Futayo Honda WIP no.1 & more plans

So as promised, a WIP-post about making the costume of Futayo Honda from Kyoukaisenjou no Horizon, Horizon on the Middle of Nowhere being its English translation.

I watched the first season of the anime god knows when... Wow, actually, just about one year ago in the beginning of December, 2013. (Yeah, I cheated, I checked my MAL.)
I liked it a lot, and not just because of 70% of screen time consists of boobs, no, the story was actually good and there were a few interesting characters among others. So what would be a better way to commemorate a great series than cosplay from it, and of course I would now pick Futayo in my newborn crossplay enthusiasm, as she was my favourite female character in the series!

With no longer ado, let's start with the photos!

First off, some of my reference pictures put together.

I like her design so much! It's like, so inconvenient for someone whose fighting special skill is speed. Um, air resistance, anyone? Of course enormous boobs are a great bonus...wait, did I just say that? And then there's Tonbokiri, the spear, which is a very unique weapon.

A bit challenging hairstyle, great! Also, a cool face is always a bonus.

A screen capture from the anime, showing her going off to a fight...

And then some other photos Google had to offer me.
Yea, yea, boobs, ass...an irrelevant old man touching her ass...

So, Futayo's the first really big, most challenging, time-consuming costume I'm making. Thus far I have bought all the fabrics I will need for her, gladly, and started on at least three different parts of the costume, but nothing is even near finishing yet.

I figured it would be interesting to keep an eye on how much money I spend on the whole costume from head to toes, and also how much time I waste of my life making it.
After it's finished, I'll list an accurate calculation of everything here, but the numbers at the moment say something along the lines of 110 € and 62 hours.

I think it's much better to split the WIP-post in parts, making each "bigger" part of the costume its own post. This one being the references and what is my current situation with it post.

62 hours for these? I suck.
I'll give more specific information on each part of the costume in their own respective posts...

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Okay, then the part where even more of my (not so) surprising, extempore cosplay plans get revealed!

It all began a few weeks back when I was floating around the internet and somehow ended up thinking about how Gen Urobuchi is the guest of honor in Desucon Frostbite, and thanks to that, there will be a "Urobuchi category" in the convention's hall cosplay contest.
And that truthfully speaking, I'd really want to get chosen into the contest now that Yukicon was a missed chance (I'm a bit of a sore loser, I know...), so I'd need to have something from an anime he's made and that should be both recognizable and cool. And then I started to think about Rakuen Tsuihou, the new anime movie from Urobuchi, which will also be introduced in the convention on Friday...and began searching. And what I found was Angela Balzac.

Boobs, ass, what else does a character need to get me interested?
Well, in this case, at least horribly difficult shoes to walk with and such hair. Much tangle.

So now that my plans for Frostbite are finally crystal clear, it's time to get working!

Exactly how I've spent last few weeks...

The next post will be about the photoshoot from November, see how I'm falling behind? I'll never be able to update about something a few days or a week after something's happened!

For the season's greetings, I'll include this photo from tonight.

The first anniversary of making my own costumes is near, and (most probably) this was the last time I'll ever wear this costume that was my first completely self-made one.
It's time to move on in life...

Merry Christmas everyone!

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TL;DR:
Oh, come on. Check the tags and get out of here!

My life during past three months or so...

Like I wrote on the last post, after Tracon was over with, I started almost immediately working on some other costume stuff. Cosplay really is a damn lifestyle...that I'm happy of. (Though sometimes it's good to have some time off and I've sure done that too.)

Okay, so, what actually have I used my time on? Let's use photos, as a picture is worth more than a thousand words.

I wanted to start making something new and I figured it would be easy to make the suspenders for Ryuko Matoi. Well, guess who made them too short and had to take them apart again for later redoing?

Then it was time for serious business, something that was originally planned for Desucon Frostbite, but later put aside because my friend said she couldn't make Makoto after all. We'll see more of Noel Vermillion surely later, though!

The NOL Academy suit on Noel Vermillion, from BlazBlue.

So I started with what I could do right away: the skirt. I had lots of black cotton fabric left from earlier costumes and that was just the thing for this too.

I actually did the maths and made a pattern for a pleated skirt. WTF, you'd like to think? I wanted to try if it would be easier to make beautifully equal-sized pleats this way, and to learn how one would actually measure the need of fabric and other things for such a skirt.
Well, what I learned from this was that the pleating is easier (for me) when there are marks to follow, but overall the process was slow. I like making patterns though, so it was nice and there was no rush so I had time to do it as well as possible.
Next time I'll only mark the top and hem and pleat according to those, not in the middle too. Too much hassle for about the same result.

Ironing the pleats one by one took a long time, I even got bored while doing it... I had marked the pleats with a chalk through the patterns (four marks per pleat edge) before turning them over according to the marks and ironing.
There's the other half of the skirt ironed to its right position and the hem is sewn.

So then it was time to make the white stripes. I bought a 7mm wide satin tape for this. Because I suck at sewing tapes, I had decided that I would use two-sided fusible interfacing of some sort to attach the tape before actually sewing it on. There are the 5mm strip pieces on the left that I cut and used to "glue" the satin tape on with the iron.

Almost ready!
After sewing the tapes on I ironed the pleats once again and sewed them together a bit from the top. I had some kind of blackout in my brain and did it totally wrong. The result looks the same but I used twice the time on it in vain!

Then I sewed the zipper on. I'm happy about the outcome, as I was trying to sew it so that it doesn't show, though the pull is too big for such an occasion... Well, it doesn't really matter, because it won't be visible on the finished costume.
After this the only thing that was missing was the waistband.

And it's done! I like the results a lot, though there are a few mistakes on it yet again. Nothing visible, though, but something to keep in mind to doing "right" next time!
And the zipper doesn't quite give enough width while open to let me put the skirt on without slight problems, but what's a costume without some wiggling around while dressing up?

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I also started planning the costume of Futayo Honda from the very boob-tastic series Kyoukaisenjou no Horizon (Horizon on the Middle of Nowhere) somewhere along the line.

My great masterplan was to go to the cosplay competition in Yukicon with her (and to win it).
And as much as I hate crying about things like this in the internet, I'll now do it myself: I had used a lot of money buying all the fabrics and worked for one month already, modifying a wig for her and starting on the shoes at least. And I was so fixated on going to the competition that when I actually didn't even get through the enrollment it hit me so hard.
How could the competition enrollment get full so fast? I mean, I surely understand the international preliminaries getting full in minutes but that was just an ordinary competition. Which Finland hasn't seen that much anymore in the conventions this year, which then again eventually explains it all, but I really wasn't all that prepared for that happening to me right there.
I was appalled, dumbfounded, and ultimately disappointed. Shit, that totally broke me! It took maybe a few days to finally collect all the pieces back together, and I'm not saying I'd have been totally depressed for days, no, just sad for missing out on something I really had planned so much.

What I decided after that unlucky turn of events was to skip Yukicon, that would save me some money, and to keep making Futayo anyways, of course. Heck, she's amazing, I wouldn't suddenly drop one of my favourite crossplay characters just because one thing didn't go down like I wanted to - that's what life is about, you just have to get back up after disappointments and setbacks and keep going.
If we were to go into this kind of deep stuff more, you would find one of my own principles being that I don't generally plan much into the future because the more I do, the more nothing goes like I had planned initially. But, guess what, we are not going into that, because I don't want to seem like a depressed, whining bitch right out of the blue. No, I'm more of an optimist and I'm totally in terms with this thing now as I quickly realized that grief is useless. There will be many new opportunities in many, many conventions after one missed chance, and I will be there.

This leads to the present one way or another, like one thing mostly leads to others, and to the question: what have I actually done since my so-called resolve? Well, heck. Nothing much Futayo-wise. Or cosplay-wise, anyways.
Why does it always happen that when you're the most vulnerable with one of your projects, a new inspiration hits you like a lightning from a clear sky? No, I'm still not dropping Futayo, never. I just am -ahem- delaying her finishing deadline. Not much! Just that much that I won't make her to Desucon Frostbite either, which was my first Plan B.
This is also all thanks to things leading to others, good-looking figures demanding to be bought and characters demanding to be crossplayed, and anime series to be watched. So, I present you my new (partial) plans to Frostbite, thanks to the also very boob-tastic series Medaka Box: Medaka Kurokami, alternative version (from episode 9)!

Damn, Medaka was like love at a first sight cosplay-inspiration. All I needed was to see a cheap-ish figure sold online and suddenly I had a lot on my mind. It could have been my way to deal with the sadness but more than that I feel like that's how I have picked up my latest inspirations anyway... Hahaha(?).

I'm totally looking forward to making the costume. I've already started with the shoes, and I will make WIP-post about that costume too when the time comes. Eventually...

This has been kind of a heavy post, both by lenght and content. To not make it all so gloomy, I have also a bit of a brighter news to share!
On the 15^th of November I had a photoshoot session with my friend, I wanted to give some more love to my Yukimura Kusunoki (Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai!) crossplay of which I had too little photos before. Fun times. Cold weather to be out in a little more than one really thin layer of cotton though! I'll make its own post for that sometime later when I get the photos sorted out, and before that I'll also give you some Futayo-WIPs! But, to end this one cheerfully, we'll need a compilation of...stupid faces!

Do I ever even try...?

That's all, folks. And that's how the cookie crumbles.
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TL;DR:
Ramble, some cosplay plans, a few pics. Nothing to miss, really.