So for the interview, can you tell me how you decided to go with Punk Rock Suzumiya Haruhi and how you went about making the outfit ?
Suzumiya Haruhi is a character that I can relate to. I feel like she is my anime counterpart so I love cosplaying as her. Since our personalities are so similar I just have to be myself when posing for pictures. It makes life a lot easier lol. The Punk Rock Gekisou outfit was something I always wanted to do the moment I saw that image floating around online, promoting the seiyuu concert DVDs. I instantly fell in love with the outfit and I kept begging all my roommates into cosplaying the entire cast. Whether or not I can get my group together was the determining factor on when I can cosplay this particular outfit.
As for costume creation. I have a million reference pictures of every angle I can find of her figurine and every image this costume is featured in so I can be as exact as possible. I don’t own a sewing machine. Nor do I really know how to use one. I’m still very very amateur in the cosplaying world. Much of the costume is hand sewn. More complicated parts like the skirt and certain parts of the top I would pin it all together and give it to my friend to help me sew the parts down. lol. Since I’m bad at making patterns and measuring, much of my time is spent in the closet pinning fabric together for a perfect fit lol. It’s just a very repetitious cycle of pin things down, sew together, wear it, figure out why it looks so darn terrible, re-pin, re-sew.
I love my guitar. I gathered as many high quality reference images as I could. When I first debuted this costume at Fanime 2009, I felt that my guitar was slapped together quite poorly. I made sure to make it as exact as possible for my 2nd debut at AX 2009. It’s a modified “World Tour” guitar hero that happens to have the same shape and starburst skin that I needed. I added more buttons with model magic and placed on many coats of acrylic paints to achieve what I have currently. I think I have every knob and button on the guitar and even the orange stripe running through the sides of the guitar. I am missing the tuners at the top though. I wanted to put them in but I know how clumsy I am so knocking it around and breaking it off was imminent, thus I decided against. lol. I also did not put in the strings of the guitar. At the time I felt it would have been too much to have the strings too but now I’m starting to regret it a little haha.
Anything I could buy I did lol. Dog collar from Petco, cross necklace, stockings, headband. SHOES. THE SHOES. I was lucky to find the exact same pair of shoes as featured on the figurine! :O It took many hours of scouring the internet. But it was perfect in shape, style and color lol. I love my shoes. haha. I wanted to buy the little gold saturn/vivenne westwood bootleg type of necklace too but I couldn’t find any so I ended up shaping and painting it out of model magic. Model magic is my number 1 molding material since it’s simple and easy. Air dries! Sculpey however is my second love and mistress. If I had the time to shape and bake I would call upon her.
I love the fact that you spent so much time trying to get it as perfect as possible – and truthfully I didn’t even discern the difference on your guitar between me photographing you at Fanime and Anime Expo and yes, I’ve heard others rave of the wonder of Model Magic lol ! Tell me how you got involve with cosplay in the beginning?
I’ve been to a con or two when I was younger. I was in awe of all the fancy costumes and all of my favorite characters coming to life. Since then I’ve always always always wanted to cosplay. The only problem was I did not know how to sew and I was also financially unstable. Finally I came to college and I have a job but I still didn’t want to go at it alone. I met my roommate and now best friend who was the exact same way. Together we decided we’ll go for it. We cosplayed something very simple for the tiny convention held on our very own campus (Mikomicon) and we kept going forward from there. Our first costume was really simple, everything store bought. I did Rukia from Bleach and my roommate accompanied me as Orihime. I cut my hair to her exact style and we just did the summer uniform. We didn’t even use the jacket lol.
Who else have you cosplayed and have any favorites ?
I’m still fairly new at cosplaying so I haven’t done too many characters. I’ve done Rukia from Bleach, Meroko from Full Moon wo Sagashite, Nami from One Piece, Suzumiya Haruhi’s school uniform, Hikari from Pocket Monsters, Simca from Air Gear, and Konata from Lucky Star. My favorites so far are Simca and this rock outfit of Suzumiya Haruhi. They took the most work and I put in a whole lot of time and effort. :3 I also love them the most because their personalities are fun to act out around the convention and on camera.
Do you prefer solo or group cosplay ?
Group cosplay is awesome. It’s way more fun when you and your friends are all from the same series and you can run around and pose together! It’s great fun working on our costumes together too! Sharing tips, tricks and more often than not, pulling all nighters together to finish the costumes on time haha. We always put it off until the last minute. I think we work better under pressure lol. With more people, posing possibilities expand as well. Yay!
lol, I think almost everyone wait till the last moment ! And finally, unlimited time/money/technology, who would you cosplay if that were not an issue ?
I would love to cosplay CLAMP characters. Their outfits are always so gorgeous, detailed and unique. Chii from Chobits, Tomoyo from Tsubasa RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE, Umi from Magic Knights of Rayearth to name a couple. I would also love to cosplay as Yukari from Paradise Kiss in the blue rose gown she wore for a fashion contest near the end of the manga. That outfit is exquisite and would take so much money and effort to create.
Oh, one more question – How was the reaction of people at the two different cons I’ve seen you at ? (Fanime and Anime Expo)
I wore this outfit to both Fanime ‘09 and AX ‘09. I got pretty positive feedback at both cons. However at Fanime there seemed to be more people that thought my costume was from K-ON! This didn’t happen during AX. :3 I did get a lot more requests for hugs at AX and really positive feedback about my personality matching the character very well. Hurray!
