Here is part 2 of the interview with Katharine (Tsubaki) and Gabriella (Cattypatra).

Above is a picture of them doing cosplay from D.Gray-Man. (thanks Katherine and Kenny!)

Question: What was your criteria in choosing your costumes for the Australia preliminaries at Animania and other costumes in general?

Tsubaki:
For WCS we had to do characters or series that we enjoy. The criteria would be:
• It has to be a series Catty & I both love
• The characters have to have good /complicated costumes, work together & have a generally interesting personality traits
• The characters we want to do have to couple well together
• We have to have fun doing those character, being from that series & being together
We originally were going to use Fullmetal Alchemist for our preliminary round in March & D.Gray-man was going to be for the Australian finals in August however we decided to swap the choices around as we knew we’d have more fun cosplaying Fullmetal Alchemist together in the event we did lose, we would have had an awesome day being Edward & Alphonse as they’re such great characters, instead of D.Gray-man where our characters are rivals & only really fight within the series.
We’ve decided we want to do something along similar guidelines for the finals in Japan, we want a series we both enjoy, characters we both love who are drawn together in some way & of course have complicated outfits & great story/personality to back them up. We just want to enjoy cosplaying together as we always have, otherwise it wouldn’t be worth it if it weren’t fun.

Cattypatra:
Even though we had all these criteria that had to be met, as Tsubaki explained above, we pretty decided out costumes on the night we decided to enter the WCS. The decision was very easy, we didn’t fight about it and we were both extremely excited to do both sets of costumes.

The only thing that differed was when we swapped our pre lims with finals, but we both decided together and were very happy with our choice. The most important thing for us is always to have fun. If we’re not having fun, it’s not worth it. But we’ve had some very great Cosplay experiences and times, with WCS being one of the most memorable things to ever happen to either of us.

Q: Could you tell me what your performance at Animania was like?

T: Our Finals skit, it was stressful. XD
I wrote the skit well before we’d done much of the costumes, however I designed so that it would show off both the costumes as well as showing off parts of the series & why we love it. The problems that came up later on were we’d have to either alter the skit slightly, or alter the costumes slightly as we made them to make sure the skit would work, which was very frustrating by the end. For example during our practices I for some reason never wore the armour heads until right before the con as I considered it just a practice & it never occurred to me until right before the con. I couldn’t throw the kitties our when the armour heads were on, so at the last minute before the con I had to make the front grill open up so that I could throw the kittens out from there.
We were really amazed on the day ourselves that people enjoyed the skit so much. I’ve listened to it so many times & gone through it so many times I couldn’t tell if it would be good or not anymore. It was definitely harder to do on stage as the dimmed lights & huge space around us meant my visibility inside the armour was almost nothing. Thankfully the good thing about Catty wearing a bright red coat meant I could spot her, but nothing else.

C: The skit was a bit of a car crash. Everything kept falling apart. The final product was fantastic, but everything went wrong leading up to it. It’s funny looking back, but it wasn’t at the time. Many good things came of this though. Back stage someone accidentally broke my prop spear I needed for the skit, and every other team, without exception, banded together to try and help me fix it. This sportsmanship was very touching as everyone genuinely helped me to the best of their abilities.

Despite that, the skit was great on the day. Everything really came together, and we were both really surprised to know that we had made several people in the audience cry, We tried to portray the amazing relationship between the Elric brothers from Full Metal Alchemist, and were glad that the audience and judges acknowledged us for that and showed us so much support. I’ve never had as much fun on stage than being able to share it with my Tsubaki.

Just as everything went wrong prior, everything went right when it really counted, and it was perfect.

Q: Please tell me a little about how you put your costumes together especially the great work you put into making Alphonse Elric's suit of armour. How long did they take to make? How did you make them?

T: The armour was definitely one of the hardest things I’ve had to make thus far. It required a lot of planning, I spent at least one month working out the approximate measurements, shapes that would need to be cut & scale of it in accordance with my body & for how it would stand & looks next to Catty as Edward to make me appear much taller & bulkier. Of course no matter how much planning goes in there are always problems & things that need changes. For example, the fake hands needed to be put in half way through the armour construction when I realised that proportion-wise I would look really weird if I tried to use my own arm length.
The armour is made entirely from foam. There are various techniques used to create the appearance of armour, such as the fake bolts made from creatively cutting two different types of foam & attaching them together to look like bolts. Also the pieces of foam are actually cut on the same joints as Alphonse’s armour from the references. I loved working with the foam as it’s relatively cheap, very light weight & meant I could move very easily, which I needed to, to be able to sit down & stand up for during our skit.
All together we spent 5months working on both these costumes.

C: I hate this question. No one realises how much work went into everything else XD. I did majority of the sewing. I drafted patterns from scratch for all the parts. I made both coats, paying special attention to the sizing, and also to where all the seams were. I purposefully removed several of the seams to make them as accurate as possible. I also paid attention to the specific colour and fall of the coats, choosing an appropriate fabric, gaberdine. Unfortunately gaberdine frays like crazy, so I had to overlock everything, giving it a very professional finish. I made both the shirts from matching fabric, as well as the pants, which while it wasn’t very noticeable, were fantastically fitted and very professionally made. I put in a lot of details that weren’t needed, such as functioning zippers and deep pockets for my alchemist pocket watch, which I also hand made from scratch.

On top of that I made my automail arm and leg. This took a very long time and I suffered from a lot of hot glue burns, which while they were funny for the people keeping me company, were very painful.

The final part of the interview will be added shortly!