Worn at: Project: A-Kon 12

Cost: Not sure.. $20-30?

Time to Complete: Not sure again.. 3-4 hours?

Inspiration: This was my first costume, and mostly I decided to cosplay Presea for two reasons: 1) She was blonde like me, and 2) I liked Magic Knight Rayearth. I hadn't seen any other blonde characters with non-difficult costumes that I wanted to cosplay, so Presea seemed like a good choice. Yeah.. seemed.

Description of Costume: Presea's clothes are pretty weird.. typical Cephiro. From what I can tell, she's wearing a dark red long-sleeved turtleneck shirt, with white lined cuffs at each wrist. Then over that is a cream-colored apron thing, that goes over her front and back and is connected on her left shoulder with a puffy armor-piece thing. The "apron" is weird because it's actually kind of slutty--it ties at her sides, so the front and back are just flaps over her thighs, and if they suddenly flew up you could see her underwear quite easily. She's also wearing dark red thigh-high stockings, and her knees are covered with armor-piece things that look like knee pads. She has ankle cuffs like those at her wrists, and white boots. She wears a gold necklace over the turtleneck, and has a gold tiara thing across her forehead, with a red jewel in the middle. It would actually be a pretty cool costume if you could manage to do it right, and I... couldn't. ^_^;;

How It Was Made: This costume was annoying to make, mostly because I didn't have one good, clear picture of Presea where she was standing up and you could see all aspects of her costume. In the only pictures of her like that, she was wearing her artisan dress and not her regular clothes. So I had to rely on screenshots and a few manga pictures, which weren't colored. Also, at the time I couldn't sew, so I had to leave that up to my mom. We bought fabric, ribbon, jewels, and an apron pattern (the closest thing to what Presea wears) at the fabric store. At another store, we bought the dark red turtleneck shirt and dark red tights (not legwarmers--we couldn't find any, so I had to wear the tights instead). My mom sewed the cream-colored apron from the pattern, and put brown trim along the sides. Because she was following the pattern, my apron goes over both shoulders, when it should actually go over just one. The side ties were pretty accurate though, she sewed in three ties that I had to safety-pin once I put the apron on. I had no idea how to make the wrist or ankle cuffs, nor the shoulder and knee armor-pieces, so those were never made. Also, for some insane reason, I thought the hotel would be too hot for a long-sleeved turtleneck (cause it was summer and all), so I cut off the sleeves of the turtleneck. >.< Bad idea. It just made the costume even more unrecognizable. But I did make the forehead tiara thing--I glued a round red jewel to a strip of ribbon, and tied it around my head, just under the ponytail. As for shoes, I just wore my regular white sneakers.