Sera Myu
Sailor Venus

A month or so before Katsucon Kelly and I were at a loss for what costumes we were going to make/wear there. Then one night Kelly had a dream that we had dressed up as Myu Venus and Mars and ran around having a marvelous time. Well, since we had such a great time in this dream, why not actually make the costumes? We figured that since I'd already made Myu Moon, these fukus wouldn't be that different and we'd 'whip them off in a week'. NOT THE CASE.
We spent a good deal of time online researching fabrics/trims/wigs/shoes during the first week, ordered what we wanted and then waited for fun things to arrive in the mail. Meanwhile, I set to work on our silly little accessories (chokers, brooches, tiaras, earrings, etc.) because I thought they'd be fun and I'd feel like I was getting something done. We spent an unhealthy amount of time looking at reference pictures, watching the musicals over (which we liked to call 'research' but when paired with wine really just became us laughing and counting how many times we could see their panties while they danced.), and talking about shiny things.
For our first attempt at the skirt fabric we found something lovely that didn't come in orange- and tried dying that which was a disaster, for the second attempt, we ordered fabric from online and when it arrived it was nothing like what we thought we had ordered, and finally we found the fabric that we ended up using at a local fabric store- I still had to dye mine orange, but luckily the dye took to the fabric this time around. Finding orange shoes that matched the style we were going with was also just about impossible (we decided that the myu boot covers look beyond stupid so we were going to make them have killer pumps instead. With that much leg hanging out we didn't want low shoes). To make a long story short(er) finding just about everything for these costumes was a trial. I ended up ordering three wigs for Venus because the first one that I ordered was a crap-tastic wig, the second one was too short, and the third one was just right. We also chose to make the chokers inaccurate on these- in the musicals all of the inners have the same little symbol inside of the star on their choker, but we gave Venus and Mars their own planet's symbol. Finally, we didn't add beads to the trim around the skirts because- well, we honestly didn't notice that they were there until we were leaving for Katsucon. And if you actually noticed these things then you're either looking too closely at these pictures or you're a crazy hardcore Myu fan.

Oh, wait, another side note. We had the matching spankies to go with these costumes. Each of the senshi wear GIANT GRANNY PANTY SPANKIES in their key color. So Mars has red and Venus has orange. Sadly, the orange happens to be hunter orange. It was something we didn't really want to go without though. Those skirts could not be shorter without being raunchy.

Okay, I lied- one more thing. While I was going slowly insane trying to get the pattern for those stupid sleeves right I made them with the silly little colored bit between the sleeve and the top- which sadly gave me more trouble than anything else on the costume. It shouldn't have- I don't know why it did- but that little orange strip between the sleeves and the top made me want to chuck the whole costume out a window. Once I finished with the stupid colored strips, Kelly pointed out that they didn't have them in the fourth stage costumes. HA. I argue that Venus is the slow and special one of the bunch since none of her colors match.