Construction Details:

My second Ayame costume. It's another manga only outfit and it's from Yuki’s parent teacher conference in volume 13. There wasn’t a color reference for this so I picked colors based on some of his artbook outfits.

I made the ruffly black shirt under the coat with a black and gold lace overlay to try to match the lacy patterns in the reference. The coat is a red leaf-patterned brocade with a cutaway section in the front. I did matching fabric-covered buttons and stitched all of the gold cording into place by hand.

I bound the seams inside the coat with seam binding so I wouldn’t have any raw edges. I also made the necktie to match the coat and the hairtie to match the shirt.

Personal Thoughts:

Although the craftsmanship was good and I won an award for it, this costume was disappointing to me in other ways. :-/

I wanted to make this outfit as soon as I saw it in the manga but the end result didn’t match the vision in my head. I didn’t like how I looked in it and regretted some of the fabric choices (mostly the gaudy lace). The ridiculous equipment failure when I was working on it didn't help either. The sewing machine broke. The new machine was defective and had to be exchanged. The iron started leaking all over and had to be replaced, too. o_O It took me about 3 months to get through the costume and I was just sick of working on it towards the end. X_X It left me frustrated and not really wanting to sew for several months.

I feel a bit better about it now that I finally have some decent pictures and got to do silly cosplay chess stuff with it at AB '09. But I still don't see myself wearing it much in the future unless it's requested.

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