I did say I was tired for that last picture, but the truth was I was pretty much exhausted from the beginning. The reason for that was, well, Taigei/Ryuuhou is a pretty rare, and somewhat obscure character. I normally buy my costumes, but there currently are none being made for her. So I made mines. Everything besides the wig*, pantyhose, apron*, shoes, muneate, and skirts* were either made from scratch or otherwise put together by myself, with some minor assistance~
*there were some modifications made still

Oh, and I had to do it in about a month. I've never made cosplay before either (except for a one tiny instance of practice). It was tough.

Anyways, the first order of business in my cosplay was to put together the seifuku portion of the outfits.
Actually, that was a lie. The cosplay starts with assembling the obscene amount of small parts in Taigei/Ryuuhou's outfits. If you live in Canada and have done cosplay before, you'll have an idea of how difficult this can be when you don't have time.
I've got some pictures of the platform clogs that I chose.




Those things are literally impossible to walk in. If you thought heels were hard, you wouldn't last two seconds with those. People who saw me would've noticed that I was actually wearing heels (my backup shoes) from my Yuyuko cosplay last year.

Anyways who cares about that, look, pattern drafting!




This was actually the easiest part of the whole process. You just measure a bunch of points and draw lines. Finding guides or patterns online may be a bit difficult, but here's the one I used. (sleeves not included)

By the way, there's a really awesome guide that I used for the general seifuku construction, right here. It's extremely well written and I wouldn't have been able to put together my outfit without it.
After the drafting, it was then a matter of putting the patterns on cloth and cutting them out.




My room quickly turned into a mess.
Meanwhile, satin! Lots of it!


Mmm satin so sexy~
It's actually really difficult to find fabric of the exact right colour. Making cosplay yourself gives you a great deal of control, but the one thing that's still difficult to control is colour, so I'm really happy with this fabric. I actually had to dye the skirt and collar for my Ryuuhou Kai costume - it was an extremely arduous and high risk process. I don't have any pictures of that unfortunately.

I also did the patterns for the haori (the jacket) by myself, and cut the fabric accordingly. It was a bit tricky since I had to work with much larger pieces of fabric. After that, the last big thing that I had to take care of (aside from actually sewing everything together), was getting the patterns printed on the two haori. In addition to this, I printed the whale on Taigei's apron, and Ryuuhou's headband design. So to start things off, I sketched out an interpretation of the sakura patterns from the haori.


An image with the sketch along with some preliminary planning
Afterwards, I painstakingly traced out the design with vectors, and had it printed on paper.


I then took the paper prints to this one place, where I had silk screens created and was able to use those to get the design printed out on my fabric. This was a particularly bumpy and depressing part, so I don't want to go too deep into the details, but you can see the results in these pictures that I took after I was done.




Once the printing was done, it was a simple (hint: that was sarcasm) matter of stitching all the little pieces together on all 5 of my unfinished garments with less than a week to go! If you ever wanted intense thoughts of inflicting self-harm or committing first hand murder, try sewing some sleeves, or attaching some bias tape; the more the better.


Progress at last
It got pretty painful, and I don't really have any other pictures since I was so busy, but to give you an idea, I basically put together the red ties, attached the whale print, made the headband, did all my packing, and put on my costume for the first time ever on Friday morning. I'd slept from 4:30 to 8:30 prior to that, and the nights before were similar. So yeah, that was kind of why I was tired.


The final stitch.
Oh right, I forgot, I also made my ahoge on Wednesday night. It held together beautifully for the entire weekend and only fell out once. It may sound a bit silly but this ahoge was one of the more uplifting parts of the cosplay~ I particularly enjoyed watching it bounce around as I moved my head back and forth. Here's a quick look with it on my head.


I used the wire method for creating this ahoge. It might be a bit overkill for an ahoge of this size, but you can't go wrong with the rigidity while still having that playful bounce~ This is the guide that I used for it.

So yeah, that's basically it. Hopefully this post wasn't too boring. I'll try to meet together with more of you guys next year~