Goals

I had a few goals for this particular costume.

1) Not to use satin. Satin, even the expensive stuff, always looks rather cheap to me, unless you get wedding-dress-grade satin, and even then it wrinkles fairly easily and is a bitch to clean. The person who commissioned the costume agreed with me - she didn't like satin, either.

2) To use a decent fabric. I have seen too many costumes ruined because the maker chose to buy cheaper fabric. The $1.99/yard special might be easy on the pocketbook, but is usually bad for costumes. Cheap fabric *looks* cheap, sews badly, and doesn't stand up to a lot of wear.

3) To make the costume washable, within reason. Ideally you get a costume professionally cleaned after every wearing because dirt and sweat and body oils get into the fabric. It may not *look* like it's dirty, but these things often contain chemical compounds that change the color of the fabric or break down the fabric's fibers over time. If you don't clean it as soon as possible, you may pull it out of the closet for next year's con to find that you've got enormous sweat stains or weird stains that you don't remember getting. Trust me, I'm a museum professional. I know this stuff. However, I know that often getting something professionally cleaned isn't an option, due to cost or time issues, so I wanted to make a costume that the wearer could throw into the washer and then hang to dry without worrying about it.

I was only partially successful with that - I got a washable, hard-wearing fabric, but due to the nature of the costume - white edging sewn on to bright red fabric - it really shouldn't be washed at home because all that white edging is going to turn pink. If it *has* to be washed at home, though, if the person doing the wash throws in a handful of those new stain-reduicng (dye-absorbing) sheets, it will cut down the damage. Those things do work.

4) To make all the bits and bobs on the costume removable (again, for easy cleaning and storage). Velcro to the rescue!

5) To make a costume that the client could wear around an anime convention all day without getting overheated. This was another strike against satin and other fabrics made of synthetic fiber. It needed to have a high cotton or other natural fiber content so that the wearer's skin could breathe and she wouldn't collapse from overheating.