status: Finished. Done with. Over.

worn: A-Kon 2000, by my friend Jennifer

how it was made: I found a skirt pattern from Style (which has, I think, gone out of business) with the exact kick pleats in front that the Evangelion school uniforms have. It had two kick pleats in back and the uniforms have only one, but that was easy to adjust. I also hemmed it slightly shorter and fit the waist slightly higher to emphasize the length of Jennifer's legs and make her look a bit more like Rei.

The jumper straps were harder to do, especially since Jennifer lives in Colorado and I live in Texas, which makes it a challenge to fit her. She was obliging enough to don an old T-shirt, wrap it and herself up in duct tape, cut it off, and send the resulting form to me, when I then stuffed with cotton batting. The result: a tailor's dummy fitting her specifications fairly well. I experimented with paper to find the proper shape and curve for the straps, and thought I might have to sew snaps onto the straps and the shirt to keep them from falling off, but they turned out to fit beautifully.

Jennifer supplied the shirt, finding a pattern for a round collar and sewing it herself, the red tie, and the socks and shoes (despite having a major trauma over Rei's inclination to wear black socks with white shoes). We bandaged her up to make her stand out a little from the crowd. Her hair is normally close to that style, but she'd done enough stuff to it over the previous year that her stylist refused flat-out to dye it blue, fearing it would break off, so we resorted to chopping up a wig.

comments: The only thing I forgot was the little thingy that the uniform has under the buttons on the waistline, but nobody else seemed to notice.