[cosplay, fashion] Yunjin qi-lolita for Lantern Rite Festival

The first lolita coord and closet cosplay of the new year! In one outfit!

I (re-)learned about the local Lantern Rite festival early in January, my brain is a sieve, so once again I had less than a month to make a costume lol. And once again, I decided to work smarter and not harder. Of the four or five cosplays I planned to make the next 2 years, two of them were from Liyue region in Genshin Impact, Xingqiu and Yunjin. And while Xingqiu would have been so cute as a little prince, I decided to do Yunjin who was much less popular but still deserved my love (I got her five times already haha) and also had long sleeves appropriate for a winter cosplay. Of course, I didn’t have time to make her in game outfit which was quite elaborate, so I decided, why not do her modern 2022 concert outfit like I did for Xinyan. But after searching at several thrift stores for closet cosplay, I couldn’t find anything that matched her concert outfit and the one thing I could have reworked was so expensive and needed way too much sewing. Plus I didn’t want to buy brand new fabric just for a closet cosplay. Then I remembered I had a qi lolita dress hanging in my closet, new with tags, untouched for at least 4 years, that was in the gold, pink, purple and black colors of Yunjin’s regular outfit. As Yunjin was kind of a lolita/idol character, this was the perfect solution, so all I had left to work on was her Beijing opera headdress. I’m a genius! A forgetful one, but still, a genius.

I crafted Yunjin’s headdress from scraps of my previous cosplay costumes like yet another Tony Stark in the desert, bonus points if you can pick out the costumes the materials came from. I had to buy orchid pink ribbons and the mauve and teal yarn from the craft store to make the large pompoms and a bag of small pompoms from Daiso because I couldn’t make a pompom that small but that’s it. I used a pattern from Otome no Sewing as a base for the bonnet, and tried to make it a little more curved like in-game but kinda failed. I made the gold loops and diamond hair pins from fun foam painted gold, and used jewelry findings and red beads from a necklace for the side decorations along with leftover gold tassels from a previous costume. I also made the red tassels and her braids (that may be her hair???) from more yarn and gold cord. I wanted to make this headdress appear just as nice as an “official” costume from the cosplay manufacturers, but obviously cheaper and using stuff I already had. Overall, I’m super pleased with how beautiful this headdress looks (from a distance); I think except for the fun foam pieces and the red beads I was too lazy to make, it’s just as pretty as the SR “official” cosplay if not better, and almost as good as the SSR version. The “official” cosplays use fake fur balls which are surely lighter, but from my research, actual Beijing opera costumes use velvet and silk pompoms so my yarn pompoms were more accurate construction-wise. I think the biggest change I need to make if I ever complete her in-game costume is to trim the 3 largest pompoms by a bit so the bonnet stays curved on my head and also not be so heavy and warm lol, and maybe try to make the red beads more accurate but let’s be real, I’m probably not going to do that.

[dress, socks: Metamorphose Temps de Fille; blouse: Elegy; shoes, umbrella, fan: Aliexpress; fur collar: off-brand; rings: Liz Lisa, Etsy; earrings, collar chain: Iconografi]

And here are the full coord photos! As mentioned this coord includes a dress and socks I already had and never wore, and the ensemble perfectly matches both the character and theme of the event (well, except the goldfish/carp fan but uhhh it’s the year of the dragon at the event and magikarp evolves into gyarados!) and looks so lovely and elegant and cute in my opinion; basically perfect. I think the only change might be getting a purple or deep pink blouse, but I wasn’t going to spend money on a new top when this black blouse matched so well, and also the dress was too long, it should have stopped below my knees to match Yunjin’s actual dress, but which I couldn’t do anything about. Anyway, I got stopped for a number of photos and compliments, I may have been the only Yunjin there, I don’t think I saw more than one Yunjin cosplayer at a time at the past few Genshin events, she’s so unpopular. At least there were 3 more Xinyans this time!

Finally, here are the goodies I got from the Lantern Rite fan-event. I actually only spent money on the autograph from Pat Pedraza, Wanderer’s English voice actor who was so good, the rest were freebies, some that my VIP friends gave me, or I traded my button badge and stickers for from other people at the swap meet. This one-day event was run by local anime host clubs at the convention center in a city near mine. While I wouldn’t have gone by myself, my out of town friends were going and I hadn’t seen them in a while, so that made my decision for me. There were quite a lot of attendees, and ended up an authentic Genshin experience – fetch quests, retracing one’s steps a million times, talking to NPCs (actually most were PCs wearing hanfu and other Chinese costumes if not the actual cosplay), games of too much skill, arts and crafts, music and dances and panels, browsing vendors and artists, wishing and then not getting what you wanted lol, even a banquet for VIPs. If you’re into doing a lot of activities all day, you would have fun, but there are way fewer things to do if you wanted a simple con experience or if you don’t have friends or are not into socializing.

That’s it! I still have a handful of buttons and stickers to get rid of and I dunno how much energy is left in my old broken body to get to another swap meet anytime soon. I even attempted to learn Yunjin’s dances or at least some dance, but I had to commute to work the week before so my body was like, you’re doing nothing, you will barely hobble around and sit upright and get food into your mouth and it was right. Anyway, thanks for reading and stay tuned for… idk… the new fanarts I made???