Day 18: Try Again (A cosplay you had to redo/restart a part of) My Yukishiro Tomoe (Rurouni Kenshin) kimono started as plain white silk. I dyed it with a special blend of colors to get just the right pale purple; then, after we made it into a kimono, I spent hours dye-painting and dye-discharging the silk by hand to produce the delicate plum blossom branch pattern. I don't even know how many hours (and how much money in materials) I invested in that piece. I wore it to one or two cons, but decided that some of the branches needed touched up before we entered them in competition, so I did a little more painting. The fabric must be washed thoroughly afterward, so just as we'd done several times before, Laura put the kimono into her washing machine on a cold/delicate cycle to remove the dye paste. But this time, something went wrong with the agitator, and the washer *shredded* the silk. What came out of the washer looked like it had gone through a blender. It was little more than string. So of course this was right before Gen Con, where we were planning to compete in these costumes, and guess who spent the two days before the convention frantically re-dyeing and painting another kimono? *sigh* Then again, that Gen Con is where The Chair Incident happened, so maybe this costume was just cursed from the beginning... #shepropchallenge #30daychallenge #cosplay #rurounikenshin #yukishirotomoe #sewing #dyeing #kimono #dyepainting #horrorstories https://www.instagram.com/p/CFSKywnD2TM/?igshid=ym36ls8n3il4
