JAUHELIHA-PERUNASOSELAATIKKO

Hello, Ennah here!

Dalin already updated one of her older costumes, so I thought I'd do the same. I decided to put all my older cosplays here in the same post, as I haven't done as many cosplays for myself as Dalin.

Over the years, I've done many custom-made cosplays for my friends from the series/games like Disgaea, Magic Knight Rayearth, Chrono Crusade and Shingeki no Kyojin.  After WCS preliminaries I really feel like I should keep a break from all the other cosplay projects than my own, especially now that we know that our next WCS-project is going to be humongously big!

So the first group cosplay project that I made with Dalin was a OC-version of Alice in Wonderland. It was just before the Tim Burton movie was released that we started designing our own versions of the characters. I wanted to 'cosplay' White Rabbit, as he was my favourite character in the books. We wore our costumes for Desucon at 2010.

At that time, I was still studying for clothing seamstress vocational degree, and I made the jacket as a part of my schoolwork. The 'swedish aristocrats gaypants', as we called them then, were from this vintage-themed upholstery fabric.

All together we did 4 costumes, Dalin did her Queen of Hearts, I did this, and together we did also Cheshire Cat and White Queen for our friends.

White Rabbit and Cheshire Cat

After that was this one project we both were very enthusiastic to the moment we put our cosplays on and walked to the con. To this day, we do not really talk about the project, as it was a bit... embarrassing one (but still, it was one of the funniest and greatest experiences with cosplaying that I've had, and the costumes were good... kinda)! There still might be some photos left in Dalins computer...

The next project was also with Dalin, as we did our Digimon cosplays for Desucon 2011. I was not as familiar with Digimon as Dalin, because I was more of an Pokémon child for myself. Still, one of my favourite characters in Digimon  was Wizardmon, and I decided to do that one. 

The fabrics were kinda hard to find, and many cosplays that I had seen so far had colors horribly off. Finally after going around Uusimaa's fabric stores, I found some at Eurokangas in their scrap box. In the cape, the white patterns were actually from adhesive fabric that I had ironed on, because I didn't want any stitches to be shown on the other side. 

The thing I have with my cosplays is that I'm really, really lazy to get them photographed. To me, being in a convention with my costume means more to me than getting good pictures. With Wizardmon, we were having a blast all day at Desucon, and before we left, my friend took couple of pictures of me. I probably should probably get this one photographed better ;;___;;.

The next project was for Tracon 2011, as we decided to do a Star Wars -group. I remember being a little girl and watching the older movies with my dad. He would always tell me how he had went to see the first movie in theater when he was just a little boy and how amazed he was by all the cool special effects.

So this project was dear to me, and first I was troubled by which character should I do, Amidala in her Black Invasion costume or Tusken Raider. We were supposed to have Amidala attending to our group, so I decided to do the Tusken Raider. The sewing part was simple to do, and the funniest part was to dirty up all the fabrics so they looked like they had been used a lot. 

The head part had an old respirator inside, and I builded the whole thing around that with duct tape and iron wire. Then I covered the whole thing with fabric and created the 'mouth part'. 

So that's it. It's a shame that I haven't had the time to make more cosplays for myself, but I've promised myself now to prioritize my own cosplays before anyone elses. I'm not saying that it hasn't been fun doing those costumes as well, but wearing my own handmade costume and hearing peoples thoughts on it really get's a smile on my face.


***

I've done some progress with Hajimes outfit, the skirt is almoust done. I have to stitch the hem and put the suspenders on.

The only fabric that I had to buy for this cosplay was the black skirt-material. I bought this really nice cotton fabric that has a bit elastane on it. I had to put some adhesive fabric on the lining so that the tight part on the waist doesn't stretch.

Loving my Vallila's mandariini carpet

We always do our patterns from scratch, using only our own measurements. It's easier to get the right fit when you do your patterns yourself. These particular patterns were easy to do, I just had to get the fit from under the bust to waist tight and the rest of the skirt was cut bell-shaped.

Pattern pieces

That's it for now. Next post is probably going to be Dalin's again, as she tells you more about her older projects.

- E

OMENAPIIRAKKA

Hello, everyone! It's Ennah here!

Today's short topic is a bit unusual one for us. I thought I'd share my thoughts to you about choosing characters for your body type. Both me and Dalin lean on the more heavier dress size than the "usual" 38, and the challenges with choosing characters are not new to us.

Let's be honest with ourselves, you can’t cosplay every character you happen to like and make it look perfect. The most important thing in cosplaying is attitude and your dedication, but remembering your body shape and type is also crucial. If you are a bit bigger on the stomach-area, cosplaying as someone in the bikini might not be the best idea. That doesn't mean you should be a skinny 34-sized girl and look like a doll.

What you should do is to think of the characters you like as well as your body shape; what do you think are good qualities in yourself and what do you want to show off, and what would you rather cover a bit.

Depending on your character, shaping your body is possible. If you have a dress, it's easy to do a corset boning inside your dress that will slim your waist slightly and give you a better posture. Usually your costume will look even better with boning inside, as it will give it some support it needs as well.

One of the things I really love about cosplay is the transformation and how far people can go to look like their character. When it comes to crossplayers, unfortunately many of them don't really think about their own silhouette when they start making the cosplay. It's easy to spot a woman in men's clothing if you don't bind your bust or make your waist more unnoticeable. The same goes of course for a man, if you don't get yourself curves.

Then there is people who stop themselves of cosplaying something they love because they don't have as much curves than the character. There are great ways to get you some hips, and it doesn't even have to cost that much.

Drag Queens for example, don't have the womanly curves at all. What they do is use these things called hip pads which many of them make themselves. There are great tutorials about how to make your own hip pads from high-density polyurethane foam sheets.  I'm actually a bit sad that I have bigger hips, because I would love to try to do padding myself. (Please recommend me some character that has a humongous hips so I can do those ;__;)

Here is agreat video by petrilude about making your own hip pads. He also does great make up tutorials and drag queen stuff;

There's a lot of different things you can try to shape your body to match your character, but one of the most essential thing is to buy the right fabrics and make your costume as fitted for you as possible. You can always try to play with the fabrics and try to manipulate them so that the "problem areas" don't show as much.

***

On the sidenote, I have decided to start making a quick cosplay from my leftover fabrics that's been piling up for some time now. After quick inventory, the next cosplay will be this;

Ichinose Hajime - Gatchaman Crowds

I'll  upload some pictures while working with this project, probably not any tutorials though. This cosplay is really one of the more simple ones, it's so nice to do something that doesn't immensely stress you out.

- E 

MUSTIKKARAHKA

Dalin here !!

We were actually thinking on telling you guys a little bit about our past cosplay projects now when the WCS 2014 project is over. So I'm gonna start with my Cherubimon cosplay from Digimon movie: Hurricane touchdown! Supreme evolution the golden digimentals and from Digimon Frontier. 

As a kid I was a huge fan of Digimon series (probably even more than Pokémon). Cherubimon was one of my favorites from the movie and it was hysterical when I realized after many years that I actually could do a Cherubimon costume. Fueled with this idea and the fact that no one had ever done this level of cosplay of this character, I decided to make something amazing !!

Cherubimon - Virus mode.

I made the costume for Desucon 2011, and at that time it was one of my most challenging costume I have ever made. It took one week to make this whole thing and now afterwards when I think about the making of this costume... It's kinda difficult to comprehend how I managed to build this thing only in seven days !! In the end Ennah had to help me out on some parts which I wasn't able to do by myself. Like gluing some filling and making sure the costume fitted on me and there wasn't any horrible mistakes anywhere. 

I just remember listening Digimon theme songs, OST's, episodes and movies as a background sound the whole week and not sleeping much. 

Digimon episode playing at the background...

As for the materials, there's a lot of filler (vanu) inside the hands and thigh-belly area. 

For building the inhuman shape there's also all kinds of supporting structures made out of iron wire, wood, duct tape, hot glue, sleeping mat, plastic bottle and cycle helmet. The violet, dark green and light blue fabrics are fleece so you can just imagine how hot this thing was to wear when there's almost +30°C outside. This thing is huge and heavy and when a 177 cm tall, not so skinny person like me is wearing it... it's quite massive sight.

Playing with the patterns and shapes was easier than it looks like. If you have even a slightest clue on how patterns and especially 3D shaped patterns work it's not so difficult to make something like this. 

Planning 

I always start cosplay costumes by drawing the character and writing all the details and work phases on multiple times and on countless different papers (which I sometimes somehow manage to lose somewhere). Thoroughly planned procedure will help a lot when making the costume and it will eliminate the possibility of making too many mistakes.

Yo Dude I'm gonna hit ya through that brick wall !!

One of the most delicious memories while wearing this costume was when I started to run after this about 5-year old kid and he started to cry and run away hysterically while screaming his mum and dad. Oh the wonderful memories. That kid was probably traumatized for life. Afterwards people came over to ask to hug them because I was so cruel to that kid. Can't even remember how many people I hugged at that day.

We actually made it to the front page of local news paper with my friend who cosplayed Dipp from Katamari. With a hug picture, how surprising. There was also a small picture of us inside where the actual article was. Ennah was cosplaying the Wizardmon btw. She will tell you more about that in her own post.

It's a shame that there isn't a picture of how I had to cycle the 3 km distance from my apartment to the event location while wearing that costume (without the huge hands of course).

- D

UUNIJÄÄTELÖ

Woohoo !! Our official stage pictures from WCS 2014 Finland preliminaries were published yesterday evening. So, here's the complete outfits of Mitsuhide Akechi and Chacha from Sengoku Arashi -Nobunaga no Shou- !!

(C)Tapio Matikainen

We really need to practice posing in front of cameras. This was fairly good one and you can see the outfits clearly, but the poses probably need a little bit more attitude.

(C)Tapio Matikainen

(C)Tapio Matikainen

It's somehow amazing to see the costumes on the stage. When we find a video of the show, we will post it here so you can see the whole thing. Also just to clarify something, that orange box thing at the background is (supposed to be) a slotmachine prop. I bet no one at the audience didn't get it and that's one of the reasons why our performance was kinda confusing. We are taking that into consideration when planning our next show at the WCS 2015 preliminaries.

(C)Tapio Matikainen

Because we were the last pair to go to the stage, we didn't see all the performances. Yeah, there was a TV-screen at the backstage where we could see something of what happened at the stage, but it was kinda small and bad quality. Ennah was half blind because she didn't wear any contact lenses or glasses (It's amazing she survived at the stage).  Some of the performances we saw were great and probably even more amazing when you were watching from the audience.

(C)Tapio Matikainen

Starting from the left, the top four; Bronze, Silver, Gold and the honorable mention from good stage performance. Congratulations to all winners and we'll be seeing some of you next year !!!

- D

RUISLIMPPU

Either of us had never ever before done an armor. So let's have a look on how it went.

Continuation from previous post where we told about paper mache and this flour-water mix up goo, the chest armor is made by using these same methods.

Firstly using the chicken wire we shaped it directly on Dalins torso. Because of chest armors shape Dalin didn't need to bind her boobs to the point where the breathing would have been painful. Ah, the joys of crossplaying.

Back part waiting it's turn to be shaped. 

After getting the right shape out of chicken wire Dalin started to cover the whole thing with paper mache. This took some while because the insides needed to be covered also and to get the structure durable and unbreakable there had to be multiple layers of newspaper strips.

Welcome to Night Vale

It took one day to do the shaping and cover it and almost three days for this thing to dry properly because of the size and all the layers. It's a miracle that this thing dried exactly to a correct shape.

At the same time Dalin also made the collar, shoulder guards, knee pads and toe protectors from chicken wire and paper mache. All of these parts needed to be covered with wood filler and sanded to get (almost) a smooth surface.

Pattern planing 

Craft foam is the ultimate cosplay material !!!

Gintama episodes playing at the background...

The chest armor needed to be covered with some thick fabric before the velveteen cover. Just to hide all the roughness and to get the surface smooth. Some hot glue to keep the pieces intact and that's it !!

Toe protectors, knee pads and the collar.

There are some parts missing from the pictures, because on this phase we were in a hurry to get all the work done so either of us didn't remember to take any pictures. Sorry for that. These latest pictures were taken a week before the competition....not good.

We'll post a pictures from the details and tell a bit about those also. Too bad there isn't any pictures about making of the Mitsuhides shoes or Chachas dress.

- D

LEIPÄJUUSTO

One of the most therapeutic part for Dalin in this project was playing with paper mache. Dalin used paper mache and chicken wire almost in every accessories and armor parts. Making the basic shape out of chicken wire and covering it with paper mache made from newspaper and flour-water mix up is the easiest job ever.

The flour-water mix up is a cheaper version for wallpaper paste and works just as well.
Put about 3 dl water in the pot and let it warm a bit before adding 1 dl wheat flour. Mix it really well by using whisk and when the water starts to boil the flour solidifies and the mixture reminds a glue... or white goo ectoplasm.

It's a pot full of white goo...think what you want from that.

Although the drying takes about two days if you put a lot of layers, but after the paper is dry it's really hard and durable. The chicken wire inside doesn't bend, but gives a slight flexibility. The paper mache shrinks a little bit when dry, so there was some unevenness on the surface. To fix these unevenness's Dalin covered the armor plates with craft foam.

All the armor plates after covered with craft foam.

Contact glue !!!

The edges were also a bit uneven so Dalin used a wood filler (pikasilote) to clean and fix the edges. At the moment we didn't have a drill so the holes needed to make by hand. It was painful. First the plates had to adjust to their right places by using nails (the metal ones, not the ones growing at the tip of your fingers) to keep them on their right places. After that Dalin used screwdriver to get the holes bigger.

The not so clean work space.

When all the plates were covered and fixed and sanded, it was time to paint them. We noticed that spray paint doesn't stick or spread out evenly to craft foam, so the best solution was to paint them using acrylic paints and then spray paint them. To get the right color was almost as frustrating as trying to dye the fabrics on right color.

To the bottom plates Dalin used a template to get the dim flower image. First the plates were spray painted by using matte gold and after the paint was dry she put the template to the middle of plate and sprayed chrome gold paint over it. When taking of the template from the plate the image is like it shows on the source image.

Chacha's wings are also getting some chrome paint on them.

Binding the plates together with golden threads was a panic-stricken situation. After not sleeping properly over 50 hours, your hands tend to shake a little bit and brains are fueled by energy drinks.
Not recommended to anyone !!! Finish your outfits a week before the occasion !!

- D

JUUSTOKAKKU

As we promised this post is about our silkscreen making and printing process.
At the cosplay backstage a lot of other cosplayers asked us about our prints and how we made them. Well, this post is mostly about our process on how and what we did this time, but we will probably do a proper silkscreen printing tutorial in a near future.

The basic thing in silkscreen prints are that everything you do in black while making the plastic sheet will eventually come out in color when you print it into the fabric. You don't need to cut anything so this is totally different technique than template printing.

Mitsuhides cloak prints

We both analyzed the source pictures thoroughly and based on those pictures we drew sketches on paper. The size needed to be exactly right, especially in Chacha's case, where all the prints needed to click to their correct places. Same thing needed to be done to Mitsuhide's ...under cloak parts (I don't know how to describe them !!). The print on those parts was a four-way continuous pattern and fairly difficult to adjust on their right places.

Dalin working on light table

Dalin had a light table so drawing the pictures to plastic sheet was fairly easy, because when making these kinds of pictures you need to be careful that the light doesn't come through from wrong places. This will be a hindrance later on.

Silkscreens on a windowsill

In total we used 9 different silkscreens to get all the prints. That's a lot and it took a lot of time to make all of those. It was awesome thing that we got a permission to use spaces and class rooms in Dalin's school to work with this project. The printing room and pattern making room were mostly the main base for our work.

The pink stuff in screens is exposure emulsion which is really important material in silkscreen printing. Without that stuff you can't do complicated prints. You need UV-light to harden the emulsion so we used the UV-light exposure machine and sunlight. Yeah, it is possible to harden the emulsion only by keeping it in sunlight for a few minutes.

Washing the exposure emulsion off from the screen is the annoying part. Glad there was a pressure washer in Dalins school.

Part of Chacha's haori

Mitsuhide's cloak is getting some prints !! At 11 pm.

Deeeeep concentration going on.

Printing the fabric was the fun part !! Some awesome music playing in the background and just printing print after print is somehow fun to do. Until you screw something up.... Some mild screw ups happened, but we were able to cover them !!

- D

KESÄKEITTO

Last time we managed to get to the painting part of Chacha's wings.  After that, coming back from the middle of the forest to civilization we started the fabric dyeing and printing process.

Quick shopping trip to Helsinki, HobbyPoint, to buy all the fabric colors and supplies we needed and we were ready to go!

Testing, testing, testing...

Because we're somewhat perfectionists, every fabric needed to be exactly the right color. To us colors are one of the most important thing in cosplay. This part took a really long time as almost all the materials needed to be dyed.

First we bought some fabrics for testing how they would react to the dyeing. After a couple of failures and do overs we bought our fabrics. Apparently artificial suede leather doesn't take this kind of coloring too well and failed miserably. Fabrics from natural materials, such as wool, silk, cotton and linen, are best suited for this kind of dyeing.

Some of the fabrics Ennah used were cotton and linen. Dalin on the other hand used stretch cotton, velveteen, silk and fake leather.

Ennah had a difficult time with the multicolored gradient haori and Dalin searched the longest time for a perfect material for chest armor that would have been possible to dye with the dyeing materials we had.

Chacha's haori is rather multicolored and bright, so dyeing that thing didn't go so smoothly as it looks like. The point where orange turns to violet was the most critical part as it easily turns out brown. In the end Ennah had to paint it by hand by using the liquid fabric colors to get the effect clear and intensive. Otherwise the whole thing, including the sleeves are dip dyed.

The fabrics were fairly large so we needed to use a big trash bin for dyeing (which we didn't stole from Dalin's apartment building's washing room).

Few tips we could point out for you if you need to dye something is that you should always start by using little pieces of fabric to see how the color will react with your material. It's recommendable to always start with lighter color, getting color out of your dyed fabric is a pain if you manage to dye your fabric too dark.

Always read the manuals in your color packet, they may wary. It's recommended to soak the fabrics thoroughly with water before throwing them in to the color. This helps the color to absorb to the fabric evenly. Use some stick to move the fabric in the container or if the water isn't too hot use some plastic gloves to cover your hands and move the fabric around in the liquid with your hands. Remember to use gloves, getting the color off of your hands will be hard.

Keep the fabric in the liquid for 10-30 minutes or longer depending on how intensive you want the color to be. After that rinse the fabric thoroughly so the water dripping from the fabric is clear. You can still put it in the washer to make sure you've gotten all the extra color out.

Most of the synthetic materials don't absorb fabric colors so well, so remember to buy a fabric that you know can be dyed. If possible buy a sample first and try it, even the finishes of the fabric might affect if it's dyeable or not.

Mitsuhides fabrics

Fabric dyeing in a trash bin

The Horror

Next we'll be writing about our silkscreen printing process !!

- D & E

JAUHELIHAMUREKE

Hi !! Dalin here !!

Okay so, we were kinda busy for these couple of weeks and neither of us had time to update this blog. Sorry for that.

So, now when the Tracon 8 weekend and World Cosplay Summit 2014 Finland preliminaries are over, we will update our process and possibly some tutorials from our cosplays.

Before you wonder that oh, what ?? They already finished everything ?? What happened ??

Well, just for your information, we have never ever before participated in any cosplay competition. We took a risk and gambled and went straight to the biggest cosplay competition ever and made it to the Bronze !!

Yeah, of course at first we were a bit disappointed because we put a lot of work for our costumes. But when you think about it and the fact that this was our first competition ... the third place is a goddamn amazing achievement !!!

It was amazing experience. People were really nice and came to ask a lot of questions about our costumes and do just some general chatting. The staff at the backstage was also wonderful !! Big thank you for everyone who helped us !!

Next year we're gonna be smarter and finish our costumes preferably a week before the competition. This year was close call and there were some horrible situations.

- D