Clang!

Metrocon Fantasy Masquerade 2011: [link]

Video by
Photo by Misha
Costume by

Laharal storms off without looking where he's going - and slams head first into a deceptively small girl. He falls straight back. "What the heck are you made of?!" he exclaims as the confusion settles in.

"Metal, like most robots," replies a calm Hime as she follows out her servant.

"Who the heck are you?? And that's a robit?"

Ah, Metrocon Masquerade, how I miss you. :3

Costume Information

Flandre is one of those characters who I wouldn’t have known, let alone ever cosplayed, if I hadn’t been cast as her for a Metrocon show. It was a fairly simple costume, but the simple ones always have their snags, especially when trying to make it easy to put on and durable so it’ll last through a stage show with multiple fights.

The dress base was really easy. It was a Simplicity pattern with a zipper up the back and a few hook and eyes to close the collar, made a size too large to give it that baggy look and to make me seem a bit smaller in it (I was playing a character four feet tall; I’m glad the folks playing characters from my show were all so tall!). The skirt portion was given a couple more inches, angled out from the waist, than even the size extra to give it some poof, supported by a short petticoat under the skirt. All of this combined definitely did the trick of making me look a little smaller than usual, and I did a lot heavier makeup than usual to give myself a much more childlike look, and was pleased overall with both results.

The sleeves were also made much larger. We drafted a pattern for the sleeves not based on the original pattern, a bellish shape much like the ones used for the Sweet, but smaller. The white cuff was added to pull it in and give it more shape. The collar is also made of the same white material. The white trim on the bottom is more of the same material; to make such an outlandish trim (why couldn’t it have just been lace?), I made a pattern and calculated how many triangles I needed and sketched them out on the fabric. It was folded over, cut, and sewn together. Pulling the points was a PAIN. I then handstitched the trim to the bottom of the dress, into the hem I slipstitched in.

The apron was a pain. It’s a hybrid of two patterns, made blockier in the front and the opening made from the top and the straps made much more square. It took a couple of giant paper attempts to get it to fall in the right place, then it was sewn in two pieces to create a lining. A few straps were sewn together, stitched into either side at about the waist, and snapped together to close it. The straps at the top were done in the same piece as the apron front, giving it a more streamlined appearance up top and able to slip right over my head. The bow on the back was made separately, with interface to keep it up, and attached with an oversized snap.

That was most of the costume. The other tricky part was the oversized screw in her head. Because of the nature of the fight show, I had to make it a plush object (I didn’t want to fall back on something hard or breakable), which was a fun project. The core is a plastic drain stopper, and it covered with silver spandex was the base of the screw. The head part of the screw was made from four pieces, like quarters of a circle… kind of like oversized Trivia Pursuit pieces. They were stitched on to the base (which was hard sewing on the fourth one!), and there was some stuffing involved before all that. Now, normally, I would have sewn those into the wig, which would have been a nice, secure fit… but the screw had to be pulled out in the middle of the show, so I needed to secure it in a way that would stick in most of the time, but could be pulled out. Initially, I had sewn in an interesting little clip that was flat and snapped in nicely, which worked when we rehearsed without the wig, but the clip wouldn’t go into the wig, so I can to cut slits and make do with bobby pins, which caused a lot of problems on the dance floor and made it difficult to keep the screw in, booooo. The wig was so heavily pinned because the back had to be flush to my nape. So, yeah, the head portion =/= fun.

The rest was really easy. White tight, a pair of black shoes from the store, and a red strip of fabric tied into a ribbon under the collar. The costume survived its first major fight… but the second fight did it in on show day (not BEFORE show day, of course). I lost the screw halfway through the fight (it was only supposed to be ripped out during the first fight and put back in to turn me back on) and one of the apron’s waist straps tore off during the fight, and I had to carry someone with several inches and about twenty pounds on me off stage without tripping over it. Oops. But it was still a lot of fun… even if all I could say was “Fuga!” I hope we get the Princess Resurrection group together again at some point – it’s obscure, but a fun show!