretty black-on-black fabric and sewed up my dress! I kept the elastec band at the bottom of the dress, but I gatherd the top of the dress instead of using elastic. This was so I could keep the gathers toward the fron of the dress and make it look poofy and more easily sew the band around the top of the dress. I created the band using a teal, almost irredescent, taffeta and laying downt he striped by hand...yeah I know.In order to created the stripes, I used a roll of Heat-n-Bond tape to attach black satin ribbon to the teal band. I used a ruler to make sure my stripes were even before ironing them into place. The process was teidious, but well worth it since I had a wonderful striped pattern at the end of all my hard work. An invisible zipper is in the side seam so I can actually wear the dress. Once it was all together, I added the fake flowers and some fake little ribbon tails.

 

For the collar I essentially made a ribbon with the teal fabric, added the stripes with the heat-n-bond, and then added a pre-tied bown to the back with long tails. The collar isn't really tired around my neck, I just used a snap closer to keep the collar around my neck. 

 

Skirt- The skirt is a simple elastic waist skirt (becasue at this point I was too lazy to sew a zipper) with a box pleat strip of fabric sewn at the bottom. I used the same stripe making process on the dress and collar on the skirt. Once the pleated strip was all sewn down I attached it to the skirt and added some white scallp trim to the bottom of the box pleats in order to make it look like I was wearing a white slip underneath with the trim peaking out from under the skirt. Again, I was too lazy to actuall sew a slip at this point haha.  

 

Socks and Shoes- I already owned the black over-the knee socks (see my Camellia Gumi costume) so I just used those and borrowed some black suede wedges from Koi-ishly. 

Peachy Keen Cosplay
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