Cosplaying Yachiru

I love Anime and consider myself to be an 'otaku'. If I lived in a major town, you can bet me and the Hubs would be in every anime convention there is. I'd love to see people cosplaying their favorite anime or manga character. That being said though, I don't think I would ever do cosplay myself. One reason being that I'm rather reserved about certain things and going about in a costume would be too much for me. That doesn't stop me from sewing up something for the Kiddo though when she expressed that she wanted a 'different' Halloween costume. Hubs and I was watching 'Bleach' and the Kiddo had seen a few episodes and she said she wanted a shinigami outfit as a costume. Hubs also expressed an interest in getting a shinigami outfit so we finally decided that they can both cosplay as Yachiru and Kenpachi. Unfortunately I only had enough time and fabric to do Yachiru for the Kiddo.

These were my reference photos for her.  Looks simple enough but to a newbie sewist like myself this was quite a challenge.

 


Thanks to Google, I was able to find a great number of sites that showed how to make a hakama which is basically the pants part of the outfit.  The top part is based off a kimono.  The following tutorials were a great help to me in doing this:

• How to Make a Shinigami Outfit by Chibi's Cosplaying Chaos shares some patterns for the hakama and for the kimono.
• Anne Liese's Fibers and Stuff had a great tutorial for Constructing Japanese Clothing which was quite helpful in putting it together
• How to Make a Kimono by the Barony of Bryn Gwlad was also an awesome resource
• Nicholas Battjes' How to Sew Costume Cosplay Pants from Bleach has a great video tutorial on putting it all together.

Once I researched all I could it was time for me to start.  I measured the Kiddo and adapted the patterns for her size.  I was pretty much 'winging' this part as I don't know squat about drafting patterns.  LOL.  It was a good thing the outfits were pretty much all sewn in blocks so i pretty much scaled things down by half. 

Here's a shot of the cotton fabric I used.  

Ideally the outfit should have a white kimono/gi underlayer but I cheated by using white bias tape instead to simulate this look.

It doesn't look half bad. Oh and in case you're wondering the instructions didn't call for the two pieces of the kimono to be joined by a french seam.  I just did that as practice.

I wasn't able to take step by step photos of how I put together the hakama, the links I shared above should be more than adequate to show how it was all put together.  Besides I have a horrible tendency to shut out all other distractions when focused on a project so I often forget to take photos. Horrible, I know.

Anyway, here's the completed outfit as seen from the back.

And here is how it looks like from the front as modeled by the Kiddo.

Just had to add some finishing touches like the sword, armband and pink wig and we were done. 

It was a difficult journey but very, very rewarding.  Methinks, the Kiddo shall be cosplaying Sailor Chibi Moon this year...