My First Cosplay

I can remember like it was yesterday.
I started wanting to cosplay since 2007, but did not have the funds nor the time to make a cosplay or buy one it that time, the next year in 2008 I went to my first anime convention ever (Animefest), I was overwhelmed of how many cosplayers that were there, I wanted to talk and get to know them more, like how did they get into cosplay and how did you know what character to cosplay?

Right after the convention I asked my mom if I can cosplay, she said let’s start making plans for it, so we did.

The next year in 2009 we still went to the same convention from the past year, I didn’t cosplay though, because I did not know what character to cosplay at the time, I had been looking up on videos and websites to help me pick a character, that would be my first cosplay, so I didn’t know what to cosplay as, I had to consider a lot of things at the time like money, my body weight, my body type, and if I wanted to cosplay a boy or girl. Early 2010 I finally found out what character to cosplay as!

It was the Vocaloid Kaito Shion, I was so excited to cosplay him I told my mom right away who he was and what he looked like so she said why don’t you try to find the cosplay costume online? So I did, I started looking for his cosplay online to just buy it, but I found out all of the websites that had his cosplay were so inaccurate!!!

With all the cosplay websites all Kaito costumes would look the same and have this weird “W” design on the back and have all this other stuff going on or have weird fabric, So I turned to my mom, Mom do you think you can help me make this coat for my cosplay?

(Mind you my mom is a really great sewer)

So she said yeah I’ll love to help you make this.
I on the other hand have never sewed in my life, so we started planning everything out, finding the materials we needed for the cosplay, first we needed to buy the base pattern, we went with the Simplicity costume pattern # 5386 for Kaito’s coat thank god my local fabric store had a $.99 sale on all patterns at the time.

Now that we have the pattern we checked it to see what fabric goes well with it, we went with white “Twill” for the base of the coat, we went and bought 7 ‘12” yards of it , the blue fabric I knew I wanted that part to shine a little bit so I asked my mom if there was a fabric that shined a little, not like those really shiny fabrics that would just make the cosplay look tacky, so the blue part of the coat is all made from “vinyl” we bought about 5 yards of it and with the design of his coat all of the blue parts of the coat we had to make our own appliqué from scratch for them.

The original design of Kaitos coat, there is yellow trim around the cuffs and the shoulders and a little piece on the left front part, my mom made a great suggestion about using gold instead of yellow, and I say it made a huge difference!
So now we had everything we needed for his coat, we were really busy that year for some reason so we didn’t get started sewing the coat till like 7 days till the anime convention my mom and I were hurrying to get it all done before the convention so I could enter the cosplay walk-on I think the cosplay took only 3 days in hours to finish but since we did not work on it nonstop it took about 5+ days including the night before the convention.

Almost all of the vinyl parts were glued down with fabric glue, the same with the gold trim around the cuffs and the shoulders, we bought the pants a few months before, they are a tan color not brown I think the brown looked a little to dark to me, we took the gold trim and used double stick tape to stick the gold trim to the pants for the bottom design the same design is on the shoulders as well.

We did get the coat done it time for the convention, I entered the walk-on I was very nervous during the whole thing, when they called my name I went on stage did a few pose’s and walked off , I did not win any awards but I had fun and I’m hoping to enter in another walk-on it the future.
Thank you so much for reading! XD

The reference for the whole coat, we used the Vocaloid Kaito Nendoroid Figure, I really liked that design overall.

This post is written by ~T0ra-Chan, entered in the My First Cosplay contest hosted by Miccostumes.com.