Furisode Girl Lienna (Pokemon Trainer) - Construction

When: February/March 2014

Where: UK

I have to admit I have never played Pokemon X or Y. This was because recently I've bought the games and then never had time to play them. But I loved the character design for this pokemon trainer and decided to try doing her costume as it seemed like a fun challenge!

You can see the final cosplay here

Reference Picture:

There were practically NO reference pictures for this character and they were all very small with off colours.

Construction:

The Top

How I saw it was this costume is made up of two parts. The Top and then the skirt. It's a Kimono style top with a modern skirt. This meant the top needed two elements, the Y shape of the front (DONT get this mixed up as wearing a kimono the wrong way means you're dead) and the long sleeves (furisode literally means long sleeve). But unlike normal kimonos the sleeves attach at the armpits.

The main body was fairly easy as I used a basic kimono pattern. The trimming I made from the same pink fabric I used to make the obi (not photos of the construction of the obi, sorry).

I used these patterns I got from a friend's book on kimono. She helped me map out the size of pannels I needed too.

The sleeve was a bit of an experimentation. I compared the length of the sleeve on her proportions to myself and calculated how much needed to by tight around the arms and how much needed to be the long sleeve (furisode) part.

The Skirt

The skirt was a massive pain. I got a pattern for a circular skit through a google search. I then divided this pattern into 3 for each later of the skirt. This was a massive pain as my calculations were not very accurate and I had to guesstimate a lot. I made a circular shape for the petals which would lye over the layer below it. 

The bottom layer was the trickiest because of my miscalculations with the circle skirt pattern

I then hand stitched all of the edging to make sure the fabric on the petals wouldn't fray before machine sewing around them and pulling out the hand stitching to make it much tidier.

I then hand stitched the layers together and once I was happy with them machine stitched over the hand stitching before pulling out the hand stitching. 

You can see the final cosplay here