from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
So last year... was definitely unique. When fall started coming around, I started thinking about costumes I could wear on Halloween that would have a mask built into the actual costume. My wife and I had just recently bought a house, so I wasn't interested in doing something huge, but I had finally set up my new sewing table in the new house and was eager to try it out.
Earlier in the year, some friends and I had been watching Miyazaki movies every week, so a character from one of my favorite Miyazaki movies came to mind: Nausicaä. She's a princess living in a post-apocalyptic world, trying to save her village by protecting her local ecosystem and its wildlife. And for a good portion of the movie, she wears a mask, to protect herself from deadly gases!
Nausicaä's mask is not simple, so I did some googling just to see what was out there, to see if it was even feasible for me to get a mask and do this costume with the mask. And I came across this:
It was exactly what I was looking for! I didn't see any for sale on Doc Stone's Etsy, or recently on his Facebook page, so I messaged him on Facebook and asked if I could commission one. He replied immediately that he could! By this point, it was mid-September, so I knew there was a big chance I wouldn't actually get it by Halloween. I figured it was fine either way, and it wasn't worth rushing, and I thought it would be a cool mask to have (even for every day use!) even if it wasn't ready for Halloween that year.
So after working out details with Doc Stone, I found the rest of the pieces of my costume:
The outfit Nausicaä wears for most of the movie is basically a light blue dress, along with an aviator hat, gloves, boots with gaiters, a belt pouch, and (I hope) some tan leggings.
I got this dress (in Sky Blue) - it's not exactly Nausicaä's dress-outfit; I assume hers is made of a more durable material, like a jumpsuit with a skirt. But I was going for simple here, so I figured this was good enough.
Nausicaä's skirt is very short, so I hemmed the dress to the right length!
I was having trouble finding aviator hats in any color but the traditional black/brown/tan, but I did eventually stumble on this kids' ski cap that looks very much like a blue aviator hat! Fortunately, I have a very small head, so the fact that it was kid's size was only a bonus for me :)
I also for some reason had trouble finding gauntlet-style gloves like Nausicaä's, especially in blue. It seems pretty weird to me that gauntlet gloves aren't more popular, but I guess people really only wear them for riding motorcycles or costumes like knights or mad scientists ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Eventually I found exactly what I was looking for, in a color that matched the hat I found!
And I got some Khaki leggings, because I'm pretty sure Nausicaä would be wearing leggings, at least every time she rides her glider.
I also found this adorable Teto plushie from this Etsy store!
I already had a Grey belt bag I had gotten the year prior as part of a Team Rocket costume, and these Brown boots that I like wearing for everyday use but also work for several different costumes (most recently, in my pirate costume)!
Right around this time, there was a Snapchat filter making the rounds that turns you into an anime character, so I also played around with that:
All that was left were the gaiters for the boots. It took me some research to figure out what those things even were, and even more searching to find anything remotely close to what I was looking for.
Specifically, I wanted blue gaiters that matched my gloves and hat, came up to my knees, and had button fasteners. For those who don't know what gaiters are, as I didn't when I first started this project - they're boot coverings that fasten to the bottom of your boots, to protect you from getting gunk or snow or whatnot in your boots. Given all the gliding Nausicaä does, I expect hers also function as leg warmers. In fact, that's what I thought they were at first.
After much searching for "blue leg warmers with buttons" or something along those lines, I determined that what I was actually looking for were gaiters. There's another kind of boot covering called spats - those are much shorter than gaiters, and they really only cover up to just above your ankles. However, try searching "gaiter" during a global pandemic - pretty much all I was finding just searching "blue gaiters" was this:
I discovered that when you search "gaiters boots" there are two kinds that show up (besides more neck gaiters): functional gaiters for actually trudging through the snow or mud or whatever that came in natural colors and fastened with zippers or velcro or other very useful fasteners; and decorative ones that came in all sorts of colors and fastened with buckles and laces and BUTTONS. I also discovered that when you search "spats" you also get a bunch of gaiters - and they're all the more decorative kind.
Unfortunately, what I actually wanted to get was something that looked (and ideally was) more functional than most of the decorative gaiters that I found. It was hard enough finding the correct style of gaiters - even harder to find the correct style in the correct color! The only blue gaiters that were even close to what I was looking for that I found were these snow gaiters, and it looks like they don't even sell them in blue anymore!
Eventually, I found a video (which I would have found again for this post if I hadn't waited a year to make it!!) of someone making his own gaiters, and that ultimately convinced me that they were easy enough to make and I should just make my own!
First, I ventured out to the fabric store (after barely entering any store since March)! I found a faux suede that matched well with my hat and gloves, and felt like a material that Nausicaä's gaiters could be made out of. It seemed like too thin of a material to be the only thing the gaiters were made out of, so I also looked around for some lining, and found something perfect - a pillowy jacket-liner kind of fabric, with stuffing inside! They might not be accurate to what Nausicaä's village may have had available, but they definitely make these gaiters as useful as Nausicaä's would be to her!
When I was ready to start, I put on my boots
And then roughly started to figure out what the gaiters should look like:
At first I thought a rectangle was good enough, and then I realized there were more curves - the top of the gaiter came up to the top of the knee in the front but just inside the knee in the back, and the parts at the bottom that attached to the strap on the bottom of the shoe went lower than the rest of the base of the gaiter. Eventually I settled on this shape:
I cut two pieces of each type of fabric (reversing the shape for left & right),
then pinned and sewed the two types of fabric together:
I then folded it right-side-out
and made sure it fit correctly before proceeding
Next was buttons! My machine has a setting for magically making buttonholes all by itself given a button of the correct size, so I figured out where I wanted the buttons and holes to be, marked them, and began sewing the buttonholes.
When sewing on the buttons, I realized that I actually wanted the base of the boot to be tighter than it currently was. I was able to adjust that by moving the buttons in from where I originally planned on placing them. This works out because the hole side is the side that will be visible on the outside of the gaiter, so the extra flap created by the tighter buttoning is hidden inside.
I made a little strap that buttoned on each side for holding the gaiters onto the boots, and added some button holes to the base of the gaiters
And that's it!
Now, back to the mask:
The mask came in on October 7, and I was ecstatic! I didn't expect it to come by Halloween, let alone that early! But when I put it on my face, I realized that my tiny child-sized head that worked so well for me when finding an aviator hat was not at all the right size for this mask that was clearly made for a person with a much-larger head.
This mask could easily have covered my entire face. Plus, the strap sat way high on my head, when I actually wanted it here:
So I reluctantly sent the mask back, and asked for a new one that would fit my face better. Fortunately, Doc Stone already had someone lined up to buy the mask I wasn't going to use, so it worked out for him :)
The new mask of course didn't show up until November, but it fit me much better, and it came with two straps instead of just the one - there's the lower one that holds it onto my face and the upper one, which holds it into the correct spot on my face!
So this year I finally got to wear my full costume, complete with mask!
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