Step 6: Don't be annoying. Kikyo is not annoying at all.

While doing research for this costume, I came across a kind of hilarious guide on how to act like Kikyo from Inuyasha. It boiled down to "Dress like Kikyo. Learn archery. Don't be a twit."

Anyway. I wanted to dress as a miko (Japanese Shinto shrine maiden) for a party. This party was on a Saturday. The fabric got to my house on the evening of the Wednesday before that. So, uh, guess what I did all of Thursday, when I was off work. That's right...

Part 1: Hakama
Hakama are the giant poofy pleated pants. For miko, they're always always Bright Red. I based these (very) loosely off the Lastwear pattern, which makes slightly odd but really cool-looking hakama ... it wasn't intended to be as loosely based as that, but then I ran out of time, and had to compensate for mistakes, and, well.

So. First off, I didn't get nearly enough fabric. At least, not to follow the pattern as written. I thought that 2.5 yards would be more than enough for any reasonable pair of pants. Unfortunately, hakama are not reasonable pants. So I spent the better part of an hour juggling numbers to figure out just now I could salvage this.
Eventually I managed to trim off just enough out of the pleats to be able to fit the front and back of one leg across the width of the fabric (yes, each leg is 58" around...). Whew.

Then the part I was dreading... trying to get all the pleats in accordance with the pattern. It took several tries to get the numbers to match with reality, but eventually I got it...



If you zoom in, you may notice my toes that I was marking the fabric with something, er, more indelible than regular fabric marker or chalk. Thankfully, I came to my senses when doing the other leg and did it in pencil. This was a lifesaver, because I then proceeded to cut out two left legs. Doh. It's a good thing for me that the wrong side of this twill looks almost like the right side, or I would have been Very Very Sad.

Finally, I got all of the right marks onto the correct sides of the correct pieces of fabric (although I think I did mix up a front leg with a back leg somewhere - they're almost identical, though, so it didn't really matter). Then the other part I was dreading rolled around, which is to say, actually getting the pleats physically in place. I don't know what it is with me and pleats. I can do pleats on the fly, but when I try to do pleats matching up to a pattern, I just fail horribly. See:

One of those things... is not the same width as the other. Sigh.

Eventually, I realized that following the pattern after making such substantial modifications to it was just going to be a pain. I also realized that the original pattern appears to have been made to fit someone with a Much Larger waist than mine, and since I took the extra width out of the inside of the pleats, my hakama perforce would fall right off. This is where I hit the part of the project where I just start totally making sh*t up. There's one of those in every project, but most of them don't come quite so early.

So, after recalculating to make sure the final width would be, you know, reasonable, I just put the pleats in where they wanted to go. It turned out that my pleats were just as deep as the original pattern called for... so it may have been a win that I didn't get enough fabric. If I had followed the original pattern, it would have been terrible.

There, doesn't that look better?

Next up was the whole waistband unit. I more or less did this by the pattern, although I left off a lot of the quilting, due to time constraints. (I have discovered a secret fondness for topstitching and quilting things down. If you do it neatly, it just looks so gorgeous!) Here's part of it:


This is about where I stopped taking pictures, because the time pressure was getting to me. A couple more highlights from the remainder of the evening:

• I ended up having enough fabric. Barely. Part of the back waistband was patched together from the crotch cutouts.
• And I had to make the back pleats deeper because I only had enough fabric to make the back waistband so wide. Eep.
• If you're curious, I ended up stiffening the koshita with a couple layers of upholstery velvet.

Anyway, eleven hours after I started, I achieved VICTORY!!

The first picture was better, but I had to include this one just for the expression on my face. Can't you just see me doing the FF Victory Dance here?

That's about it for the hakama. They got pleated and pressed, of course.

Part 2: Kimono Top
This was actually fairly uneventful. (Gasp!) Basic kimono patterns are really fairly simple. Although, once again, I ended up not getting enough fabric to have a comfortable surplus... sigh. Well, mostly because I forgot how deep the slits in the side of the hakama were going to be, and I sadly didn't have enough fabric for the kimono to go down long enough all the way around to cover it. (I ended up piecing something together to make the kimono longer just where the hakama vents were).

Part 3: Hair Tie
This was something of a last-minute inspiration. One possible mode of miko hair style is to have a ponytail wrapped in prayer paper and tied with something that looked like twine in the pictures I saw, but probably isn't. I had a scrap of white fabric left, and some red ribbon, so I just finished the edges of the fabric, sewed the ribbon on, and voila!
The tie isn't quite right, of course, but it's all red and white, which makes it plausible enough.

Here are pictures of the whole thing (this is from after I got back from the party, so I was tired and grumpy. This costume looks much better in real life, especially when freshly pressed. Also, you can't see the perfect perfect shoes and tabi socks I found in Chinatown and borrowed from a friend, respectively.)