CHISE

Series: Saikano
Worn to: Acen 05, Youmacon 06
Status: Retired
Difficulty:

Why I made it

Saikano was one of my friend's favorite series so I decided to give it a whril. I ended up really loving the series! I actually didn't think I'd ever cosplay Chise because of the difficulty level of th costume. Up until that point, I had never made a costume completely on my own and I knew it would be a huge challenge. However, I was determined to learn and, because the costume didn't involve too much sewing, I decided to give it a shot.

How I made it

The blazer is just a comfortable-fitting blazer I picked up at a thrift store, modified, and tore in various places. The patch was made from leftover fabric, interfacing, and yellow bias tape. The skirt was made using an online pattern and was my first of MANY pleated skirts. I had the shoes, wig, and socks.

The wings and gun were more difficult but not nearly as complicated as I expected. The wings were made from cardboard packing boxes I shamelessly stole from my Mom's work. I then cut the boxes into random, jagged pieces (I wanted them to look chaotic) and slabbed them together with hot glue. Next, I used an especially strong piece of cardboard (a little longer than the size of my hand) as a base and screwed it onto the back of the jagged pieces. I also used two belts as straps. then, to mask the appearance of the cardboard's texture, I outlined all of the edges of the "feathers" in electrical tape and spraypainted them gray + gave them a topcoat of metallic spraypaint as well.

The gun was made the same way but using cardboard tubes and poserboard. The tubes were simply poster tubes glued and taped together but finding a tube large enough to stick my arm through was much more difficult than I thought it would be. Instead, I used a triangular packing box and covered it in posterboard to give it a more tubular look. I then used masking tape to cover any of the openings of the tubes. I used a plastic bowl to shove over the three bottom-most tubes to make them more stable and just used 2 liter bottle caps for detailing along the side + the tip of the gun. The wing is a styrofoam model airplane wing my brother had sitting around the house and the wires are just old computer wires hot glued on. It was then spraypainted and glossed and I learned my first important lesson that styrofoam and paint DO NOT MIX and the wing sort of melted. Thankfully I liked the effect but still..

Final thoughts

This was a fun project because there was so much open to interpretaiton and I was able to go crazy with my creativity. It is not the best quality costume but I definitely had fun making it.