There is something just a little bit insane about cosplay¹.  We—the fans—look at something that usually exists only in a 2D world and decide “I am going to replicate that.  In my spare time.  On a budget.  And I am going to make it awesome.”  Crazy, right?

Add to that the fact that many of us—probably most of us—are learning on the fly.  I had a bit of a leg up from already knowing how to sew², but the majority of cosplay costumes involve a lot more than reading and following a pattern.  You learn fitting.  You learn to alter patterns.  You learn to draft from scratch.  You spend hours and hours googling techniques you don’t even know the names of because someone, somewhere, has to have run into this problem before.  And that isn’t even touching on props and accessories.

But right now I want to talk about pattern alterations, and some of the unforeseen pitfalls you can run into when learning on the fly.

I had recently fallen in love with the webcomic Namesake, and loved the design of this character in particular, Adora.  And lost my mind in typical cosplayer fasion, with half of me saying this is insane and the other half saying yeah but I’m gonna do it!

The first step was to go searching for patterns, because while drafting can be fun it’s always better to have something to refer to.  Especially since I’d never made a dress of this kind before and wouldn’t know where to start.

I lucked out and came across this pattern from Simplicity.

It’s about as close as I could hope to get.  All I needed to do was draft a simple princess-seam blouse with a stand collar and some leg-of-mutton sleeves for the top.

Of course it wasn’t that simple.  It’s never that simple.  It took a lot of stubbornness and determination and blood-sweat-and-tears, and a lot of help.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned with sewing, and crafts in general, is that it never goes in a straight line, and you never, no matter how you try, anticipate all problems.

But there is a lot to be said for being bull-headed and just a bit crazy.

Right now, though, I’m going to focus on the zipper.

It seems like a minor detail, but it’s what—quite literally—holds the dress together.  It’s a detail that can easily be overlooked, because that’s the point:  you want the focus to be on the garment, not the fasteners.  That means making the zipper as unobtrusive as possible.

The Simplicity pattern calls for an invisible zipper, placed on the left side seam.  I knew that adding the top part of the bodice would mean moving the zipper to the back, but I didn’t think that meant more than adding a new seam and buying a longer zipper.

The invisible zipper lasted through two conventions. At the start of convention number 3, the zipper popped, got horribly stuck, and gave its last.

If you’re not familiar with invisible zippers, they’re designed to be hidden within the seam.  They’re sewn right on the seamline, close to the teeth, and without any topstitching. The teeth are very fine, I’m sure to make the zipper line as smooth as possible.  They’re a bit intimidating at first, but once you get the technique down installing one is actually pretty straightforward.

After my zipper failed I did some searching online, and found that people either loved invisible zippers—or hated them and would never recommend using one.  Failures like the one I experienced seemed to be the reason why.  Some also felt that having the stitching so close to the teeth was asking for trouble.  Invisible zippers seemed to be a contradiction: vulnerable and prone to breaking, yet used in strapless garments where they would need to take the stress of holding up the entire outfit.

Sometime later it hit me that that was exactly why my zipper failed:  they’re designed for strapless garments.

Strapless garments hold a lot of tension around the bodice, but it’s distributed along the length of the zipper.  There is no one point that takes significantly more stress than the rest. But when I added sleeves to the dress, I created a point of stress.  We’ve all felt that stress point when trying on a shirt that’s too small; raise your arms or reach forward and feel the fabric strain across your shoulder blades.  Of course I had fitted the dress so I had good range of movement, but there’s no way to get rid of that point of stress entirely.  It’s just the nature of sleeves.

This is the sort of thing you don’t anticipate when you’re teaching yourself on the fly.  (It’s also very, very common; it’s not a convention without costume failures.)

My takeaway about invisible zippers is this:  they can be great in garments with little-to-no tension, like skirts, or garments with even tension, like strapless bodices or gowns.  But they’re terrible for anything with a single point of tension.  And never use them in something with sleeves.

In the end, I ripped the invisible zipper out and bought a standard nylon zipper, and pick-stitched it in.  It’s really not that visible and much more secure.

¹Short for “costume play.” A term borrowed from Japan—made from English words—and widely used for the act of dressing up as fictional characters.

²I learned the basics as a kid, but the bulk of my initiation was making Renaissance clothes.  My trial by fire was a fitted bodice.  Learning on the fly is pretty much my modus operandi.