Construction Details:

Kimono: The red layer is "Black Cherry" Dupioni from Silk Baron. The Blue layer is a poly shantung from eBay, and the gold is the Joann Poly Shantung. I altered an existing Kimono pattern to get the paneled look on the bottom. It allows me maximum movement and has a really cool visual effect when I spin. My WCS partner made stencils on her Cricut machine and airbrushed all the pink cherry blossoms. We watered down a mixed shade of Jacquard Textile Ink in pink to make the paint. She created a second stencil for the gold dots, and I painted them using a stencil brush and Jacquard Lumiere in Bright Gold. The stamen were painted by hand with small brushes, the color was a mixture of Jacquard Textile Ink in black and Bright Gold Lumiere. That was all on a white stretch sateen. The large gold flowers are a poly shantung. Karmada took the smaller flowers and drew larger ones based off of them to create the stencils for them. We then traced them onto the back of the Heat n Bond and cut them out. Each Sakura blossom was satin stitched with metallic gold thread. Each yellow flower was satin stitched with yellow-gold thread. Each sakura flower is adorned with topaz and crystal AB crystals. The layers each have matching crystals on the base fabrics.

Obi: The obi is made from a layer of duck canvas, and the poly shantung. The colors were hand mixed and the painting was done by hand. It took 6 hours to paint. I followed a stencil that Kristie made. The obijime is a length of white home decorating cord but into three lengths and hand stitched onto the obi. The white scarf was a pleated piece of poly shantung that was hand stitched on. The obi has 14 steel bones, four spring, and 10 rigid. The back has 20 black metal grommets, and it laces up. The obidome was originally sculpted from Sculpey. I used Oomoo 30 to make a mold and then resin cast the actual flowers. There is glitter embedded in the resin. I used opaque white and red dye to make pink flowers. I used Aleene's Jewelry Glue to attach two pins to the backs of each flower, and to glue the double flower together. I used two pieces of craft foam and sandwiched the dangling pearl and gold spikes between them. That was also glued to the back of the large double flower.

Floral Crown: I bought a number of springs of silk Sakura blossoms from all over the world. None of them had the look I wanted. I purchased some Plumeria blossoms from Micheal's used a pink floral spray to make them pink. I carefully ripped them off of the stems and glued them around the LED lights. I built a wire base for the crown and wired the lights to the base. I then wired some small sakura blossoms in to cover the base. I pushed the extra lights through the center to give more illumination. I also bought some wired crsytals and put those into the middle. I glued more small sakura blossoms into the base to cover all the wiring. To make the floating beads that come down from the crown I hand stitched long gold beads and red pearls to clear vinyl which was stitched and glued down to the underside of the crown. I then trimmed the edges of the plumeria blossoms and painted them to make them appear more "sakura-like." I attached the tassels to the sides of the headpiece. After all of that I put 100 crystals onto the headpiece for embellishment.

Wings: The wings were cut from 12 gauge vinyl. I traced the sections from a stencil Kristie made and painted the gradients. Once that dried I covered those and spray painted a solid black over the entire outside of the wings. I used the same dark gold from the obi and flowers and outlined the gradient areas on the wings. I used black paint and black glitter for the crescents. The wire is hangar wire made into a brace that slips into the corset. The wire is covered in electrical tape to prevent poking.

Personal Thoughts:

ALL OF THE FLOWERS

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