The easiest cosplay

Completed October 2016.

Halloween is the silliest, and therefore my favorite, of all holidays. It's also one of the most stressful holidays, personally, because I always feel like whatever I put on must be handmade, otherwise I've failed myself. The loophole is that I just put on the same self-made costume for years and years. It's fine! My creations are timeless, and so is this Pokemon costume, because Pokemon will always be relevant!

Poliwhirl isn't one of my favorite Pokemon but it is one of the cutest. Just look at how it moves!

And that's the jolly lil dance I did all Halloween season in 2016. I didn't need any other reason to want this to be my costume.

The costume from planning to completion was very last-minute. I mean, it's a sweatshirt; I deliberately tried to make the least complicated garment I could, while maintaining warmth and comfort for the Fall. I even thought that the hood was a little superfluous while making it.

For a simple sweatshirt, I jumped through a lot of hoops to get where I got. To elaborate, I only had one weekend to buy my sweatshirt fleece and I decided to buy the wrong shade of blue, thinking I would sew the whole garment then and dye it the right shade later. (Dyeing actually came first, and I was hand-sewing up until the minute I had to leave for a Halloween party). I can't even regret it because if I, say, ordered fleece in the correct color online I would have missed two or three days of sewing.

I wonder if I'm the only person who bought fabric dye from the student store that quarter.

I would have loved to have a machine to do a tight zig-zag stitch around the eyes and belly appliques, like well-made sweatshirts often have when they have logos, but I had to make it work with a whipstitch. These closeup photos are pretty unflattering, but from far away who'd dare say anything?

I painted the eyes and belly swirl (which is supposed to represent Poliwhirl's guts, how nice) with fabric paint.  The white reflection dots are the negative space of the white fabric with some faint gray sharpie for shading. The eye sockets have a little bit of polyester stuffing to help them stand up. They're also fun to squish when you're bored out of your mind during a lecture!

On the day of Halloween I hadn't finished sewing the belly patch at the very top of the circle but I pretended that I did it on purpose so it would serve as a large pocket.

(I was lucky enough to be given the poly-fil after asking for some on my university admission year's Facebook group page. There's very little stuffing in there and I kind of wish I didn't have that whole bag left even though it was completely free. I had completely forgotten about the poly-fil saga up until I recently looked into my closet and found two more full bags that I had taken when I was really into dumpster diving. College, man).

Oh yeah, I made a pair of boxing gloves, technically mittens, to complete the costume and completely forgot about them. I still don't know where they are, but I do remember putting a little stuffing inside to give them a more bulbous shape, and having very sweaty hands all Halloween. Cover yourself in plastic fibers: it's how you keep yourself warm, kids.