Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Costume breakdown: Eruka Frog dress

This is where I reveal my secrets to how I constructed my Eruka costume.  The hardest part to this not so complicated costume is the dress, it is almost impossible to find giant polka dot printed fabric without custom printing it yourself.  I have searched and searched online for a good idea, and finally came decided to combine some of the stuff I have seen in others' costumes.  The idea is to get a black dress and either sew, print, or paint some kind of big circles on it.  Searching for the black dress was a mess, nothing was quite short enough or flared out enough.  I finally found a dress on Yesstyle.com for about $15 (currently out of stock).
Taken from Yesstyle.com

Obviously the dress had sleeves, so I had to take the seems for the sleeves out and re-serge some edges.  This entire process took me about 2 hours.

Now, for the dots.  There were couple things I really didn't like about either sewing or painting the dots.  If I had to sew the dots on, I had to find fabric 1.) that does not fray 2.) was not too thick or too sheer.  Then there was also the problem of not being able to cut perfect circles out of fabric.  Painting the dots would have worked with some stencil, however, I still had the problem of cutting perfect circles and make the paint go on evenly.  Eventually, I decided to use this old technique (lol) I have used when I was printing cheap J-rock t-shirts.  T-shirt transfer sheets for dark fabric!!!  I got the stretchy ones because the dress itself was stretchy.  I also obtained a circle cutter from my local crafts store (This type of thing), since the transfer sheets had the consistency of paper, it was very easy to cut.  With my perfect circles, all I had to do was just to iron them on.  Voila!

To make the dress flare out more, I used gray fusible interfacing and stiffened the entire dress out to obtain it's shape.  I have seen others use petticoats, but since in the anime Eruka only has a dress that has one-layer, I wanted to stay true to the show.
one layer, and it is gray
I also added some gray lace at the bottom to mimic the pattern.

I bought my hat....>.> yes, I know I'm a loser for that, but it was so much easier to just buy the hat.
Result:

More pictures should be coming in about a month or so.  I think I will do another post in the future regarding tadpole Jackson and the mistakes I have made while making him......Q_Q 

We have some more pictures of my Eruka costume now :D  Go to check it out HERE

6 comments:

  1. Thanks so much! This really helps! i was having so much trouble with the dots but you found a perfect idea! thanks ;P can't wait to see more pictures!

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    1. aww thanks! Let me know if you have any questions. The method should be pretty easy if you don't burn it. I will post more pics once they come out :D

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  2. Hi is there any way you can help me look for a good dress base for this cosplay I've tried everywhere with no luck I even tried that site but that dress is gone because you got it a year ago.

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    1. since each person has their own fit for dresses, I can only recommend the type of dress that might work for this cosplay. I think if you look for "skater dress", you will find more dresses that look like the one I bought.
      Dress Example 1
      Dress Example 2

      These are some examples I found on ASOS.

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    2. Thank you so much I looked on amazon, ebay, and numerous others with no luck I found one in minutes on that site!

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  3. I never thought of ironing on the dots! You beautiful brilliant person, thank you!!!!

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