The Source

I like the world of Halo a lot, although I tend to get decimated in multiplayer. (I’m much better at RTS than FPS…and I’m not very good at RTS. :)) I watched Halo Legends and appreciated Daisy’s storyline (RIP Daisy); my buddy was doing the armored version of the costume and I like the color red, so…

The Costume (2010)

Daisy has multiple color insets in her outfit, and the only other seams exist in the back and in the crotch inseam. I fused together two Kwik Sew bodysuit patterns with the Crystal Lake ice skating pattern to make the base mockup. After iterating until the fit was correct (I always have to take the waist in a lot on Kwik Sew patterns…), I took it all apart and blocked in the patterning for the white insets and yellow stripes. For the bodysuit fabric, I ordered dark red matte milliskin from Spandex World and picked up some white cotton spandex from Joann’s. The yellow was some rather poor quality yellow stretch knit I’d ordered from the internet to mock up my Reika dress—it had very subpar stretch retention (which from my Sabrina costume I had learned to be wary of), but I only needed a small bit and it wasn’t “loadbearing” in any way.

Like many (if not most) white fabrics, the cotton spandex was too transparent for a single layer to be adequate, so I doubled it. As I had feared, the difference in bulkiness between the double layer of white and the single layer of red caused some unsightly rippling, so I topstitched them down in place which really helped smooth things out. (I didn’t need to top stitch the yellow leg and arm stripes because they behaved themselves.) Getting all the different colors to line up evenly across the shoulder seam lines was taxing due to the double layer of cotton spandex.

All the bras I tried seemed to show a bit too well through the matte milliskin, so I built a camisole shelf bra type thing into the suit. This worked ok for Daisy (who isn’t especially busty), but in the future I opted for using foam cups installed in conjuction with the “shelf bra” type understructure to avoid having to tape up…things. This was the most stressful part of the costume by far.

For the neck collar and waist shawl, I attached green upholstery foam to poor man’s wonderflex, aka latchhook canvas. I then covered it with some of the black 4 way stretch cotton jersey from Joann’s before attaching some plastic grommet rings to mimic the indentations as the animation is so low budget that it’s hard to tell wtf is even supposed to be going on there. For the wrist cuffs, I just double layered the black stretch knit as I had done with the white (same fabric actually, just in a different color). I covered pieces of craft foam in the black stretch knit to make the shoe “cuffs” and then used more of the white to cover the shoes themselves. The little front chest and shoulder decals were created out of foamies. The wig was from Cyperous (originally meant to be a Guy Cecil wig that I shanghaied for Daisy).

A short anecdote: when shooting with Shiroin at AnimeCentral, we walked some distance so that we could use the underside of a Chicago underpass as a backdrop. Ricky stayed on the sidewalk while we carefully crawled up the concrete slope for one of the paired photos seen below. Apparently we were sufficiently far from the geographic blast radius of the in-progress anime convention that, while we were in the middle of posing, some awestruck guy in a Jeep stopped in the middle of the road, completely blocking traffic, just so he could stare at us for a very long, very awkward moment that stretched on ever longer until the honking behind him grew too frenzied and he reluctantly drifted away…

Photos

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