Construction Details:

First I want to tell you that this is NOT a Kimono!
This is Chinese Hanfu.

I have started in Oct. 2009 on working on this costume and it was finnished in Mai 2010.

The most difficult part are the Chinese "lantern" sleeves. It took me 5 hours to make a good pattern for it. Sadly the sleeves was loosing their shape when I added the big under sleeves because of their weight.
I added a "straight" sleeve (don't know the english name) under the lantern sleeves so this part is carrying the weight of the undersleeves so the "lantern" sleeves are keeping their shape. Yay for being smart!

About those bells...
I made them all by hand *.*.
I didn't want a noisy costume because there are 109 "bells" on it. And making it myself was in my case cheaper than buying tons of bells. So I decided to sculp them from prof. doll clay. I also added flower details on it. It took 3 weeks to make them, making every day a few of them.
The pearls are from wood and all handpainted black, I also painted a little pink flower on it.

The flowers on the costume are all hand painted on with fabric paint. I made a pattern for it and the base color needed 4 layers of paint. The details are strass stones, a hand sculped round thingy with flower detail in it (also handmade) and embroidered black lines.

The head piece is made from fake flowers wich I cutted in the shape of a cherryblossom and painted it darker pink on the inside to create more depth.
I added a gold stone and black strass stones.

About the boots...
I wish I could wear Chinese Lotus boots T.T
But I had to cut my toes off to get my feet in it T.T
So I choosed for Chinese Tai Chi boots.

About the chinese knotting....
ehm wel, I made them from satin chord but...
the flowerknots looked nice right in front of me, but when I did a few steps back it looked like radom messy knots.
Since I am a Theatre person I decided to get rid of the Chinese knotting and made my own "flowers" from some nice rope. So they will look good from a distance and on pictures.

Fabrics I used:
Cotton mix with some synthetic (against the wrinkles).
Viscose mix with some synthetic (same reason).
Gold satin (will never use satin anymore omfg it was a disaster to work with!)

It was very hard to find the collors I wanted, but I finally did yay!

The feather cage thing is made from 2 halve plastic balls wich I glued together. The feather is made from foam, with some 3-D paint and acrylic paint.
The details are from clay and painted gold.

I am very happy with how this costume turned out *.*
It was really hard work but the end result really paid of!!

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