Zombiewalk with Samara Morgan

I started with the Samara’s dress about one and a half weeks before Halloween. Patterning and sewing took little time, dyeing ate the majority. I started with the dyeing in the evening, so that I could continue on the morning, let the fabric dry when I was at work and then start the cycle again. I bended some rules with the dyeing and was quite happy with the result. There were few mishaps, but the final result was better than I had expected. Over all the material choices, technical solutions and structures worked well. I’m pleased that I chose to line the whole dress, even if I thought it would be pointless to see the effort for Halloween costume.

First I thought Samara would only be qualified as a Halloween costume. Boy, how wrong was I. Through my costume history Samara might be the one I have enjoyed the most as an event outfit. Even the fact that the make-up took approximately two hours didn’t bother me. There were no props to be handled, the costume was comfortable to wear and acting like the character didn’t require much. Mostly I just stared in front of me, face as blank as possible. Probably slightly evilishly.

I think that the happening, where I wore the costume affected the experience also. Even if Samara isn’t practically zombie, Zombiewalk might have been the best event to take part in this particular outfit. The character was recognized by many and I lost count how many people wanted to take photo WITH me. That was rather new to me. Usually there are one or two scenarios like that at conventions. Now I even got stopped during the walk itself. I must say, it was flattering and fun.

Photo taken by Tommi Joutjärvi.

The walk itself went well with few interruptions on the way. I want to thank my companion, who went with me with short notice, that being a day. Weirdly and also little sadly, it wasn’t Yoki who attended with me, but my older brother. Thanks to our LARP background, it wasn’t hard for him to scrape together an outfit. On the five minute drive to the starting point of the walk, I made him a pale, sunken eye make-up. I have no idea how it really looked like. It was too dark everywhere to evaluate the result.

During the walk we had some problems keeping track of each other. My brother’s vision was blocked by a scarf and mine by hair. I was able to follow him by voice, while I myself hobbled forward without a sound. The next evening the limp walking style proved to be straining. My right calf was stiff and sore for the extent where I could not walk properly and my lower back felt little weird. Samara survived without a scratch. Keeping eye on the next wear, I only need to take off the excess glue and toilet paper from the cuffs of the “skin sleeves”.

My brother is the faceless lurker behind me on the far left. Photo was taken by Tommi Joutjärvi.

As cosplay fan video nerd, there are few additional ideas I’ve been pondering, the weather just aren't the best for them. But that is for sure that Samara will be seen in the future.

The next time Zombiewalk is organized I’m going to drag Yoki with me. Take a notice, old friend!

Halloween is just around the corner

It’s little over a week till Halloween and I’m starting out with my costume. And it begins as it always begins, me on the floor kneeling and crouching. Today I used my free time making patterns for a dress. When making costumes, I always start from basic patterns. I have two or three different sizes on my closet fit for me and Yoki. It’s quick to pull them out and start cutting and taping the wished forms from them. Personally, I hate going through piles of magazines in hopes of finding close enough patterns. Sometimes it might be quicker, but my short temper rarely bends on this matter.


Next to making rather easy patterns and cutting the pieces out, I sewed the bust and started to dye the sleeves and the hem for the dress. I’m not sure if my take on the dyeing process will work or not, or rather will the colour stay after first wash. What I’m using is antique grey Dylon dye intended for washing machines, which I found when going through my mixed supplies, but I’m not going to stick with the normal routine. I’m just messing the fabric with the dye free hand. Does anyone have any ideas how to make the dye stick? I might try ironing to attach the colour after the pieces have dried. But still, I’m not too convinced that the colour will stay; at least it will get lighter. Then again, it’s a Halloween costume. I don’t know will I ever use it in other circumstances. For future projects this could be taken as a learning process.


The mossy and decomposed dress in making belongs to a girl, who gave me few nightmares back in the days; Samara Morgan, “misunderstood” kid down the well. She is also typically associated to a ring type thing and a video tape. There are two western versions from two movies obviously. I chose the first one. I think I haven't even seen the second. According to Youtube the "second" Samara is more spider like, quick and evil thing.

If it’s not crazy cold, I’ve planned to take my little girl out for a stroll for local Zombie walk... even if she doesn't practically eat brains or any random body parts.

Casualty Cosplay as seen at Tracon V

Sorry, I lied! There is still one Joxter and Muddler themed post! I had almost forgotten Tracon’s photobooth and got a nice surprise when I noticed that they were added at the photo section of aniki.fi. Big thank you to Miika Ojamo and everyone who made the photo service possible for con-goers!

All the pictures were taken by Miika Ojamo.

My favorite thing in these photos on my behalf is the peeking granny sock at the last shot! I laughted so hard when I saw that sneaky bastard. Again I remind myself, that checking the costume before a shoot is never a bad idea. Well, in this case it was because of the pose...

Lack of ladies - solved

Hiron stated in the post 'something feminine' that we were looking for female characters with the right attitude and clothing. Mission impossible made a turn towards success as she found a game called Heavenly Sword. Yes, two great ladies with a fascinating and sad story. And of course showy and "not too minimalistic" clothing is also part of their fittings. I'm not sure am I allowed to make announcement like this, anyway we were quite sure that Nariko and Kai were going to be our plan for summer 2011.

Then something happened. Was it the geekiness or our linked minds, even Hiron's obsession towards tents or the fact that we've been watching too much Star Wars recently, I'm not sure. The result however, was that our next project, after finishing snowtroopers of course, is to make these beautiful ladies.

Copyright Lucasarts.

Jedi master Luminara Unduli and her (former) padawan Barriss Offee. Nothing beats the Jedi. I had thought the possibility of making Luminara's Clone wars version, not too long ago and suddenly Hiron comes to me and says: "Luminara and Barriss." It needn't much persuasion, only the picture of the jedi master's huge 'tent' with nice little details and leather decorations, when I shouted: "You'll be the master, you'll be the master!" This will be the first time ever when Hiron gets to be a character in a higher position than the one I'm cosplaying. She has already raided through our hometown's fabric stores three times during her search for perfect and accurate materials. My presence made Hiron's stress level to rice because I was constantly in the way blocking her path, even though I tried not to be.

-yoki out

Back in business

First things first… All the English readers this question is for you! Is it possible to eat a chocolate covered waffle with strawberries whole in one sitting by yourself? We thought that we have to try them while in London and possibly out of greed and gluttony bought one for each. That shall never happen again, trust me on that. It was really good, but not in big portions. So, are they meant to be shared? Next time we are going to split one and enjoy them with delight.

Now, back to business!

Because our first duo’s costumes are looking quite good, I think I can reveal that we are going to be Joxter (Juksu suomeksi, Joxteren på svenska) and Muddler (Hosuli suomeksi, Rådd-djuret på svenska) from Moomin in some summery convention. Ha-ha, I must say. We moved the completion of Snowtroopers to the fall because they would be hot to wear in summertime. Instead we are going to wrap ourselves in wool, leather, thick cotton and multiple layers of clothing. No mask is the best improvement I can think of.

Here are some pictures from the progress. The most interesting parts including Muddler’s “shoes” and headpiece are still under planning, but I think they’ll start to take form during this week. The real problem we are facing with these guys are their lack of carriage. We can’t possibly drag along a giant tin can, so we need to think something else. I suggested to Yoki, that she could carry a paint bucket, which would actually be a purse. We are still going trough Tove’s cartoon strips and books in hopes of finding some references. Hope we bump into something which would solve our problem. Moomin fans, suggestions are welcome.

Highly recommend!

Straigtening project for Joxter's wig.

Yoki collecting reference pictures.

Joxter's hat in the making.

Yoki knitting Muddler's leg warmers.

Something feminine

Our cosplay history is dominated by male characters, but now we are trying to chance it... even though it's starting to seem like mission impossible. There are plenty of interesting female characters, but finding a duo with strong and confident charasteristics hasn't paid off. I was quite suprised when Yoki pointed out, that I could choose a male character if it was too overpowering to find suitable ladies for both of us. Our tomboy want's to be a lady! As a result my task got a bit easier.

But not too easy. We are not only looking for a strong will and action oriented females. Because we like showy costumes girls in regular school uniforms needs to be counted out, even if we take liking in their personality. As a duo we try to be respectful for the height difference between characters as well as their difference in bodytypes. It just takes a lot of workload off if we can avoid building characters structure over ourselves.

In short, we are looking something mean and lean female or male partnered with something mean and curvy. Burst Angel's Jo and Meg would ba a match made in heaven... if they had more clothes on. I'm not a fan of "skimpy" outfits and Jo and Meg have great amount of panty and booby stuff going on.

I have gone trought manga, anime and games hoping to find suitable characters for us. We have always wanted to do a cosplay from Soul Calibur series, but the ladies in the games also suffer from common cloth-loss, which is really annoying. And the ones with more clothes aren't just as alluring for us, like Cassandra and Sophitia. They actually fill many of our requirements, starting from "connected" characters, but something in them just isn't catchy at all. Maybe they are just not mean enough.
If we forget about female duos, I think I might have something promising in mind. Recently I have been reading Pandora Hearts and totally fell in love with the character design and complex storytelling. The outfits just screams to be made. Alice would be a suitable character for Yoki, not too girly and fluffy even if she has a softer side. The male representation is wide and almost everyone of them have some kind of a connection to the heroine. I must admit that I like Xerxes Break, but then again Jack Vessalius would be more natural choice.We can't get too caught up with our future projects yet. We still need to finish our current one and it actually seems that we will be done in the end of this month! But it's always fun to do some character research and I think we will be doing some more before we are both satisfied with it.

Choosing characters- Casualty Cosplay edition

Many people wonder which character they should choose and why. I've been planning on writing from this subject in general, but first I'd like to reveal how we have ended up with the characters we have cosplayed. I will go trought our pair cosplays original ones not included.

When we did our first cosplay pair, I was the one who chose the character first. I had just been introduced to Bleach and after a marathon of manga and anime published to the date, I took a liking on Matsumoto Rangiku, because of her feminity and outgoing personality. And perhaps the fact that she enjoyed alcohol had something to do with it too. The con we were going to attend was Ropecon, which I had participated two or three times before in random costumes. It was first time for Yoki and she had hard time choosing the character. She wanted to cosplay character from Bleach as I did. In the end she just picked up Hitsugaya Toushiro. She didn't particularly like him, but it would be natural to see these characters together. The uniforms was easy to make with the skills we had back then and we just couldn't resist the fact that we would have swords. When I look at the costumes now, there are many things I would like to redo, but then again, everybody have their first costumes which sometimes are just things to set aside.

The second pair we did was Sasori and Deidara from Naruto. God... I can't remember what was the reason why we chose them, but then again they jus fitted us really well. I think Yoki has a opinion on this one. I have some idea though... I think this was the first cosplay we chose as a team. Usually one of us come up with an idea and then the other one just goes with the flow. But in the case of Sasori and Deidara we ended up with our favorite characters in the series and they just matched. The height was so and so, personalities varied like ours do and we liked them. What else do we need? The funny thing with this cosplay was, that we had thought of doing one other pair cosplay, but then chose to drop it, because it seemed a lot of time consuming work. May I laught now? Making complex pieces of Sasori's body and Mayuri's head gear at the same time isn't a lot of work? Hohhohho... We had to use our imagination with Sasori, because his puppet form hadn’t been shown in the anime at that time. As colour reference we used one manga cover and if I remember correctly, one original art. I recall that Sasori debuted in the anime week before Animecon 2007.

At the time we were really ambitious and decided to do two cosplays. Yoki wanted to do Kurotsuchi Mayuri from Bleach. I had no clue that I would end up doing Akon. It was just a natural solution to our ”we need to do connected characters”-thinking. I think I also chosed Akon, because I hadn’t seen more than one person portraying him. The costume was easy and it would not take too much attention off from Mayuri's costume. I could concentrate on doing Mayuri, when my own part was quite humble. For Mayuri, his Yoki’s ultimately favorite character from Bleach. In fact, everyone of her favorite characters have some sort of mental issue. Mad scientist syndrome in this case. And Mayuri was the highlight of this pair cosplay. I was more like an add-on, which was fine really. I was satisfied with my work on the costumes and Yoki is like a hanger for my creations. And the more photogenic one.

Jasdero and Debitto was purely my idea. I had read D.Gray-man for some time and when I saw these twins the first time I just couldn’t pass them. I introduced grey-skinned Noahs to Yoki, and she approved them. Of course I had already thought that Yoki would portray Jasdero and apparently he was enough of a nuthead to fit Yoki's taste. The height difference between us, which is something like 10 cm at most, didn't matter, because Jasdero hardly ever stands straight. If I were to portray Jasdero, I would have serious problems with showing off my waist and stomack and also grinning the way Jasdero does. Yoki did not have any issues with these. Only thing she wasn't too happy about was the long blond wig. Without the grey make-up she looked really bizarre.

Our current project, which I can not reveal, fits the neutral-evil personality zone we have been accidentally been following. And if we ever finish this huge project we have another one already selected. The characters are more in the nuthead zone, I think.

When we choose characters we try to take in concideration our height, porpotion and on some level the personalities. We hardly ever cosplay characters we don't like, but can pick up the other persons interests. The restrictions we have are usually costs and a level of skills in costume making combined. I'm personally not going to start a project I know will include expencive fabrics and stuctures sewing-wise that I am not too familiar with. But as I always say... Imagination.