Saturday, August 4, 2012

The Prettiest Princess, Part 1

Greetings Blogosphere! After a bit of a hiatus (which will henceforth be known as Laziest Summer Ever), I am back to bring you news of a brand new sewing project for me. This September, I'll be participating in the first session of an ongoing campaign LARP featuring canon characters from a wide variety of sources. Happily, I will be playing one of my favorite characters of all time: San, better known as Mononoke Hime or Princess Mononoke.

Fierce.
Princess Mononoke is one of my favorite movies of all time, and you can probably expect a Film Friday entry in the near future outlining why. Needless to say, it has been a long-time dream of mine to be a badass anime warrior princess, so I jumped at the opportunity to pitch this character for the game. It was also the perfect chance to try my hand at Cosplay, utilizing my new sewing skills. So what will this costume entail?

1. The Dress & The Vest

I think the sewing for this project will be pretty simple, and I'm looking forward to the chance to experiment a little and make things look rough and natural. I'm not sure precisely why San's dress is purple, but this is an anime from 1997 so you have to cut it some slack for unusual costume choices.


So, I found a relatively simple sundress sort of pattern at Jo-Ann, and I'll be using the one I circled for the dress. It's not perfect, but it's sleeveless and frill-free, and the skirt seems to billow in an an appropriate way. San's dress is actually a little shorter than this, but I'll need to chop up the bottom anyway to get that ragged leather look, so it's good that the pattern will give me extra room. For the vest, I'm basically just going to wing it. It looks to me as though it's just two rectangles with shoulder straps, and I think I can manage that easily enough without a pattern. For fabric, I chose polyester Microsuede, which has a nice suede texture without the exorbitant price tag or merciless care needs. It also feels a lot lighter than I imagine real suede does, so I think it will have the proper expressive flow that any Miyazaki character's costuming (and hair) absolutely demand.

2. The Cloak & The Mask

Here we have pretty much the defining items of a Mononoke cosplay. Without the epic, iconic white wolf cloak and mask, San is just a loopy girl who lives in the woods. When it comes to sewing, the cloak is pretty much a no-brainer. It's just a big, roughly cut piece of faux fur. But! When it comes to attaching it to the rest of the outfit, things get tricky. If you look closely, you'll see that the cloak appears to be attached at two places: The back of the mask, and the necklace. Apparently, it's actually two separate pieces of fur: one hanging off her back, and one hanging off the back of the mask. Cloak to mask should just be a simple matter of hot glue, but if I'm feeling ambitious and I have extra time I may try to fashion some little straps to attach the two pieces in a more naturalistic way. The trick with the necklace seems to be in balancing the two so the cloak doesn't just pull down your back and choke you to death. I think I'll try putting some weights in the beads to hold it down, but I may end up having to attach it in some other way. Ideally, I'd like to be able to wear the dress and vest without the cloak, but Miyazaki does not seem to have given enough thought to the actual practicalities of how this thing is supposed to work as a garment. As for the mask, I've found a pretty solid guide here that involved paper mache, a bowl, and some napkin rings. I don't really have any of those things yet, but once I realized that I had everything to make the dress and vest, I decided I'd make those first instead of the mask. I foresee a trip to Target in the near future!

3. The Accessories

Finally, there's everything else: The knife, the earrings, the toothy necklace, the armbands, the headband, and the shoes. Accessories are, of course, very important, so I've armed myself with clay and paint and glue and knives and clip-on earring backs and so forth:


I think I'll probably end up needing some more clay in various colors, but I intend to get the "big stuff" done as soon as possible so that I have lots of time to play around with accessories and putting the outfit together. Anyway, today is my first sewing day, so wish me luck on my new project, and look forward to more updates soon!

3 comments:

  1. Yay! We're both in the "first-time cosplay" club! =D

    If you ever need advice on working with the faux fur, lemme know. I've worked with it quite a bit, and let me tell you - it can be a real bitch.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Miyazaki does not seem to have given enough thought to the actual practicalities of how this thing is supposed to work as a garment.

    STORY OF MY COSPLAY LIFE. Man, I remember those days of trying to make fabric do things that clearly were physically impossible. I wrote about making a physics-defying skirt here, if you're interested:
    http://electric-monk.net/becoming/costumes/index.php?costume=op-alabaster

    I think microsuede is a good choice for the dress, because it won't fray to bits if you leave it unhemmed, and you totally have to do that for the ragged look at the bottom. The one drawback is that it can be very staticky.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Also also, Pretty Pretty Princess would be a much better game if you ended up with a princess necklace like San's. Just sayin'.

    ReplyDelete