The Mission: Design an awesome, accurate Suki costume for Halloween which would, we hoped, also be wearable for next year's Anime Con and Emerald City ComiCon.
The Staff: Lead designer and dressmaker: my mom. Headdress and makeup: me. Lead researcher, accessories and finishing details: LG's mom. Kyoshi Warrior attitude: all LG.
The Project:
We spent a morning at JoAnn Fabrics picking out clothing and costume patterns that contained different elements mom could piece together to create the final dress pattern. LG located fabrics that exactly matched the colors in our screen printout. I took some wild guesses at yardage. We picked up a few notions that we thought mom wouldn't already have.
Mom did some shopping for supplemental patterns in better sizes, and modified the design to be expandable in a variety of ways in case it needs to be altered next spring.
Barb picked up fans, two shades of gold spray paint, tassels, and other items. We each shopped for a variety of items to try for the facepaint. Very annoying that all the Halloween brands say not to use red around the eyes.
I designed and built the headdress out of a Clorox bottle and some chopsticks from Panda Express. I glued green bias tape to the wraparound headband area and added laces for adjustable sizing. We painted the pieces using Barb's gold spray paints and assembled with a hot glue gun.
Barb spray-painted the fans and applied gold medallions and tassels to finish up the costume.
On Halloween evening, LG finished dinner, suited up, and we sat down for a makeup application (which was long enough and unpleasant enough to give her serious second thoughts about her showbiz career aspirations). We used Clinique foundation base, white drugstore greasepaint (dabbed on with a makeup sponge), cornstarch powder to set the white, and then Wet 'n' Wild black eyeliner pencil and Wet 'n' Wild red lipstick (applied with a lip brush) for the designs.
The Result:
Perfection. Look for LG and a gaggle of proud grownups at next year's Cons!
1 comment:
this is amazing. my daughter & i are attempting this feat as well. any suggestions would be very helpful:)
-e
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