Hoshido meets Hakuouki

Ugh… again I had so much cosplay stress that I had no time to blog at all. Luckily I am on vacation now and can finally continue after months of silence ^^’’…. But due to a request I don’t want to start with how I finished Zuko, Freya’s lance, made Ryoga from Ranma ½ nor even how to finish Kaze from Fire Emblem Fates in less than 3 weeks ^^’’’’….. but with my cosplay for the Dokomi cosplay prom which happens to be an own design of Takumi but very close to his swordmaster version. Just with more decorations instead of armour. 😊 Although it was really last minute again and I don’t have a finished cosplay picture to share yet I think I am very satisfied with the outcome. Especially as I had only got about 6 weeks for this monster again ^^’’. But luckily I had help again by Cynthia with the pattern making and even putting together the different parts. Otherwise this wouldn't have been possible at all!

Let's start with some pictures and a short introduction of Takumi xD. Takumi is a prince of Hoshido from Fire Emblem Fates. He is the 3rd child of 4 and a teenager with low selfconfidence due to his awesome big brother and sister and a very short temper.  On the other hand he is very hardworking and nice to the ppl he loves. He originally is a great archer wielding a devine weapon with awesome skill but if you reclass him ingame to a swordmaster (which I would never do though ^^''') he happens to wear his father's clothes.  Which happens to look like his:

I thought this might look great for a western prom. But now let's rush to the making of: 

I started out making the trousers. There is not much to tell about them in fact. I sewed puffy trousers and for that I added width to a pattern for normal trousers below the waist. If you add above you will only make them too wide and they will look goofy like clown trousers. Putting them in the boots makes them puffy in the end as I already experienced in case of Zuko. This time Cynthia adviced me though to sew the extra width off at the lower legs in order to make them fit better inside the boots. All the extra fabric makes it a bummer to pull the zipper up xD especially as my boots were not that wide.

Trousers just washed so a bit crincled but to show what their shape looks like. ^^''

The most interesting and utterly new thing for me when making these trousers were the coloured pleads. Basically I gathered all my courage and cut a giant slit as far as the plead should go. Afterwards I finished the raw edges till I got something like a giant button hole. The rest I tried to explain in the following sketch. Not 100% sure anymore though if it is entirely correct. Ironing is very important in this case though! The second picture shows a slit I did for practice first.

Afterwards I started to work on the coat but in between I also worked on the other garments I wanted to add instead of the armour parts not suitable for the ball. I decided to go with a design inspired by Hakouki. Adding a “vest with sleeves” XD or in other words a buttoned shirt and a pseudokimono garment. (I was really really happy when Mondfinsternis, a friend and fellow Hakuouki cosplayer actually recognized this xD.)

The “vest” was easy to sew using a pattern from a sewing magazine. The only new thing for me was adding facings to make it look more neat and I bought a tool to add hotfix nails 😊 which looked sooo great on the sleeves ^-^! In case of the vest I wanted to go with a Nohrian look as our first inspiration of Oboro and my prom costumes was the ingame support of the two where she thinks of making something elaborate for Takumi again after the war. So I thought what he might wear during a peace treaty festival with the western kingdom of Nohr at the end of Revelation or Birthright still keeping in mind that it should be recognizeable ^^’’’…. Which lead me back to his swordmaster design and adding Hoshidan and Nohrian elements to it. 

The sleeves were shortened afterwards to match up with my leather gloves :). And last minute I decided against the lovely buttons I had bought as it looked better without. I really like this shirt so much that I might wear it without the cosplay indeed some time ^-^ when I need something more formal.

The Hoshidan elements consisted of some Japanese fabrics used for the coat (cranes and leaves ^-^) and this kimonothing without sleeves. Only after finishing the coat I noticed though that I had to change the armpits as they would stick out very much under the armless coat otherwise… so I used a vest pattern to shorten them…. well making it a vest ^^''''. Also I added  press buttons in order to fasten it for the prom. But this didn't work so well... I got the advice to use a Korin belt in the future now which is no other than suspenders attached in a certain way :).

But now to the most important part: the swordmaster coat 😊. As a base we took a dress pattern (!) from a Burda magazine (2017 HW model 406/7). We just took out the girly folds and made it straight at the sides basically and changed the armhole a lot. More or less the outcome of these changes are shown in the picture. The innermost line on the bottom back parts should be the line to be cut for the slits later.

I sorted the parts a bit out by marking them in the picture. The only parts without a pattern are the front bands. The reason for that is: They simply just consist of rectangular stripes and my fabric was just enough to make them ^^''. They are of course a bit longer than the front. Also I added a golden band around them (which is also nothing but a band.) Important before attaching every part to each other is to finish every single part on its own! Otherwise things might become impossible or very difficult. Only exception is the top back. We had to attach center and sides first in order to make the pattern for the decorative backpart shown on the right. Center and top back parts, decorative back and collar are of course cut on the fold. The rest has to be cut twice for the basic coat. For the "tails" the center back bottom part has in fact to be cut 4 times all in all. Once with the original fabric, once with lining, and twice with the crane fabric in my case or different coloured fabric for the normal version. The bottom layer with the cranes is about 10cm longer than the top one of the basic coat. Also the front parts are twice to be cut out of lining.  We decided against putting lining into the whole coat in order to make it less warm (fortunaltey ^^'').

I think the most difficult parts I was involved making are the collar and the slits/tails. In order to make the tails neat the bottom line had to be sewn first very close around the slits which would be cut later (about 3mm on each side). Afterwards the slits were cut open and everything carefully pressed (ironed) open before the extra fabric  was cut off very close to the seam. Afterwards the fabric could be turned. I'm sorry but there are no pictures of this ^^''.

Now let's continue with the center back part. After sewing the center back part together I made a pattern for the decorations. Also on the fold as seen above. It was cut out of fabric and lining, sewn together, the extra again cut of very close to the seams and then turned and ironed flat. Afterwards I cut a golden band matching this out of golden pleather. I used pleather for this as making a band out of golden fabric and turning that one like the original piece would have been a pain... afterwards I just sewed it onto the decorative back part with two seams and sewed the upper back and the decorations together.

The collar was also kind of a challenge cause of the outside band around it. Here you can see the single parts.

The outside bad side of the band had to be sewn to the good side of the collar but very unintuitively exactly 180° turned to what it would look like later. Around the corners I handwheeled with the sewing machine very close to the edges. After adding the band I started work on the other decoration. In this case I used the golden fabric as well (+ put some vliseline underneath as the fabric was stretchy to make things easier) and sewed around my pattern with a very small zigzag stitch and cut it out to appliquè it later. The straight part I sewed onto the outer collar piece  with the sewing machine. before adding a very stiff vliseline to both insides of my collar. Then I was able to sew both pieces together, sew them to the by then finished coat and turn them (after again cutting the extra fabric off very close to the seams). Only then I fixed the rest of the decorative pattern by handsewing it onto the finished colar. I could have done this with the straight seam already but I wasn't sure if I'd not mess up the round shape then. Sewing circles is very tedious indeed and I'm a freak for doing this so often.....

Unfortunately I can't tell so much about how to put the different pieces together as I mostly didn't do this cause of time reasons. Without help I wouldn't have been able to finish it in time at all again. Cause this is clearly not my skill level yet. So yeah, I kind of cheated but learned a lot again in the process...

The one thing I remember which is very important though is: That the upper and the lower tails of the coat are not attached to each other in order to enable them to move separately when worn. Also the cranes aren't really attached to the rest except for being sewn in at the sides and tacked in place at around the height of the back seam. Also the  leafy band is just folded (after about 4cm in width), ironed and tacked at top and bottom.

Here are also some more detail pictures which might give an idea:

Now I can just tell of some more decorations I added. Of course I had to add the Hoshido emblem :) For this one I used golden pleather in different shades (cause one would have eaten the details up and I was free to change what I wanted anyway). I cut out the different parts using around shapes like glasses as templates and the inner hole of the innermost ring was added using a leather punch. These very tiny parts were glued together using leather glue and just tacked to the coat later on (I'm still not such a freak as to sew something like that ^^'''). I really love how the tiny petals curve so naturally ^-^.

At the back I also added the cord. In the end cause of time issues we just pinned it to the back (finishing the ends using red nail polish before). But I am going to sew them in place some time.
For the flower knot I found a very nice tutorial on Youtube. It was quite easy to understand and the knot took me less than half an hour to make. I added some golden pearls I had originally bought for Zuko's obi xD but which had arrived far too late for that.

For the bracers I luckily could use the very same methode I had already used for Kaze's xD. I took two white pieces of pleather, sewed them togehter on the bad side, turned them, sewed these shut. (Using a side seam is much more easy than the back or front part xD I found out the hard way). Afterwards I cut out the golden decorations in one piece and sewed a fake decorative outer line around it close to the edge. I also handwheeeled the inner circles of the pattern. Afterwards I pinned the gold part onto the white and sewed the inner seam close to the edge of the golden piece. For this you need a lot of patience likewise for the appliquéing stuff (also correcting a lot isn't possible cause pleather is most often not very forgiving if you wanna redo seams). In the end Oboro helped me and added dark elastic on the bottom to keep the bracers in place. 

The shoulder pieces I didn't want to add as they are plainly armour and wouldn't have been appropriate for the ball while the bracers could pass off as decorations especially as I used white pleather and not silver. 

Sooo now the cosplay is finally finished and even survived a whole prom indeed. :) And I'm extremely happy to wear it again some time this year :) Only thing I urgently have to fix is getting that damn wig in place. Never have worn such a heavy ponytail wig.... had no time to really try before and it was always dragged back even with lots of pins. But I got some advice now from accqaintances and I'm going to improve this next time. Afterall making mistakes makes you improve the most I guess.