Cloth is very important

So let's start with a bit of how I made Amir. Like I said earlier this has been a dream costume of mine ever since the manga started, but I didn't start working on it right away. Firstly, I knew it would be really labor intensive and there always seemed to be reasons to make other costumes. Secondly I knew I wanted to use good materials and that takes money.  So I kept having it on my 'someday' folder until we were discussing our options for the WCS preliminaries and yumi brought Otoyomegatari up as one of the possibilities. Honestly I felt like this would be the perfect place for this cosplay, what ever happened in the actual competition. I'm really happy I got to bring Amir to a stage.

Photo by Mikael Peltomaa

Amir's referenses are really, let's say fluid. There are a lot of detailed pictures from almost every angle, but the details keep changing all the time. I wanted to make a general version of the character, not just a certain version from a certain page. I used the cover of the second book as my main- and color reference. Some things though, like the sleeves are different because they are different throughout the manga and in the end I followed the most common design.
All in all Amir is my most expensive cosplay so far, and the weirdest part was that it didn't feel like I was making cosplay per se. It felt like I was making real, usable clothes(which they pretty much are). This even led to a small crisis because I felt like I didn't get to do any cosplaystuff during the summer while I was, in fact working on a very detailed cosplay.

Complaining to my pair and trying to decide which ref to use

 I started from the underlayers, the pants and the tunic. The fabric is a mix of some sort, it has a bit of stretch, nice thickness and weight and the best part; it's doesn't practically wrinkle at all. We coordinated with yumi on this, and her dress is the same fabric. We also have the same materials for the bootcovers, and her jacket has the same black wool and the red suedette as mine.
Since the source was a manga, some of the details were a bit vague simply because they hadn't been drawn properly/big/detailed enough, so there was a little bit of room for interpretation. I had to decide the pattern on the pants based on a tiny scribble on one panel of the manga. The same went with the socks (which I just realized I don't have a photo of).


The skirt fabric was the hardest one to find, it took over two months before I actually bought one. You'd think that a nice off white fabric with a bit of weight and thickness to it was easy to find but nope. It's either paper white, twill, or jersey. It was my first circle skirt, and took about week to embroider with work and stuff going on. If you're ever wondering, stripes are the slowest thing to embroider. Ever. The skirt is hemmed by hand, as are the edges and I even made the buttonhole by hand.

The tunic is made from a basicpattern I got in the spring for myself, I just had to draft the collar by myself. The pattern on it is also very ambiguous, as it keeps changing from picture to picture. I tried to design it with the feeling you get from the manga, but it's impossible to copy it exactly from it. You almost never see all of the design at once. There were also different ways of how the pattern circled the hem, so I just chose one picture and based the design on that. The manga shows that the pieces are not in fact lined, but I lined some parts for convenience. The tunic is hemmed by hand.

I made a stencil and used a disappearing marker to draw the design on the fabric. The best marker ever.

I thought the belt fabric would be the hardest to find because of the odd, desaturated orange-ish, brownish brickcolor, but I actually just walked in to the store and picked it from the first box of fabrics I tried. I wish it was always that easy! The stripes are painted with fabric paint. I was planning on maybe embroidering them on first, but you can kind of see it from the manga that some of the fabrics are more likely printed or knitted and imported, and not embroidered. This is also why yumi decided to print Pariya's scarf, and it would match if I did the same.

The first try was definitely too thick

The jacket was the scariest part of the whole things on mostly just because of the patterning, and because I wanted to get it right. In the end I was being really careful not to make it too small and I'm going to still take it in a notch to have it fit a bit better. I was worried that the tunic might not fit under if I made it too small by accident. I bought the wool for the jacket over a year ago, because I happened to finally find the kind that I could actually afford. I'm glad I did it back then because the quality of the said product varies greatly and I got really lucky. I'm super happy that my batch had this fine almost 'fur like' surface with a tiny sheen almost if you look at it closely. I was only worried if I bought enough but it turned out I had plenty to make the jacket. The red stripes are red suedette. I wanted to use fake suede to have a bit more of the rural feeling plus the only other option was pretty much felt. The only problem was that it was a pain in the butt to embroider and took ages, because the needlework was so slow oh gods. I had to use fusible interfacing on all the pieces to eliminate the stretch of the fabric, and fake suede/suedette is quite dense so it was a fight to get the needle through. I honestly don't want to embroider any suede in a while if I can avoid it :'D