bbfacecosplay

[bbfacecosplay]

Cardcaptor Sakura (Catch You Catch Me OP):  Complete Work Log

Here it is! This was the very first costume I ever wanted to make! Granted I made it 10 years later, but I hope 13 year old weeb!Babyface is happy with it. I debuted the costume at Cardiff Film and Comic Con recently and won Best Craftsmanship at the masquerade, which was a lovely surprise! 

Because I decided to set up my social media stuff towards the end of finishing Sakura, I didn’t really feel like bombarding my dash with a blow by blow of each element. So I boiled them down into the subsections below:

The Dress - Covering the dress, blouse and overskirt

The Wig - Pretty self explanatory

The Wings - Because this was an adventure on its own

The Accessories - Covering the wand, gloves, hat and that darn petti!

It’s not an exact walkthrough by any means, but I have tried to link all the tutorials I used throughout. Feel free to drop me an ask and I’ll do my best to talk you through anything I can!

Now onwards to the next project! Let’s go! 

[bbfacecosplay]

Cardcaptor Sakura: The Accessories!

Because I couldn’t call it the bits and bobs section.

So this will cover all the little pieces all over the costume: The Clow Wand, gloves, bow, hat, sock toppers and most importantly, the petticoat!

The Clow Wand

Being a seamstress by trade, I have no clue where to start with props so I caved and commissioned the lovely guys at @chompworksprops. They were kind enough to paint it for me as well so all I had to do was pick up a wooden rod in Homebase, paint and attach. 

The Gloves

The gloves I got in a two pack of generic white ones from Amazon. Having a second pair was pretty useful while tried and failed to figure out how to make them touch-screen friendly. 

Now I have abnormally small hands, so I had to shorten them a fair deal by turning them inside out and pin the finger down to fit. With that done, I finished decorating with more gathered lace and mini bows made with this tutorial. To attach them to the glove, I slipped a little rectangle of fabric through the back of the bow and safety pinned it to the glove to not mess with the stretchy qualities. I did the same thing to the bows on my shirt sleeves. 

The Bow

The two larger bows were made with a slightly different tutorial, but are still using a rectangle of fabric behind the bow to attach it to the dress. I drafted two different patterns for the tails of the bow as the hat’s bow needed a much longer tail. 

The Hat

For the hat, I used this tutorial for a shower cap. Just to make the sure the hat would stay upright and puffy, I used two circles of the cotton poplin as well as smaller circle of interfacing between them. 

The Sock Toppers

I forgot to take pictures of my sock toppers! But just as a finishing touch, I measured strips of elastic around my calves, making sure they were taught enough to stay up without cutting off my circulation. With them cut, I laid out the remnants of my lace and stretched out the elastic as far as it will go pinning it along the way. Then just to finish it, stitch along the elastic with a zig zag stitch and then stitched end to end. 

The Petticoat

Affectionately known as petti-sama or petti-zilla during construction, the petticoat was undoubtably the most labour intensive part of this outfit. I believe start to finish it took me about a month total of the 4 month build. 

I bought 4 spools of the tulle meant for wedding decoration because I was too lazy to cut that ungodly amount of fabric and used the wonderfully straightforward tutorial by Joshua Hart and got to work.  

I found the easiest way to keep everything organised was to roll each strip so it was small enough to stash in my workroom drawer and pin a label to them indicating which row and tier they belonged to. I don’t have a lot of photos of the work, since it was a lot of monotonous gathering of net, so have some bad webcam photos of the finished result!

I was so happy when this was finally done! I was twirling around my living room with this marshmallow cloud of dreams. When I started this project, I promised myself that I would nail the 90′s poof of the original design, and if that took 200 yards of net and 5 seasons of Drag Race then so be it. I’d say it was worth every bit of grief it caused along the way! 

[bbfacecosplay]

Cardcaptor Sakura: The Dress

So thankfully, the dress was actually one of the easiest bits for me as sewing is one of my strengths. Below the read more I’ll be doing a breakdown of the three parts: the frilly underskirt, the blouse and the dress itself. 

The Underskirt 

To give the skirts lots of twirly bounciness, I went with multiple different circle skirts. The underskirt was one circle in white cotton poplin with lots of rows of white cotton lace top stitched to it. The worst part of making this was the sheer amount of maths in order to work out how much lace I needed. Now there’s the plenty of generators out there to do the work for you, but I’m kind of a masochist for this kind of thing and worked out the whole lot on paper! I drew out a circle on paper and then worked out all the algebra for each concentric circle within that. 

These were all hand gathered and hand sewn on at the time as my machine was broken and had to go in for repairs. If I remember correctly, there is about 20 metres of lace in the skirt and it amazingly didn’t immediately flatten my petticoat!

The skirt fastens with ties made from bias tape which also functions as the waistband. 

The Blouse 

The blouse started life in Simplicity envelope 1558 for steampunk costumes, and I thought it was a perfect fit as it already had that stand up collar and puffy sleeves. Wouldn’t you? Well this is how it turned out -

Looks like a cross between Pennywise and the marshmallow man from Ghostbusters! I couldn’t think of any other way to salvage it from what the pattern gave me. However I was quite fond of the sleeves. So Plan B involved me rummaging Tesco’s for a dress shirt. Unfortunately, I could only get a men’s one, but I had to make do. 

I ripped out the original collar and replaced it with my lace, swapped the sleeves out for mine and shortened the whole shirt. Like the picture above shows, I also pinned and added bust darts for a bit of extra shaping. With all that done, I shortened the sleeves a little as I felt they were a bit granny-ish. They came out so much nicer then, much more poofy and circular. 

The Dress

So like the blouse, the dress also came from a pattern envelope, McCall’s 6754. The dress had the ideal scooped neckline but was a stretch pattern meant for jerseys.  To fix that, I made the bodice up in a rough draft with calico and pinned it (with some assistance) to better fit my shoulders, as well as bust and waist darts for shaping.  I also reshaped the back pieces in order to be able to add a zip after the skirt was attached. 

For the skirt, I followed a tutorial by RufflebuttCosplay on Deviantart. Her tutorial uses a plastic trim called horsehair that is sewn into circle skirts to give them a bit more flounce and volume. The tutorial calls for 3 full circles to be sewn end to end and gathered for maximum fullness. However as Sakura’s skirt has bigger ‘flounces’ (for lack of a better word), I simple used 2 circles. 

For decoration, I also added the pale yellow stripe with bias tape and also added pockets(!!) in the side seams. 

With all the skirt finished, I simply attached it to the bodice (After finishing the lining and put the zipper in the centre back and we’re done! 

Next time, I’ll talk you through the accessories!

[bbfacecosplay]

Cardcaptor Sakura: The Wig

The wig was my first attempt at ‘styled’ hair beyond taking it out of the bag and trimming the fringe. I’m really pleased with how it turned out and I’m also super happy I didn’t fry any of the hair! 

My wig started life as two Inigo wigs from Arda Wigs in Warm Light Brown. I decided to get two so that I could salvage all the pre-cut wefts and sew them into the wig and double up the hair to give that 90′s anime poof. 

Once all that was done, it looked much fuller from the top, and I trimmed the fringe at this stage. 

And I couldn’t a resist a quick try on to see the gravity defying bits at the front (I refer to them as ‘framing pieces’ in my notes)! 

Next, I began to look for tutorials in order to get the framing pieces to stay upright. I have a few pinned to my reference board on Pinterest, but settled on this one. I used a combination of heat from my hairdryer and Got2B Glued hairspray to get my poof to stay. I also left it overnight around the roller for the hair to set in that shape. 

I then sprayed with more hairspray with the rollers out to really set the shape. Then I moved onto the ahoge, that little cowlick of hair Sakura has that look like antenna. To do that I used some mini straighteners and the Got2B Glued spiking glue on the roots of a small section of hair behind the framing pieces, and then used the spiking gel to bend and mould the hair off into two directions. To give it an extra bit of height in case the heat wasn’t enough, I also wrapped a mini plastic hair tie around the base. 

With all that done, all that was left to was cut the length to match the original and cut the shape into the back of the hair-do. Back to the internet I went, and I found these awesome concept art boards from the anime. 

Afterwards, I used a light spritz on the ends of the hair to shape them into more defined points and went back to the mini straighteners to do finishing touches like getting the longest strands to curl in. And that was all the hard work done! 

Travelling with Styled Wigs

Now, with all that work done, I wasn’t sure how I was going to get it Cardiff in one piece as I was travelling by train. I didn’t very much fancy wearing it there as suggested by family members so I had to think. With a bit of research on the archives that is Cosplay.com forums, I found that someone recommended a Build-a-Bear carrying box. Off I went to pick a box up and only found after I brought it home that Hedwig, my styling head didn’t fit in it!  I didn't have any choice to put in my suitcase, luckily I managed to cushion it by surrounding it with clothes and it travelled okay, even when I had to pull out my wand to get it into the luggage rack! 

[bbfacecosplay]

Cardcaptor Sakura: The Wings

So the wings, I would say, were probably were the second most work intensive thing on the costume behind the petticoat. I had a small meltdown a few days before Cardiff Film and Comic Con that involved me finishing at 2am in the hotel the morning before. So now I guess I’m a real cosplayer! 

I’ll be walking you through the turbulent wing times below the read more!

Wings (Take 1)

So the first attempt in order to give them that puffy, chubby CLAMP look were made from two cushion pads I found in Hobbycraft. 

I’ve never worked with foam before so I had to make do with whatever tools I had to hand, which in my case were a kitchen knife and a little craft scalpel. I made up a stencil and did my best to carve it up. I then covered it in a white four-way stretch and hand sewed around it wrong side out, pinning and pulling it as taught as possible. 

With it turned back out and put on like a big sock, I stitched the lines over it in a  chain stitch. Deciding it was too flat I also sewed through the foam itself to give the ‘feathers’ a more 3D look. Now like an idiot, I decided to do all the decorative work before the structural wire stuff to get them to stand up! 

So taking all of that off again, I used my scalpel and hacked open the foam wing along the top edge in order to feed in some twisted florist wire similar to those strapless cellophane fairy wings, those of course foam was way heavier than cellophane and wasn’t enough support. 

Look out folks, engineering time is here. Next I opened up the whole wing and added more struts to divide the weight more evenly and also out struts along the U shape that would go against the back to strengthen. Unfortunately, this didn't really make a difference as it continued to sag. Luckily, my dad is an engineer and once I explained the situation to him, we managed to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new plan. 

Wings (Take 2)

Okay, so the second attempt was focused around lightening the weight of the wings themselves as well as adding more support to keep them at their angular positions on my back. This involved me doing a last minute return to Hobbycraft in order to pick up some A2 foam board (and avoid the washi tape aisle at all costs). 

These aren’t the best pictures but I hope they still illustrate my point. This time I added a strut to support the lower third using a long twisted wire joining one wing to another by coiling around the U shape. I then tried to cover up the ugly wirework with some spare bias tape from my petticoat and recovered the wings just like the original draft! 

Voila! 

Photography by The Tattooed Tog 

[bbfacecosplay]

Have some reference images! I went frame by frame through the OP to get a complete front and back view as well as a few detail shots. I’ve been using this as my bible (aside from one picture I’ve been using as my scale guide) so I don’t get confused by the manga vs anime colour schemes.