Ember Costumes and Crafts

Angela and John as Ukyo and Ryoga from Ranma 1/2, plus Nick in a Party City Spider-Man suit. Way back in 2001, John and I were in middle school. We had loved Sailor Moon and Pokemon for years by then, and through our local comic book shop and our friends, we started watching other anime like Ranma 1/2 and Tenchi and Inuyasha. We LOVED it! We wanted to dress up as our favorite characters for Halloween, and for Austin's very first anime convention, Ushi-con!  Back then we didn't have Youtube or costume tutorial websites or anything. We were on our own. So we found an old Singer sewing machine at a garage sale (which was so wonky that we needed channel-lock pliers every time we wanted to wind up a new bobbin) got our parents to take us to Hobby Lobby for fabric, and we taught ourselves to sew! We didn't know how to use patterns, so we did a combination of modeling off of our own clothes and draping and pinning things on ourselves. We were very determined! We made o...

Nick (Spider Boy) and John and Angela in their first real home-made costumes Halloween 2002 I was going to say wow, we sure have come a long way since we started making costumes...but actually these aren't too shabby considering that we were only 12! Though the Spider-Man costume (worn daily by Nick from age 6-9) was store bought. The idea came from our favorite anime at the time, Ranma 1/2 . (Actually it's hilarious, you should check out the manga or the show if you can.) I had gone to the very first Ushicon Anime Convention in Austin the year before and told John all about it, so we decided that the next time around we would go with our friends and dress up as our favorite characters. The material for my Ukyo costume was a lucky garage-sale find of jersey knit in the perfect color and strips of cotton for the bindings. I spread my brand-new karate gi on the floor and traced the basic outline of it onto the blue knit, then cut it out and bound the edges with the white ...