Costume Notes: Mistress 9 (Sailor Moon)

So… long time no see. Apologies for yet another belated absence. I won’t bore y’all with a bunch of silly details. The long and short is that I’ve been creatively drained for a while and felt the need to step back. I feel mostly recharged, and I’m looking forward to getting back into content creation! Here’s a break-down of one of my more recent creations, Mistress 9 from Sailor Moon!

Completed: May 2016

Hours Spent: Around 30

Debuted: A-Kon

Why this Costume: While I love cosplaying Jupiter, I absolutely LOVE the designs for the Sailor Moon villains! Honestly, I think they get the best designs in the show/manga. I’ve been toying with the idea of making a villain for a while, and this season of Sailor Moon Crystal cinched the deal for me.

How I Made it: This is fairly simple design, so of course I made it about a million times harder than it needed to be.

For the blouse, I knew right away that I wanted it to be super tailored and fitted to my corseted measurements. I used my adjusted Margaret dress pattern, lopped it off at the hips, and made a mock-up to draft Mistress 9’s funky points and plunging neckline. I used a lot of corsetry techniques for this piece: 1/4″ spiral steel boning in each seam, and a lace back closure for size flexibility (the ribbon lacing I initially used got dumped for gold grommets after the Luxe Dolls photoshoot because it started fraying like crazy). The shell of the bodice is made from silk duponi (same material I used for Hannah), and each piece was interfaced for stability. Each strand of pearls was hand-strung and then hand-stitched onto the blouse. The blouse was pretty heavy as a result, so I eventually added some boning to the neckline of the blouse to keep it from gaping.

The mermaid skirt proved trickier than I thought. I didn’t have a mermaid skirt pattern on hand, so I used Simplicity 1560 and lengthened it to my height. The base layer is made from satin, and the shell layer is French-seamed chiffon. I hemmed the satin layer with horsehair braid and did a rolled hem with fishing line for the chiffon layer. It closes at the side with an invisible zipper.

My tricky situation came up when I put on the skirt for the first time. It simply didn’t flare. It just kind of… hung there. Solution: petticoat! I drafted a quick one using some white spandex, satin, and tulle I had on hand. I made a pencil skirt out of the spandex that fell to my knees, then drafted a short circle skirt out of the satin and gave it some fluff with the tulle. The very bottom of the skirt has a 90″ hoop bone (harvested from my very crummy Belle petticoat) that holds the skirt flare out.

I had an Arda Delilah wig in black on hand from a planned Tifa costume that never happened. I wanted to have purple undertones, so I bought some extra long wefts in dark purple and hand stitched them in. Honestly, I wouldn’t do that again. You can’t even tell that I added them, and all I managed to do was make the wig super heavy. I also purchased a Venus in Dark Purple from Arda to wear at A-Kon since I didn’t want to deal with the tangle factor of my monster wig.

My jewelry accessories (earrings and forehead star) were purchased from Unique Cosplay Props on Etsy.

Thoughts: All in all, this was a really fun make! I enjoyed doing something that wasn’t a full-fledged corset, but utilized some of the same techniques I’ve learned over the last year. It was fun to embrace my inner villain for a day, and I definitely want to cosplay the other villains now.

Who’s your favorite Sailor Moon villain?