The Anime Expo 2016 event set up a special booth for Okayado’s bestselling manga, Monster Musume, and one of the cosplayers for the booth caught everyone’s attention, as she stole the show by cosplaying the series’ sadistic-yet-lovable arachne, Rachnera.
French-Canadian cosplayer, Marie Claude Bourbonnais, is the woman behind the costume, and she’s also the one who made the costume herself. In a series of tweets, she revealed all the hard work she put in making that awesome Rachnera costume:
This is the process you should usually go through each time you start a new costume. Step one is always to sew a basic mockup.
Notice that this is NOT the pattern of Rachnera's top. This pattern doesn't exist yet. But I will show you how I will draw and adjust it.
Starting with Rachnera's top, I just made a mockup of a basic top with a collar and no sleeve. I used a basic top pattern already adjusted to my measurements, one of my personal patterns that I have developed over the years. On this mockup, I draw the general shapes and stitches of Rachnera's top, I choose the width of the yellow biais, etc. It will become a halter top. Then I take off the mockup and unsew it. I apply to my original basic paper pattern the adjustments I have made on the mockup.
I will obtain a first new pattern that will be closer to Rachnera's top design and guess what? Next step is to make another mockup to test that first attempt of new pattern. This is the normal process that all the clothing companies go through each time they will develope a new style. I will never repeat enough how mockups are an essential, necessary step in sewing projects.
Here are more work in progress steps. We covered the styrofoam spider parts with pieces of agglomerated fiberglass cloth that were first soaked with polyester resin. You have to make sure that you put enough layers everywhere. This is how fiberglass looks like before you apply auto body filler on it. As I said before, there are more efficient ways and equipment to do big fiberglass structures like this.
There are those air guns that spray both polyester resin and shreded fiberglass at the same time, so it takes very little time to cover a huge structure. That's what they use for fiberglass bathtubs, for example. But since that specialized piece of equipment is expensive and since I don't plan to build huge fiberglass structures for the rest of my life, my friend and I covered the whole thing with fiberglass by hand. As you already know, the spider's body was made using styrofoam. Now that it's covered of the fiberglass shell, it's not necessary to keep the styrofoam inside. We could, but it would just add more weight to the final structure. 'Foam is light' you'll say.
Well it's not so light when you use such a big quantity of foam. So my friend cut a hole in the spider's body, a hole big enough to allow us to take off all the foam. Honestly, by chance I have no friend in a pro-environment group because they would hate me. Building big fiberglass structures isn't environment friendly. The styrofoam enters my workshop as sheets and it leaves the workshop in pieces in garbage bags.
Pro-environment people, don't worry. I will soon go back to my sewing machines. Watch my guilty smile while I'm sitting in styrofoam pieces. Do as I say not as I do.
One of the only good sides of fiberglass is that it can be cut and patched as many times as you want. Once the spider's body was empty, we put back the piece that had been removed and we patched it with more fiberglass cloth and polyester resin. Auto body filler will hide everything.
And apparently, her costume needed assembly, so this was the scene as they were unloading her costume for Anime Expo 2016.
And then there was plenty of fun afterwards as she put on her costume and completely stole the show!