 |
| the magician's looking glass: WhiteMage_1's Cosplay |
| Loud, brash and ready to kick ass |
 |
| Cosplay: |
| Conventions: |
| Miscellaneous: |
| Chelsea Rorec Tokyo Underground One side-effect of cosplaying is that whenever I watch a new series, I immediately start assessing cosplay possibilities. No weapon, again, but oh well. The replacement costume for Belldandy. I decided to make this one because it's a costume I was considering for further down the road, it's simple, similar to the Belldandy costume and I knew I'd have a Rumina for CNAnime '02. I like Chelsea because she's a rather down-to-earth fighter character who actually makes gravity interesting to watch. lol. In FFVII, I had no idea what Gravity materia did, since it just seemed to generate a random sphere (and hardly ever worked). Oh well, whatever. lol. |
 |
| Costume Stats: Start: Mid-August 2002 || Finish: Late August 2002 Length of Process: Two weeks on and off. Creator: WhiteMage_1 Appearances: Canadian National Anime Expo 2002 (Masq. & Sunday) Approx. Cost: $25 Future Appearances?: UTMAnime, if TU continues to be shown when it's warm enough to wear this |
 |
| and even Canada gets hot in August. Skirt: My Tifa skirt. I realised after trying on the thigh-highs that I'd never get that bit of skin between the hem of the skirt and the tops of the stockings if I didn't shorten the skirt, so...well, I shortened it was much as is needed. Do you realise how long Chelsea's thighs must be...? Well, and I'm short, so I guess that doesn't help. lol. Anyway, one of the reasons I chose to wear my black leotard instead of a turtleneck was in case I took off the overskirt...the fewer chances for inadvertant fanservice, the better. Thank goodness. It was quite windy walking to the convention center. *blush* I'd never worn a skirt that short before. Vest: Nothing special. Made without a pattern. Next time, I'd use ddarts to make it fit better, but I didn't have time. It should've also been shorter, I think. The first time I'd used the machine to sew proper buttonholes (uhh...I did have to make a buttonhole for Megumi, but that was before I realised that my sewing machine had a foot for sewing buttonholes. -_-;) Bow: Just a strip of leftover balck fabric. I shoudl've added interfacing to make it stiffer (the bow was incredibly floppy -_-;) and I think the bow was actually a bit too big, now that I look at the pictures again. It was threaded through the buttonholes in the vest. Overskirt: I traced a very large skirt I had and, instead of cutting out the front and back of the skirt, I just used one panel, in the hopes that it would happen to have the right opening at the front. I adjusted it so that there was a large enough waistline, since the fabric didn't stretch at all. The skirt actually fastens with velcro with the balck buttons sewn on just for show. Legs: These stockings really sucked. I got a dark grey colour, since, even though in the series they look black all the time, they look grey in pictures. These had lace at the top (really ugly lace) for about four inches, but, since the elastic was in the lace, I was hesitant to cut off the lace. I was forced to just fold the lace over and hope it lessened the ugliness a bit. These would not stay up AT ALL and by half-way through Friday the elastic in one of them had ripped partially off of the actual stocking because I'd had to tug them up so frequently. I was really not happy. T_T Armlets: Used four of the remaining rings that I used for the FFVII armlets, hand-sewed the black parts in between the rings, added some interfacing to give them a bit more stiffness, then glued the black to the metal. Gloves: Ran out of time and couldn't find gloves at that time of year. =\ I had everything ready to put onto the gloves, but just no gloves to glue them to. Footwear: I could have used the brown hiking books from Tifa's outfit, but they have red laces and are also not the style that Chelsea wears (Tifa has huge clunking boots, whereas Chelsea's are more sleek). I was going to make the folded-over cuffs at the tops of her boots, but I ran out of time, since I was working like crazy to get the Dogu ccostume finished. Instead I just wore my own hiking boots, which are comfortable and which I love dearly (worn them everywhere...climbing in San Francisco, running up the CN Tower stairs, road trip from Ontario to Alberta...they rock ^o^), since they're in a similar style to hers, except that they lace all the way up. Hair: My own hair. I unfortunately could not locate a long blonde wig before the convention. =/ Eyes: My eyes aren't blue and I didn't feel like getting contacts for a costume I wasn't putting all that much effort into anyway. If the costume wasn't perfect in every other manner, it seemed silly to concentrate on a small detail like contacts. I also wasn't planning on any other blue-eyed characters at the time. |
| [Chelsea Rorec] |
| [Photos of Costume] [More coming soon...hopefully] |
 |
| Construction: Dress: Top: I didn't have time to sew myself a dress from scratch, especially since I couldn't quite get my brain around thinking up a pattern to get those triangular shoulders in. =/ If I re-do this costume, I'll definitely make that from scratch. I also decided that I'd make the skirt and top separate, since the overskirt could disguise the fact that they were two separate pieces. Chose leotard instead of turtleneck because the con was in August. |
 |
| Taken by Ikegami at http://pictures.adaelis.com |