Construction Details:

Watanuki: This was fairly straightforward; men's kimono and hakama. We wanted to embellish the kimono a bit, so we took the pine tree motif from the background of the reference pic and decided to incorporate it into the sleeves. The trunk design is appliqued in this great silver smoke patterned brocade, and the tree bits were painted with a black gradient and then edged in gold cording, similar to the sleeves on my Suzaku costume. Ali embroidered a butterfly crest to match the designs on her costume onto the back of the kimono for me.
We were using a red dupioni to make all our bias tape, so I used it to make some matching red cord for the trim on the belt. Both the kimono and the hakama are sewn and snapped in place to avoid any shifting.



Overrobe: Although the overrobe only shows up as a tiny corner in the reference picture, Ali and I really wanted to use it as a part of our skit, so we ended up putting quite a bit of time into it. I looked through some textile history books until I found a design I liked, and we decided to do a split design where half of the kimono would have her butterfly crest motif and half of it would have my pine tree motif.
The pine trees are done with the same silver smoke trunk and gold cording as the ones on my sleeves, with the added addition of gold bead embellishments. The butterfly designs are appliqued onto black discs, which were then attached to the robe and edged in black cording. We found a great quilted fabric in one of the upholstery shops in LA that had a butterfly design in the quilting, so we used that to give a padded hem look around the bottom.
Instead of being cut like an actual kimono, we enlarged the neckline so that the overrobe could drape easily off of the elbows, rather than the shoulders. We also made some adjustments to the sleeve shape and lined it in a nice slippery satin so that it could slip off quickly the way our skit required it to.

Personal Thoughts:

I'm not totally thrilled with the kimono part of my costume, but I'm pretty happy with the way the overrobe for this came out. I am also super glad that there was a minimal amount of black, white, and red in this.

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