[cosplay] Sakizo Alice’s World – Three of Spades

The last of my ultimate cosplay goals, a Sakizo cosplay, let’s talk about it! For those of you who don’t know, Sakizo is an illustrator from Japan (website: http://sakizo.jp/) who has collaborated with lolita fashion designers to make dresses and other accessories, but also creates their own artbooks and calendars and stationery with gorgeously detailed paintings of fantasy and fairytale characters, and also videogame characters. Their designs do show up at anime conventions since these characters are a challenge for cosplayers but so impressive. I decided my first (hopefully not last) Sakizo cosplay should be a lolita bunny girl on the packaging for one of the Alice in Wonderland themed tights that I love to wear. First of all, it’s a relatively simple and cute design, to my taste and within my intermediate cosplay skill level. Secondly, who doesn’t love a bunny girl, especially a lolita bunny girl?

As with my more complicated costumes, I started with printouts of the reference illustration and a cosplayer who already made the costume (from Japan I assume) and taped them into my costume journal, but my main reference was the actual tights packaging. Then I listed and sketched out all the costume parts I needed to make; hat, bunny ears, blouse, jabot and brooches, corset, skirt, wristcuffs, belt thing, and bunny puffs. I gathered the stuff I already had; the tights of course, white and black cotton fabrics, zipties for boning, stuffing, buttons and other sewing and jewelry findings, and all of the lace that could possibly match. I ordered online the stuff I couldn’t make and would be hard to find in store, such as the grey wig with twin tails (had to buy two wigs to get the effect I wanted, from both Dreamholic and a Taobao reseller), harlequin fabrics, grey fake rabbit fur fabric, black heels, gold Venice lace, the heart charm and cameo parts, all from Etsy or Ebay. What I bought in store (Michaels and Daiso) were more lace trims and like a million eyelets and grommets. I did not have a budget or challenge like with my Xinyan cosplay although I did try to use as much of my craft stash as I could.

I started this costume in mid-2021, but I just finished now in mid-2023. Lol.

The easiest part was the skirt, just a black gathered rectangle skirt with a white ruffle on the hem. Then I started on the blouse, using a Western steampunk commercial pattern flipped front to back but had trouble with the shoulders being too wide and had to make so many adjustments. The harlequin fabric I ordered from Etsy was too small in scale but I couldn’t think of how to create the fabric myself except through Spoonflower and I didn’t even need that much. Eventually I found a Bodyline skirt with panels of the print fabric in a slightly bigger scale and ordered that, although it wasn’t perfect, it was closer than any other fabric available. I debated about how to construct the corset, trying different mockups and patterns. I made the wristcuffs from a Gothic Lolita Bible pattern and also 4 of the bunny puffs and 4 of the black ribbon bows, 2 of each set sewn on the wristcuffs. Then ummm… I procrastinated for almost 2 years. Lol.

Finally motivated to finish the costume for Okashicon, a summer J-fashion centric convention, I decided to go for done rather than perfect and went back to work on cosplay for a few months. I used another pattern from aforementioned steampunk set to create the corset from white and black cotton, an old bedsheet and the Bodyline harlequin skirt panels, using black fabric for the corset back to save the remaining harlequin fabric for the hat. The first attempt at a corset fit my waist but too wide for my bust and the tiny cheap eyelets I initially used immediately ripped out of the fabric with the pressure. I trimmed the back panels by half and used large expensive grommets that so far have withstood the strain of corseting. Then I happily decorated the corset with frankensteined gold lace trims and painted white lace trims and felt pretty pleased about finishing the most complicated piece of the costume.

Next I concentrated on the hat. I was wary of making a hat since my previous handmade hats were so flimsy, but then I was struck by a bolt of genius and remembered I had a black mini top hat from a previous lolita tea party’s gift bag in the exact shape/size I needed, much sturdier and neater than anything I could make. I was able to remove the previous trim and add my own trim – black satin ribbon, the harlequin fabric, gold and white lace.

Inspired, I worked on the jewelry, including the jabot, brooches and chains for neck ribbon and hat and the waist belts. I made the spade design on scrapbook paper with black washi tape and experimented with gluing a glass cameo setting on top of the hat brooch but it resulted in too many bubbles and so I didn’t add the setting for the neck ribbon brooch. The chains were repurposed from black beads and antique gold chains I already had. The waist belt had a pocket watch ala White Rabbit, an antique key, a red heart jewel and 3 of spades card, all of which I recreated but not very accurately lol. I pondered using an actual playing card but the illustration had a simpler design so I just made a playing card out of cardstock and washi tape.  The key I ordered online and added gold paint since it was a little coppery. The red heart jewel was a glass pendant that I added more beads to the top (but not the bottom because I didn’t care that much).  The watch was a painted wooden circle with paint pen numbers, a brad for the paper clock hands and more beads. For the jabot, I referenced an Otome no Sewing pattern, but made it to wider and more circular and also with a layer of white lace over the cotton. I just threaded white ribbon through the top hem to tie it around my neck.

I went back to the blouse and decided to redo the collar and collar ruffle because they were looking limp and rumply. Instead of just ruffled fabric as per the sewing pattern, I added white lace on top of the ruffle and redid the interfacing in the collar stand that had gotten wrinkled. I also painted a thin layer of gold acrylic paint on the edges of the white lace of the collar and wrist cuffs to mimic the art better, and made a round fake collar out of white cotton from an Otome no Sewing pattern with more gold-edged white lace trim.

The bunny stuff: I attached 2 of the larger bunny puffs to shoe clips and made one more bunny puff for the tail with a sewn pinback to pin to the skirt. I made bunny ears out of fur and stuffing and thick copper wire from Daiso. I struggled with styling the wig, but finally came up with a solution to tie up half of the hair on the sides to cover the slightly mismatching clip-on twin tails that were a different shade of grey, and then pull the bottom half of the first wig’s hair up under each twin tail to give the pigtails both volume and length. I did debate cutting some hair to make the fluffy sideburns but in the end just pinned loops of hair up over my ears to hide my hairline and the pigtail mess. Then it was time to attach the ears and hat on the wig (with some difficulty lol) and try everything on!

For walking around a (small) convention, I had to switch out hat clips and rework the wires of the bunny ears into the twin tails. I briefly considered attaching all of the hair pieces to a headband for convenience but with a heavy and potentially tight-fitting wig, I didn’t want the pressure of a headband to give me a headache or slip off and taking my bunny ears with it. I did lose a shoe puff, as I predicted since shoe clips aren’t exactly the firmest attachments, and one of the zip ties in the corset started slipping out. On the other hand, I don’t really plan on rewearing this costume anytime soon so a few mishaps don’t bother me. My only regret is that light wig colors don’t look great with my skintone and I don’t know why I keep choosing such characters, had to use some beautycam filters here.

This photo at the con’s photo room is soooo cute but I didn’t wear a petticoat (not that I wanted to in the heat) and my hat chains got off center. Still, overall this costume looked great (from a distance), was on brand for me, and fairly comfortable to wear! I am just so proud of myself to have pushed through and completed a Sakizo cosplay after all the initial difficulties! Because of the pandemic I don’t go to too many cons and for the smaller cons I wear comfy cosplays if I can, but the success of this costume has me considering another Sakizo cosplay someday. We’ll see.