VADELMASORBETTI - Josephine the Fashion Diva

So much pink!

I can't believe I actually made the Josephine cosplay. She is ironically everything I hate about the fashion industry and fashionistas. The amount of pink and red was something I thought I would never wear. Still, it was kind of refreshing to cosplay her. Especially the skit was somehow really fun to do with all the parody towards fashionistas.

Josephine from Suikoden V

Photo - Kyuu Eturautti

For the fabrics I mostly used Tanjore -curtain fabric that looks really similar to raw silk. In reality it's just viscose- polyester mix. First I bought 7 meters of light pink and I thought it would be enough for the jacket, cape and parasol. Oh, how wrong I was. I had to buy two meters more and even then I had to do some hard thinking to get the fabric last. In the end I used 9 meters of the light pink fabric, 1 meter of the blue fabric and 5 meters of  the red fabric. The total price for those was 148,50 €!!

Making the patterns for the jacket was a really painful experience. Usually I just use my intuition and experience when making the patterns, but somehow non of that helped me with this! Every piece was different so you had to think hard about which piece had which print and whether the sleeves were correct or not! The sleeves were the most problematic. I had to make about six different patterns (in which Ennah helped me, because my brain just wasn't comprehending some things) and three prototype sleeves. Horrible I say, horrible.

Photo - Nyymix

One part of the costume I really stressed over was the wig. I googled lots and lots of tutorials about how to make the Marie Antoinette styled wig or something similar like that. In the end I ordered two long white wigs from ebay and sewed them together.

I made this hairball as base structure for the curls. I made the base using some soft foam sheet that is used to soften couches, chairs etc...

After that came the real question; How on earth am I going to make these tube curl thingies?!? After couple of tests, thinking and sleepless nights I found the solution to my problems! I used wadding pieces, folded the ends of hair flocks between them and just rolled the hair around them. There are almost 50 pins inside that wig to keep the rolls in the right places. Afterwards I also sewed them by hand into the wig base structure to ensure that the tube curls would stay in place.

The hat and feathers were fun to make. I like to make small things like these so they were almost non-problematic for me. Except for the fabric roses. I looked up some tutorials from YouTube and I found this best fabric rose tutorial ever! I found this tutorial really good and easy, except for the part where she just folded the fabric in half. I sewed it shut like a tube and ironed it. It looks more cleaner and there will be no threads sticking out everywhere! Here's the link to the tutorial;

I watched the tutorial like 20 times before I got a hold of the technique. I'm slow leaner if I have to learn straight from tutorials!

Mustache hat! 

I made the huge feathers from white felt. For one feather, I cut two identical feather-like shapes and stuck them together. I needed something in the middle to hold the feathers up, so I sewed a tunnel for this aluminium strip and just stringed the strip inside the tunnel. After that, I spray glued the felts together. I wanted to give the feathers more realistic look, so I painted them with acrylics.

One thing I also had so much trouble was finding the right shoes for Josephine. It was maddening to try to find right-sized high heels in the middle of the winter. I was so relieved when I found just the right shaped shoes! The color didn't matter, as long as they were somehow comfortable to wear and didn't cost too much.

The hot red color had to go, welcome baby pink! I used acrylics to paint the shoes and because the material was suede fabric the paint attached really well and didn't start to crack when it was dry.

The earrings were simple enough to make. I had already made the earrings for Okô and Dakki using fimo clay and I decided to use it for these ones also. It's pretty light material and really easy to use. I didn't want to use real mirror for the earrings so I bought this mirror plastic from Hobby Point in Helsinki, this was the best choice ever!! The earrings are so light even thought they are so big.

Photo in the right side by Kyuu Eturautti

The parasol was made from another umbrellas metal skeleton. I took it apart and made an extension for the shaft using metal shaft from dustpans brush. I had to go to our bicycle storage to spray paint the skeleton because it was sleeting  outside. Just cover the floor and no one notices anything ;D The white rose (which looks a bit like pine cone) is made from worbla!

The canopy is made from the same light pink tanjore fabric as the fabric used on the jacket. The pink polka-dot prints are made by using stencil. I also used french seams for all the canopys seams. It's really, really handy technique if you want to make neat and clean seams. I had some problems with fitting the skeleton properly inside the canopy and some of the ribs folded a little bit. Well, not everything can go perfectly.

When there was about a week left to the event I had all the accessories and smaller and simpler parts ready, but the jacket was still in pieces. I had to be really careful with the jacket pieces so I knew exactly which piece goes where and which print goes which side. There was a lot of printing using the old school method with tape to make the stripes. I made the white swirly pattern using silkscreen technique.

The stripes really suit you dear Neomundur von Furpants.

After this part I don't have much of pictures because I was working on the super mode and had to focus for anything else. What I can tell is that I had a small fuck up with the prints on the left sleeve. I had accidentally printed the swirly print on the wrong side of the fabric and had to cut and print a whole new sleeve. That was only about 30 minutes work, but still.

I have some serious problems with deadlines and planning schedules. I have noticed that when I have my project wall full of things that I need to do to complete the whole project I get the job more easier done. This is my project wall for Josephine. It contains some vague procedure lists, print testings, skit plans, materials, receipts and the jacket prototype.

This is seriously the best method to keep up with your work and to remind what needs to be done and how. I get really anxious if I need to work with overly strict schedule. Not good, but I'm working on that.

Despite this glorious project wall, I went one night without sleep while working with the jacket and even then I had to sew some parts by hand at the competition day. NOT GOOD YOU GUYS!!!

I leave this here and the next post is about Yukicon 2.0 and how the NCC preliminaries went for us ;D

- Rindalin