Of Anime First Watched in 2016, Some Favorites

Not in any particular order:

• Boku Dake ga Inai Machi (Erased): If you can return to the past, can you really change anything?  In a world where children aren't usually taken seriously, can you save a friend from adults in positions where everyone trusts them and not you?
  
• Steins; Gate and the sequel Steins; Gate: Fuka Ryouiki no Deja Vu.  One of the best "parallel timelines/realities/time travel" stories I've found, in any medium.  A little too much creepy obsession with the trans character, and the usual sexism toward scientists who are also female, but I decided I would keep watching anyway for what shaped up to be a very well-done plot.  Slow to get started; almost 10 episodes before the storyline really starts to unfold. 
  
• Sarusuberi Miss Hokusai.  Amazingly beautiful historical fiction, seamlessly incorporating some of Hokusai's best known works.  Touching and sad yet also hopeful. 
  
• Flying Witch: everyday life with a witch and her friends.  Nothing much happens, but life is peaceful and good.  I learned the best way to chop an onion.
  
• Rokka no Yuusha: six heroes are chosen to go and fight the demons who periodically try to destroy human lands.  Lush, brilliant colors, panoramic landscapes, startling personalities, and a nice twist on the typical fantasy setup.
  
• Mushishi (and all sequels): "Perceived as strange and alien, inferior and grotesque, these are beings who appear entirely unlike flora and fauna familiar to us."  Yet not malicious, not evil.  Everyone and everything is just trying to get by, just trying to live.  When mushi and humans come into conflict, Ginko the mushishi (mushi master) tries to mediate.  
  
• Thunderbolt Fantasy: egregiously over-the-top tale of swords and sorcery.  For when you want amazing costumes, flamboyant monikers, male posturing (so much male posturing), rage-worthy sexism toward women doing anything other than having babies (yeah, I would have been happy to skip those parts), unbelievable explosions, and puppets killing each other with magical swords, this is your anime, right here.  
  
• Katanagatari: take every fantasy trope about a quest for magical swords and turn it inside-out and upside-down and toss it through a black hole.  Take what comes out and animate it so that everyone looks exactly like what they are (maybe), in a phantasmagorical way.  One of the most visually intriguing but saddest fairy-tales I've encountered. 

The Mad Person-Who-Stitches: Trapeze Doom Guy

For Aerial Anime's video game theme, Doom guy is making an appearance:

This was a 1-hour costume: green t-shirt, green leggings, 1/2 inch flexible foam, and shoulder pads of doom:

Elisheba ripped the leggings.  I cut the foam into abbreviated breast- and backplates and stitched them into the t-shirt, turning up the length of the shirt and using it as self-lining for the foam.  Add shoulder pads and an elastic breastband (covered with scrap leotard fabric from my stash), and it's done!

It even stands up by itself!  It's messy on the inside, but I'm wary of stitching the foam down too firmly: the t-shirt has to stretch enough to be put on, and the foam will only stretch a little. 

The Mad Person-Who-Stitches: Final Fantasy X Yuna's Sleeves

Back to where I left off in June: I am attempting to make a Yuna costume suitable for aerial performance.

Yuna:

My recreation of her sleeves, version 1.0:

These were made in heavy white polyester satin (leftover from Princess Zelda's dress, which I still haven't written about), and I attempted to give them a gradient dye job with a fabric marker.  I gave up about 2/3 of the way through, because my marker was starting to run low, and I didn't want to have to buy another whole set to get that shade of pink in a reasonably broad point.  Also the satin did not take marker well, and it was much more difficult than I anticipated to get a good gradient.

So I took to the internet to see if dyeing sleeves might be a possibility.  I was terrified of dying fabric.  In every by-the-way description of historical dying methods I've read it involves a terrific amount of work and substances that are either really gross or that humans shouldn't be around (for instance Memories of Silk and Straw by Junichi Saga has a chapter about a dyer).  But the good people of the internet provided youtube tutorials and assured me that thanks to modern technology, I can buy small packets of fabric dye in every color of the rainbow and handle it without more precautions than gloves and ordinary ventilation. 

version 2.0
Lightweight white cotton sateen, unlined, dyed in the kitchen sink: 

I can dye fabric!  Eureka!  QED!  The world of white fabric is my oyster!  

The light is a bit too bright to see well, but I got a lovely gradient on both sleeves, with far less work than I was anticipating.  The better sleeve had the hotter water: next time I have a dye job small enough to fit in a pot I'll do it on the stove, so as to better maintain the temperature of the dye bath. 

I made version 2.0 with square margins as shown in Yuna's illustrations, discarding trying to round the back corners of the bottom hem (it's a female/male distinction with probably as much worth as buttons on the left or right for western shirts).  The purple cord is for show: I basted the sleeves to a long-sleeved nude leotard to make sure they'll actually stay on during performance.  They are a royal pain to work with in aerial fabrics, but they make all my sweeping gestures look lovely.  Dance adapts to look beautiful in the style of clothing it is danced in, and in turn influences the clothing worn to dance.

The Mad Person-Who-Stitches: Final Fantasy X Yuna's Obi

Yuna:


Yuna wears an outfit plainly derived from kimono and hakama, but a deeply pleated skirt instead of hakama, and her kimono has been cut down to the sleeves and a chest wrap.  She wears her obi in a butterfly knot, the easiest and a fairly secure way to tie an obi in my limited experience. 

Making her obi: A formal occasion obi will be heavy silk, damask or embroidered or appliqued or painted or otherwise embellished, lined with stiff cotton.  Less formal obis are narrower and more flexible, of lighter silks or cotton or other material, patterned or plain.  I wanted something sturdy and as little inclined to sliding as possible, so I used the stiffest, heaviest yellow cotton I could find, painted with fabric paint. 

I used SoSoft brand fabric paint for this, ordered off the internet.  This is really good fabric paint: opaque, goes on smoothly, neither too runny nor too thick, really good colors, dries flexible and without any residual tackiness.

When this picture was taken, with about 1/3 of the obi painted and the fabric stretching out seemingly endlessly, I quite hated this project.  Obis are long.

About this long, in this case.

Finished!  Now I love this obi again.  I painted the central design with a hand-drawn paper stencil.

It took me about 12 episodes of HPpodcraft, the H.P. Lovecraft literary podcast, plus another 3 hours of other internet listening-to stuff, to paint this.   And I even left a section that will not show when the obi is tied unpainted (quite common).   The obi construction cheats somewhat in that I did not line the fabric, nor baste the folded over fabric shut.

Slightly off-topic: One of things I am really proud of myself for is learning to tie my own fukuro obi in a basic taiko knot.  I learned from this good person of the internet.  (Bless the internet!)  For walking around a con all day, a wide, stiff, embroidered obi provides excellent back support and is amazingly comfortable. 

The Mad Person-Who-Stitches: Final Fantasy X Rikku

A while ago I showed you a rainbow of fabric, a potential costume.  That became Rikku:

 Costume tryout! (not the leggings used in performance)

Obvious modifications:

• no buckles, the belt and side toggles are just fabric
• Rikku's blue back streamers are drastically shortened and stitched down
• No weapons, just the basic armbands
• No bare midriff: that's just begging for friction burns from aerial fabrics.  (Although I could have put in a strip of nude fabric.  I was feeling rushed and didn't want to try, though.)

Construction:

top front with darts

top back: invisible zipper!  This is the 4th invisible zipper I've put in.  I didn't have to rip out a single stitch this time.

I can hardly believe the fabric store had this lettuce-green with sheer stripes in 4-way stretch.  It's very ugly by itself.  But it saved me a day's work over making the stripes myself!  All I had to do was make an underlayer with the dark green.  I confess I am irresistibly reminded of a watermelon.

Things that worked well:

• Leotard!  There is a reason leotards are popular with gymnasts and aerialists and other circus artists: they stay put (assuming they fit), they (usually) don't get tangled in your equipment, they stretch with you, they're comfortable, they're sturdy, they protect your skin, they look good, and they can be made amazing with decoration and/or fabulous fabric.  Can you tell how happy I was to be making something I'm familiar with that I knew was going to work structurally?
• Ruffly leg openings: I stitched my sprout-green chiffon into two long tubes, gathered them to match my leg opening circumference, and stitched them down (with some grief, as I had a lot of ruffle to stuff in, and the leg elastic was already in).  They turned out very ruffly!

Things to improve or correct:

• front darts are not visible from any distance; topstitch them in black thread?
• upper torso needs to be about an inch longer, but stretch fabric will stretch, so not a disaster.
• neckline and collar: I was guessing on how much to heighten the neckline on my pattern.  As you see, I did not raise the back nearly enough.  And the collar is too floppy: I should have put a strip of tearaway stabilizer (is that washable?) or something inside.

I did this costume in 5 days flat, right before our last full rehearsal.  I think our Rikku is adorable!  She is also a very talented aerialist and a kind and responsible person and I will be very sad when she leaves us for Peace Corps.

The Mad Person-Who-Stitches: Final Fantasy X Lulu, Finally Done!

Review: I'm making this dress, adapted for an aerialist:

Bodice, trim, skirt and everything else are finally done and I put everything together. The front:
The back: The fur trim was still to baste on when I took these photos, and then I cut it off again to wash the costume after MomoCon 2016, so no photos with trim today.  I rather regret the fur trim, actually: I prefer the sharp line of the "corset" top without trim.

Overall, Lulu is the most detailed and challenging costume I've put together so far.  I'm very happy with how much of the views from Lulu's screenshots I was able to achieve.

Materials: black 4-way stretch lycra, nude 4-way stretch mesh, matte gray 4-way stretch knit, gray polyester satin with the wrong side out (the shiny side wasn't the right color, the wrong side was), rain-coat fabric both shiny side and inside out, white Tulip 3D fabric paint, metallic gray Tulip 3D fabric paint, invisible zipper, black ribbon (for a drawstring at the ankles), elastic

Time to make: Roughly 3 months.  Maybe half of that, if I'd been working on this all day, every day?  It did go together quickly once I had the detailed sections assembled and stitched and painted, but those took quite some time.

Things that worked well:

• Leotard as form-fitting bodice, details done in more stretch fabric on the bodice, nude mesh wherever the character shows skin.  I am so doing this with every character who shows lots of skin from now on.
• The black tab things sticking up from the back of the neck line are loops of my black stretch fabric for holding Lulu's braids.  Long wigs are heavy, and the jerk at the end of a drop means braids will easily pull a wig off your head, even with chin straps.  I snaked each braid through a loop and ran a safety pin through braid and loop.  They stayed put, and it worked for rehearsal (the wig pulled off in performance...ah, well).
• Not visible in the photos, but there is actually a full leotard underneath the pants.  The pants are sewed to the leotard bottom, leaving a margin of leotard fabric, and then leotard top and bottom are hand-tacked together most of the way around, and the leotard top front is stitched down to the pants at the edge.  The leotard back top is not stitched down to the pants, as the pants have to open up over the hips when putting the costume on or off (there's an invisible zipper in the back waist).  I did try snaps, but the stresses of bending and stretching around for the routine ripped them off, so I left the back open over the pants.  With the leotard bottom inside there are no worries about friction burns or underwear shots.
• The satin sleeves: I made the bells very small, and they don't fall back around the arms at all, while still giving the bell sleeve effect.

Things that I should correct or do better with next time:

• I should have made the gray satin portion of the sleeves come higher up the arm, to be at the same body height as the top of the leotard "corset".
• The pants should really be 3-4 inches longer.  Right now they are the right length when standing on the ground, but pull up a lot when doing splits in the silks.  I also need to cut future versions to taper more from the knee down: my Lulu could barely work around the poof for our fancy starting climb.
• I did the full mirrored pattern of Lulu's train on each pant leg, which scaled down the height more than I like.  On a redo, do only one half of the pattern on each pant leg.  The fabric paint for the edging did dry flexible.  The flip side is that it remains slightly tacky even when fully dry.  I may try a different brand of 3D paint next time, or switch to SoSoft brand flat fabric paint.
• Joining "skirt" and "bodice" portions of a costume.  Torso seams get a lot of stress during performance, and while I can repair small sections of broken stitches after each use, I worry for the life of the costume.  Repairing fabric that's shredded from having stitches pull out too many times is out of my league.  And in general, the join between top and bottom is my structural and engineering weak point, and I'd like to feel as confident about it as I do about the top and bottom separately, in general as well as for this particular costume.  And the costume almost has to join, both to maintain the look and to avoid all the hazards of having pieces that can pull apart or pull off while you are swinging around a trapeze or wrapping yourself up in aerial fabrics.  Having longer pants will help, I think.  Beyond that, I'm still thinking.  Gentle reader, if you are a person-who-stitches-for-aerialists and have advice for dealing with this issue, please let me know.

The Mad Person-Who-Stitches: Final Fantasy X Lulu's Corset

I do not recommend aerialists to wear corsets.  The old-fashioned, boned, restricted breathing and no bending in the middle sorts are obviously bad news unless you are an unusual person.  The modern padded varieties for steampunk and other genres can be used, but you must make sure they are secured to some sort of undercostume and flexible enough to move with you.  Otherwise the first time you stretch out, you will stretch and the corset will not, and whatever was supposed to be underneath the corset will pop out.  (I profit from watching other people's costume malfunctions here.)

But Lulu wears a corset-ish bodice:
My thought is, since it's supposed to be that form-fitting, why not just make this as a leotard?  All one piece, flexible, breathable, much easier to make than an actual corset.  And that is precisely what I did.       

 Step 1: basic leotard construction.  Anywhere Lulu is showing skin I will be using nude stretch mesh to protect against friction burns and give the costume better stability and structural integrity. 

 Step 2: cut long strips of stretch gray fabric

Step 3: and iron the long strips into double-fold bias tape (since it's stretch you can cut on the grain instead of the bias; I just want all the raw edges tidily enclosed.  Also since it's stretch it won't iron very well, but I got enough of a crease for a guide until everything was stitched down.)

 Step 4: top stitch your long strips to your leotard bodice in your desired pattern, using long stitches.  Remember to leave the side seam allowance free.  Below is my bodice front:

I had some trouble with my layers of slithery stretch fabrics slithering and stretching and especially moving at problematically different speeds under the presser foot.  In future, I will make sure to leave an extra margin of the top fabric beyond the seams, and trim after I finish a seam.  But the mistakes were small, so I'm crossing my fingers and telling myself they won't show from any distance.  You can't see them in this photo, for example.  

Treat the back similarly.  I faked lacing with more gray strips, since lower back lacing is in a very bad place for aerial fabrics: a lot of wraps go there, including sliding wraps, and you emphatically do not want your costume getting caught in your fabrics.

Next time I write about Lulu, you'll get to see everything come together.  I'm really happy with how well this costume is going!

The Mad Person-Who-Stitches: Final Fantasy X Lulu's Skirt of Belts

The wiki article mentioned that Lulu's illustrator likes to give his animators a challenge.  Hence her skirt of belts:

If my Lulu were a ground dancer I could just make and weave the belts as shown.  (Which would be fun, and maybe I'll make a ground-only version another time.)  For an aerialist, that presents too much danger of snagging on the equipment, as well as being rather heavier than one wants to wear while doing inversions, not to mention the near impossibility of making such a loosely woven net of belts hold its shape under varying gravitational pulls. 

So I need to create the illusion of belts, but on an unbroken panel of fabric, and without buckles to snag on anything.  The skirt will be floofy pants, with the belts occupying the two center front panels.

Invisible nude mesh is my choice for the panel backing.  It's tough for its weight, but still very lightweight fabric, making me somewhat hesitant about using fake leather for the belts.  But my closest fabric stores didn't have any fake leather in the colors I needed, so I was saved the choice.  Instead, I did find a box of various raincoat fabrics.  I cut long strips, arranged them to my satisfaction, pinned the heck out of them, sewed them all down (tedious, very tedious!), and used grey dimensional fabric paint to draw "buckles" on them.  I have pictures of the first two steps:

first draft, before the strips were ironed

pinned and almost ready to stitch; just have to cut the strips that cross both panels.  That's my grandfather's old extra large lap desk underneath, being drafted into sewing-room duty. 

 More pictures when I start assembling the various parts of this costume. 

The Mad Person-Who-Stitches: Final Fantasy X Lulu's Trim

Gentle readers, I have once again decided that my aerial partners and I shall dance as characters whose costumes, while representing an apex of sartorial splendor, are vastly unsuited to anything but virtual reality.  My job is to render these clothes to a reality suitable for aerialists.

In this post I deal with the lacey trim on Lulu's sleeves and train:

Ideally, I would do this with lace or embroidered iron-on applique.  However, this lace pattern is not, to my knowledge, made commercially, and I do not make my own lace.  I prioritized the pattern over the material, and chose to do the trim with fabric paint.  I used Tulip dimensional slick paint: it does dry flexible, as advertised, and it won't be entirely flat, but I can easily control the thickness.  

Step 1: make the pattern with pencil and paper.  Take the time to make sure you are happy with what you have, because after this it will be all tracing what you've made.  Lulu's trim is all two-part mirror image, so only draw half and then flip and trace the reverse for the second half.

Step 2: ink your pattern.  Sharpie markers are best, as you want the pattern to bleed through the paper for purposes of flipping and tracing the mirror image, as mentioned above. 

 Step 3: use temporary fabric marker to trace the pattern onto your fabric.  This is dark fabric, so I had to improvise a crude lightbox to be able to see the pattern through the fabric.

 

Step 4: fabric paint!  Get a bottle with a narrow tip to avoid the aggravation of brushes.  Make sure you have waxed paper or waxed cardboard under your fabric.  Work from top to bottom and from your non-dominant hand side to your dominant hand side to lower your chance of smudging your work.  Below is one sleeve:

I got both sleeves done today.  It took about 1.5 hours per sleeve, not counting making the patterns, which I did yesterday.  The (divided by necessity) skirt portions still needed some finishing before I applied paint; I'll do those later this week.  

 While scowling at my various image files of Lulu and sketching my patterns, I wondered about the possibility of writing a program that could take an image file of something like Lulu's trim, folded and curved as it appears on clothing, and apply transformations to turn the relevant portions into a linear strip with the correct proportions, magically increase resolution from frequently blurry screenshots, and print out a pattern.  My guess is that the first part is possible.  The second part, not so much: obtaining good resolution stills of the parts of the costume I need to study has always been a problem for my cosplay work.  

"You Only Get a Sense of Fulfillment from Torture and Dominos If You Do Them Yourself": Art and Philosophy in Hoozuki no Reitetsu

The third OVA of Hoozuki no Reitetsu is now out! 

Hakutaku-san (left) and Hoozuki-sama (right).  Fan art from the web.

In this episode, Is Art an Explosion?, we come to the subjects of draftmanship, painting, and abusing one's powers!  Hoozuki-sama, Hell's secretary general and power behind the throne of King Enma, takes heavenly (for some values thereof) Hakutaku's terrible drawings as an excuse to force him into art lessons with Nasubi, Hell's resident up-and-coming artist.  Nasubi, a thoroughly likeable demon who works hard at his art and paints a mouth of truth mural in a previous episode, sees promise in Hakutaku's works: they're unforgettable. 

The mouth of truth will bite off your hand--or your head.

Mix in some taoist magic that makes drawings come alive, some philosophical thoughts about having such magic, and a little general mayhem, and Hoozuki-sama has another enjoyable day in Hell. 

The Mad Person-Who-Stitches: Link

Legend of Zelda's protagonist Link is easy for an aerialist: shirt, pants, tunic, belt and baldric (I bought these last, as I don't have leatherworking tools), and drop the boots, weapons, and armor.  Not that I would mind having a chain mail shirt (I think), but even if I wanted to add that much weight to what I'm swinging through the air, my aerial partner told me in no uncertain terms that she did not.  I can't blame her: I would say the same thing if I were the base instead of the flier.

What I Did:

• shirt: I used a close-fitting princess-line jacket pattern and cut the center front as one piece.  I meant to put gussets in the armpits, but I forgot.  But it works okay anyway, not too much bunching at the shoulders when I have my arms over my head.  I made the sleeves lace-up as well (scroll down for a picture).  Putting in that many eyelets was tedious, but I love the final effect.
• tunic: I used a loose-fitting shirt pattern, again cutting the front as one piece.  I faked the slit-and-laced-sleeves, mostly because I was getting tired of eyelets.  I kept the side slits, but did lacing all the way down.  The pictures of Link seem to indicate the side seams might be half sewn and half laced, but that wouldn't make much sense for actually wearing.  None of the pictures I could find of Link show exactly what the underarm seaming is, so I compromised by leaving the armpit seams open, but stitching the sleeve ends closed so the sleeves won't flap around.  More eyelets and lacing (I used double-fold bias tape stitched shut) for the neckline decoration.
• pants: I took apart an old pair of pants that fit me (about 3 hours of ripping seams) to use as a pattern.  Once you have a pattern that fits you, pants are easy.  I did not add pockets or belt
  loops, which cut down the work even further.  Contrary to sewing rumors I've heard, the pants zipper was easy to figure out and put in, just by studying the existing pair I took apart.

How It Worked:  The shirt is a little looser than I wanted, the tunic is a little shorter than I wanted, and I had to restitch the bottom 10 inches of the pants to make them taper enough not to flap when I do upside-down work.  Also I made the buttonhole for the pants almost too small.  Eyelets are a pain, but worth the effect.  I really love the hunter green of the tunic against the white shirt.

Things I Might Do Differently If I Make This Again: Try gussets in the shirt underarms.  The stretch cotton I used for the shirt is thicker than a plain cotton, and doesn't breath well; I would prefer good kona cotton, the same as the tunic, instead.  I'd like the tunic just a little longer.  The tunic side eyelets need facing or tear-away stabilizer or a deep hem, one layer of fabric is not enough (I may redo this after AWA 2015, but not right now).  Adjust the pants pattern for perfect fit to start with.  Beg, borrow, buy, or make a hole-punch sort of thing for cutting eyelet holes so I'm not endangering my fingers with an x-acto knife and embroidery scissors.