Sailor Moon sewing marathon

Back in blog-land . . . with many updates. First of all, a charity shop haul. My favourite is this skirt-similar to J-rock style, and it cost only a few euro. I also got a plum acetate jacket and skirt, which I will probably use for my Dinah cosplay, a blue dress (Sailor Moon's costume) and an orange dress (Sailor Venus's costume) 

 Here's a photo of the work in progress. The shoulder pads were ridiculously easy, as was the tiara (mind, it damages easily, so I will have to figure out how to prevent that with future tiaras).

 The other Sailors and I spent one mad Sunday sewing as much as we could. No easy feat, since not everyone knew how to sew

This isn't even all of the costumes. My poor bed!

We got a fair ammount done: we cut the foam for the shoulder armour, glove rolls and hip rolls, covered these foam pieces in the requisite fabric (except for the hip rolls-the fabric was pinned over those, and then I finished sewing them later) 

Adventures in foam land

We used upholstery foam for our costumes, since I had a lot of it lying around in my stash-I knew it would come in useful one day (not really, but I can pretend that I did ; ) ) Great stuff, but cutting it to shape is very messy. Whenever one of us was cutting the foam scraps floated about like snow. Very annoying snow that liked to stick to all surfaces, particularly people's trousers.

More foam

Sewing space

For anyone thinking of making their own Sailor Scout costume, here are some tips. Use foam for the hip roll and shoulder pads: it is less of a hassle than stuffing it with wadding would be, not to mention that the foam holds the shape better, since the foam can be sculpted, as such. For our skirts, we used two metres of cotton by roughly 35 cm (including hem allowance), gathered the longest side at the top (I used the method where you zig zag over a piece of wool that has been secured at one end, then pull the wool to gather the cloth), then sewed the skirt to the hip roll. The resulting skirt will be a very full skirt that drapes nicely. For me this was an easier method than using pleats-weirdly enough, the gathered skirt mimics a skirt that has been loosely pleated.

One thing I am considering changing is the skirt openings. They fasten on the hip roll, with a length of velcro down the front of the skirt, but it is difficult to hide the hooks and eyes, not the mention that I'm worried that the hooks and eyes aren't secure. One thread on the cosplay.com forums suggests sewing the skirt to the bodice-you would pin the skirt on to the bodice while wearing the bodice, then carefully take the bodice off and sew on the skirt. This seems like less of a hassle than constantly worrying about your skirt fastening exploding in public.  

Totally off-topic, but here is the stripey goodness apron from Bizenghast : )

The skull was painted on with acrylic paint mixed with fabric medium, the outline was drawn in permamenet marker. I made this apron from an old shirt-sadly I didn't realise that there was some elastane in the shirt, so I had to buy more ribbon for the hem. Aprons really aren't that hard to make-well, this one wasn't. It's basically a lot of rectangles. The apron skirt is made from the bottom part of the shirt, cut from under the sleeves. The sleeves themselves became the straps and the top section of the apron. The pockets are simply little rectangles sewn to the apron skirt-these will be very useful if I wear this to Malta Comic Con 2011. The eyelets are the kind you hammer in, but I just used a setting tool. Unfortunatley the tool tends to tear the metal, so the eyelets aren't very neat on the wrong side. One day I will buy my own hammer for eyelet setting.