Hi friends! As you know, I am a huge Demon Slayer fan and have already cosplayed a few characters from it. Well, for years I have had another cosplay plan from Demon Slayer, namely Daki, the Upper Moon Six Demon!
I read the manga a couple of years ago but waited to see how her arc in the Entertainment District would be adapted in the anime, and this Spring we finally got her entire story in all its glory in season 2 of Demon Slayer!
I started working on this costume in January 2022 and would have been finished already if I hadn't gotten horribly distracted with Belle, lol. But I am making steady progress on Daki now and am planning to do a photoshoot with the full costume before the end of March!
Alright, let me walk you through the process of making this costume!
I started out with Daki's primary weapon - her obi "ribbons"! There are these leaf-like designs all over it and I decided to use heat-n-bond to apply them to the ribbons. First, I drew up the pattern in a smaller and a slightly larger size. Then I transferred the smaller design to heat-n-bond many times over.
After ironing the sheet of heat-n-bond to the black embossed geo scuba from my fabric collection, I cut out the designs until I had a whole pile of them.
Then I did the same thing with the larger design and a blue brocade, also from my fabric line.
Once both designs were cut out, I ironed the black pieces onto the blue pieces to match Daki's costume. The heat-n-bond is stick on both sides when heated up so it is a great method to fuse fabric to fabric in order to create garment embellishments.
In fact, 90% of all the fabrics I'm using for Daki are from my own fabric collection! Fabrics have always been a great love of mine and I really enjoy designing textiles. Daki is an Oiran Demon, clad in exquisite fabrics, and her most powerful weapon is made of fabrics! So as a textile nerd, I am so tickled to be able to use my brand of fabrics for this costume!
The fuchsia obi ribbons are made from the 4 seasons small french brocade, with strips of yellow in the same style intersecting it. I had to apply the yellow strips and the black/blue leaf designs on BOTH sides of the obi so it took about 2 days to get two long ribbons ready.
Daki also wears the obi around her waist, but I made that like a waist cincher with boning and coutil lining. It is free-hand patterned on my mannequin and stitched together with eyelets down the back for lacing. I also added the yellow designs with heat-n-bond and satin stitched the black lines on them.
Daki doesn't wear much beyond the obi, lol, but I had to put a lot of work into making her, errr, lingerie. The pink fabric you see is my fuchsia Ultrapeme with a lace overlay. This delicate stretch lace was found on Etsy and I had to cut out each piece in the Ultrapreme first, then pin it facing down to the lace, then cut that out, then baste stitch around the entire piece to attach the lace.
I made the patterns for all the pieces by either draping on my dress form or by ductaping myself and drawing on myself. Slowly, the top, leg warmers and panties came together.
Here are the finished leg warmers!
I found these insane geta shoes on eBay and thankfully ordered them months ago. They had to be hand-made from wood and shipped from Asia. This style of shoes is called the koma geta.
They are horribly scary to walk in because the front caves inward. Daki jumps around on these effortlessly in the show but in real life, Oirans only wore these shoes during parades where they held onto an attendant the entire time.
I got these shoes for the photoshoot only and if I ever wear Daki to a con, I would substitute with different geta shoes lol.
This is where I am with the costume! All that's left are finishing touches and inserting a structure into the obi ribbons to suspend them.
But of course, Daki has a very distinct wig, hair accessories and makeup! I was prepared to take on the styling of her white/green wig but my friend Sayakat Cosplay offered for me to wear the Daki wig she was styling at the same time I was making the costume! Our combined love for Daki brought us together hahaha.
So yes, a huge thank you to @sayakatcosplay and @plexicosplay for letting me use this gorgeous wig and hair accessories that they created for their tutorial videos!!
Watch Sayakat's video on how she ventilated, dyed and styled this wig!
Watch Plexi's video on how she 3-D modeled and printed Daki’s 11 hair accessories!
I also want to shout-out @kinpatsucosplay for designing the face tattoos! They are available as a digital download on her website! I used tattoo paper to print them out and they look so nice!
My demonic contact lenses are from @uniqso! I went with their sweety crazy dragonfly lenses because I thought they would photograph really well!
Since this was a makeup test, I didn’t draw the demon veins and mostly focused on the eye and lip makeup. Main take away: Much angrier eyebrows next time lol!
I have also decided that I won’t do undead body paint for Daki because it would require so much coverage/time and the process would dampen the fun aspect of this cosplay for me.
Now I will push to finish the costume for a proper photoshoot! Super pumped to bring it all together finally!