Fun With Sewing!

            Why bother writing this up? To hopefully help any other aspiring Yunas with their costumes. I certainly could have used some assistance :P.

My Yuna costume took me roughly two weeks to complete. Not because necessarily it was an easy costume; more like I had only two weeks to create it before the local anime convention rolled around. between school work and costume I had my hands pretty full. While perhaps looking simple, Yuna’s costume is surprisingly complex, if you are a stickler for details, as I am. Why, you may ask, didn’t I pick a simpler costume if I only had two weeks? Well, the reason I chose this costume is simple. I was about as ignorant to anime as it is possible to be. I had played Final Fantasy X. That was about it.

So anyways, my first excursion was to Value Village, the local thrift store. Quite luckily from me there is a catholic school in the area, which just happens to have dark blue pleated skirts as part of their uniforms. I was able to find a very nice one of the perfect size and length. Since I only had to weeks I decided expecting to embroidering on all the flowers and vines on the skirt would be a bit impractical, so I bought some lovely fabric paint and some cloth flowers and completed the skirt in about two hours. Now that the convention has passed and I have almost a year to fix up my costume for the next convention, I can go back and embroider the vines (I’ll leave on those cloth flowers, they look pretty damn good) over the fabric paint and make it look all spiffy.

I bought some yellow fabric for the obi and broke out my acrylic paints for the design. Minus all the time it took for the paints to dry, the main sash bit took me about three and half hours to paint. Once all that was done I used the leftover yellow material to fashion a bow, and then sewed it on and wrapped some decorative chording around the middle.

I made the strange orange star thing out of cardboard, but that didn’t work very well so I will have to devise a different way to make it for next year. I made two long blue beads out of rolled construction paper, and the rest were glass, donated by my mother.

For the top I just pinned a long strip of white fabric to a black halter-top (that part was mercifully easy).

The sleevy things proved to be the most difficult to make. I lacked the means or the know-how to dye the sleeves pink, so I ended up sewing a 10 inch or so strip of pink fabric to the end of the white sleeve, then sewing on a layer of a gauzy type fabric for interest and some blue ribbon around the upper sleeve to supposedly keep the things on. All that crap took the longest, several days of toil and cursing. Not really sure about the total time it took. Now that I have acquired some pink dye I can do the sleeves properly.

            I didn’t want to do the ‘traditional’ staff because I figured (correctly :P) that the other Yunas who were bound to be at the convention would have that staff and I wanted to be a bit different. So I decided to do a staff that I had found a picture of in my friend’s ffx guidebook. The ornament on top looked like an elaborate green and blue S and the length of the staff was striped with blue and gold. That part was easy, I just took blue and gold electrical tape and wrapped it around a sawn off broom handle. My father volunteered to cut out the S thing with his scroll saw and I attached it to the broom with liberal amounts of rubber cement and more electrical tape. Weeeeeeeeeee, that was easy.

            There rest of the costume is in the details. Yuna has one green eye and one blue eye. I was half there with blue eyes myself, anyway. Didn’t have the money for green contacts though. Maybe next time. Also, Yuna has a long earring made of the same beads as those hanging from her waist, and a feather on the end, but I forgot to do that :P. My hair was (still is I suppose) about the right length and color. And finally, all that remained was the black boots (not seen in above picture :P) which I already owned anyway. I suppose that’s it.