Ifurita - from Ayaka's Vigilante Ghetto Cosplay Contest in January 2003. Made in 24 (or maybe it was 48?) hours with only found objects (we had a budget limit of $10 but I managed not to use any of it).

The staff was my favorite part - it's actually a silver rod used to screw in annoyingly high-up light bulbs - I simply removed the light bulb holder at the top and taped it to a cardboard cutout with tin foil folded around it, and a blue-painted styrofoam ball / blue magnet for the two jewels. The yellow is electric tape.

Most of the rest of the costume is creatively pieced together black fabric scraps (there was some rule about the total amount of each type of fabric scrap, I can't recall offhand but I believe you couldn't use more than one yard of any fabric you had sitting around). Of course, black satin, black felt, black PVC and black cotton all look fairly similar on camera, so those are all pinned on and around a light blue shirt I owned to make the tunic. An old blue sweater had a puffed-out pillow of blue satin basted to it for the hair, and I covered the seam with a headband with "screw heads" of some sort of silver-backed birthday wrapping paper I found. The front side probably had balloons on it or something festive like that.

Other scraps helped it out: some red satin with a huge dollop of green acrylic paint for the jewel (I think it was probably still wet on the inside when I actually put the thing on), a red sheet from my first "big girl" bed that I had previously rescued from the rag cupboard and cut up for my Team Rocket "R", some green fleece left over from my Harry Potter cloak and boots snitched from my mother's closet (with circles of black duckcloth taped on top for the "folded-down" look).

I like how in the final "kneeling" photo, you can see the two safety pins attaching my ghetto red leggings to a pair of black bike shorts.

Item I spent the most time on: the gloves, which were actually traced out nicely and sewn together with velcro fasteners and everything (using scraps of black PVC vinyl from my Teneko costume). I took the taped-on silver circles off and wore them to school a couple times, and they are also featured in a few of Kikimo-dan's parapara videos (the ones done with Maggie of Girljin Para Patrol).

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