> Sera Myu <

Holy crap, this was a huge undertaking.
Some time in 2006 Kelly and I decided that it would be super cool to make all of the senshi costumes from the Sailor Moon Musicals (Sera Myu - and for this scenario Astarte and Chibimoon don't exist because they're lame). So, that's pretty much what we did. Kelly's costumes are Fighter, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, and Pluto and mine are the rest of them.

Making these has been a sparkly trip filled with swearing and watching the musicals for hours. I thought about putting some of our totals up here - total yards of fabric, wigs, cost - when I got to cost, I changed my mind. I don't want to know how much this little adventure cost overall.
There was so much trial and error. We now have measurements and patterns for every single part of the costumes though- so that saved time after we got the first four or so fukus out of the way.
While making the costumes, we visited SeraMyu Antics multiple times a day- it's an awesome Myu site made by Sam (who is even MORE awesome) who divided her gallery up by stage and senshi and has really amazingly helpful high-res pictures of the costumes.
Finding the right materials for all of this was an adventure and a half, and we apparently picked a great time to go about this whole Myu craze seeing as some of the trim has since been discontinued.

Wigs for this were interesting. Some of them were extremely simple (Mars and Saturn) while some of them took nearly as long to sew and style as the costumes they were supposed to be worn with (Moon and Chibimoon). My favorite wigs from the bunch were Neptune and Jupiter though I have a certain attachment to my second Moon wig too (despite it currently looking like an animal nested in it...). Maybe it's because of the amount of sanity I lost while trying to style it.

The brooches, earrings, and choker doodly-bobs, were my favorite part (maybe because I could take a break from sitting in front of the sewing machine) and were made out of various plastics, metal, paper, clay, and a crap load of rhinestones. My least favorite aspect was the sleeves. I hate those freaking sleeves. Even Saturn, who didn't really have sleeves, had those stupid pointy sleeve-esque flappy things.
If anyone's actually reading this, you must be seriously bored...

There were a lot of inaccuracies in our costumes, some intentional, others not so much. The shoes, beads on the skirts, and Neptune's wig were intentional, Uranus's brooch and Venus's sleeves (it's accurate to the costume, but not to the whole group) were accidents that Kelly and I didn't feel like fixing.

By the end of this I'm pretty sure I've made enough fukus and patterns for these fukus that I could crank one out in a couple of days (maybe I'll test that theory out on Super Sailor Moon?). Mercury/Neptune and Jupiter/Uranus were our fastest made costumes since we made all of them in a span of three weeks, and Eternal Moon took the longest- mainly because of her damn wig and wings. Still, she took four weeks- though the end of those four weeks was the kind of grueling pace that makes you question why the hell you're making big gaudy shiny sailor moon costumes when you would much rather be doing just about anything else. At least it made me do that.

Click here for progress and convention photos of these cotumes.