Cosplay on a Budget (or “Omigod hand me the duct tape!”)
This week’s article is brought to you by the lovely and talented Jekka Cormier. More of her work can be found at Seraphic Blue.
When I first started cosplaying I was in a pretty good situation. I had a steady fulltime job and not too many responsibilities. Combine that with my insistence on details and you can probably see how some of my first costumes easily climbed into the 300-400 dollar range of cost.
If only those days could have lasted! Long gone are the days I could splurge on meticulous embroidery for my Edward Elric coat. Since then I’ve learned a lot about how to make my dollar stretch as far as possible and more than a few tricks about how to get my costumes to stop breaking the bank (even if the shoes still tend to break my feet.)
One of the most important ways to limit my spending, first of all, is to limit the amount of new costumes I’ll allow myself to put together in a year. This is something I decided right from the start: no more than 3 new costumes in a year. Any more than that and I need to start thinking about which one I don’t need, or which one I can put off a little longer. (This year’s three winners were Allen Walker, Cardcaptor Sakura, and as-of-yet unfinished Digimon pajamas.) So that’s a good way to make sure you don’t get too crazy on your spending. Set realistic limits on yourself.
Assuming you can sew or make props on your own, it’ll almost always cost less to make your own items rather than have them commissioned or buy them from a retailer. Even then you need to consider the materials that you’ll be using. Wal-Mart generally has a good selection of 1 or 2-dollar fabrics, but you’ll want to be careful about using a fabric that doesn’t flow well or gets easily wrinkled, or is too thin (thus rendering your otherwise awesome costume more see-through than you might have been prepared for.) I made a mistake like that with the red cotton for my Chrono the demon costume – it was inexpensive and I needed a lot of it, but it wrinkles so badly that in retrospect I wish I’d splurged a little more. If you buy your fabrics and material from a retailer like Jo-Ann Fabrics, sign up for their newsletter. They mail out 40% and 50% coupons regularly and you can end up saving quite a lot on your fabric.
If you can work without a pattern, that’s pretty darn awesome. I’m visually stupid, though – I definitely need a pattern or it’s just going to come right. Some patterns can run expensive, $15 or so, so be sure to visit a craft store while they’re having a pattern sale. I try not to buy any patterns unless it’s during one of those sales, when I get one for $1.99 or $2.99 or so. It’s another good reason to sign up for their flyer, as you can find out in advance when those sales are going to be. Even if you haven’t got anything planned just then, there are some patterns that are just a good idea to have on hand for costumes. I recommend having a basic kimono pattern, a pleated skirt pattern, and maybe some sort of hooded coat. I have several patterns with hoods, but that’s just a thing of mine. I love hoodies!
Another great idea to save you some money is recycling. This has a few different meanings. Look around your house for any clothes you might already have than can be altered or adapted to work within your costume. If you can tweak a turtleneck or a labcoat into a piece of your cosplay, that’s one less turtleneck of labcoat you need to buy fabric and thread for and spend all that time sewing and finishing. How about some shoes that you don’t particularly need to wear out anymore? Wrong color? Spray-paint those suckers (in a well ventilated environment and with care of your surroundings, of course, because wow does spray paint ever get all over everything!) How about having two cosplays that use a common piece? It could happen. Is there a piece of a cosplay that you’ve retired that could be altered for a new cosplay? Make it happen!
Speaking of recycling, keep an eye out for things you could use for props and such that might otherwise just get tossed out. I’ve made a few staves out of thin PVC piping (the kind I used to make boffer weapons out of in college); I have a friend who made the most amazing staff I’ve ever seen out of some foam core she rescued from a dumpster. That’s right, folks: cosplayers, saving the planet! Saving some green, even. Oh, oh, that’s funny…
Right. So, there’s one last nugget of advice I have for my cosplaying brethren who find themselves a little on the broke side, and that’s to believe in the power of the yard sale. I love eBay, and Cosplay.com has a Spam board where people sell off their old retired cosplays, wigs they don’t need, fabric they don’t need, shoes they don’t need… the list goes on and on. You can sell off what you’ve got lying around and don’t need, and if you’re lucky you can pick up something you need for a fraction of what it could have cost you otherwise.
Hope that helps! Until next issue, I’ll see you guys in the halls.
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