Songbird

This one is a very different cosplay from my usual. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have chosen to make this cosplay if it wasn’t for the fact that Zibartas Cosplay’s Oda cosplay from Cyberpunk is insanely good, which led to being invited to do a Cyberpunk photoshoot with some pretty admirable and awesome cosplayers at Fantasy Basel in Switzerland.

I did play Cyberpunk 2077, but I hadn’t found THE character to cosplay. I tend to go for characters that look like me and, well, I guess having 1,5 meter blonde hair isn’t super practical in that universe where a lot of fighting and such is happening. I looked around on all the female characters, and I found Songbird aka Song So Mi from the DLC Phantom Liberty. I would have loved to actually play the DLC and get to know the character before cosplaying, but I had like 3 months to make 2 cosplays and attend 3 conventions, so I went in mostly blind. I did read up a bit on her story and watch a few videos about her, just to know what kind of character she is, and I liked her.

I’m all about long hair and skirts – this is a tight bodysuit with a short bob. But I like a challenge!

Below a photo of the character, and I used the cosplay guide from CD Project Red, which was super helpful!

I started with the bodysuit, because basically, I could wear only that if I don’t finish the rest.

I started out with a standard bodysuit pattern (Simplicity 8670) and stitched it out in some ugly jersey I had in my fabric stash. I did adjustments until I had a suit that I felt was reasonably well-fitting (It was a LOT of adjustments, I never fit commercial patterns!)
I drew all the big elements onto it and marked where I wanted my seams. I had to move some a bit, but I was confident I wasn’t ruining the shape too much and also my final fabric will have some stretch as well (though, less than jersey), so I was fairly certain it would work.

I cut the bodysuit into pieces where I had drewn the lines, and I used this to make my new pattern. You can see the black thread where the old seams are vs where they will be on the new suit.

I once again went through my way-too-large fabric stash and found some ugly ones with similar stretch to the final fabrics and made a mockup – it’s a bit tricky and I felt I needed to, because my final fabrics are all different types with different amounts of stretch, so I needed to see if this would work or not.

As you see, I also drew in further details, like all the lines and such on the legs, sleeve and chest. Also, forgive me for cutting off my head, I just was not having a good face day when I took these progress photos, haha.

I added all the little details to the leg and sleeve pieces before stitching them together, since it’s impossible to do once it is stitched together. I did a best estimate – there’s so many tiny details and some are hard to see what they even are – is it plastic? Wires? Fabric? so I took some artistic liberties here.

My least favourite part was all these gold stripes. They look really great, but man, it took me like a whole audio book just to do the stripes – if not more. This is the area around the waist, back and also some of the leg and booty. Since the stripes aren’t going straight, I patterned out each of them.

There’s this black line between some of the parts of the suits, which I decided to interpret as piping, and luckily my local shop had some nice elastic piping. I haven’t worked with piping before, and it’s not perfect, but I think it turned out quite nice still.

You can just see the quilted pleather-thing at the top of the shoulder here. It’s just regular quilting technique (which I will also show for the jacket). I had an absolutely perfect-looking mesh fabric, but it was very transparent, so those parts are with a layer of jersey underneath.

Add a zipper and FINALLY I reached the “not naked” stage of this cosplay! Always one of my happy moments in the process. I also got the wig, as you can see. It’s the model called Kitt in the colour “Plum” from Coscraft . I was a bit unsure about the colours, because depending on lighting, Songbirds hair looks very different, but I went with this, because I thought it would match my fabrics well and also I have worn a similar colour before and know it works with my skintone.

I did a very rough cut on the wig myself. I do have a little bit of a fear of hair dressers and cutting hair (who would’ve guessed?), so this was really something that made me anxious. Which is why I mostly just toss wigs on without doing any cutting. I know – totally bad me, but we all have strengths and weaknesses.

But this wasn’t working, so I asked a friend to help out, and she did – in the back of a convention hall. Songbird has an undercut (or, she has cybernetics in her neck)

She left the neckhairs long, so my own hair would be covered underneath. It’s not exact, but honestly, I’m impressed that my anklelength hair fits under this and it doesn’t look too weird. Kudos to Coscraft for making proper sized wigs and thanks a bunch to Villanya Cosplay for the help!

I did the final styling at home, which included a lot of teasing, blow drying and hairspray. I got Zibartas Cosplay to do the finishing touches and voila! Skymone with a short bob!

For the shoes, I was lucky to find these used Converse in a 2nd hand shop at a very good price. Saved me some time for weathering! I painted them roughly with fabric paint first

Then I airbrushed them to make them look a bit more dirty and blend the colour pattern a bit better. Last I took out the old rivets, added a leather piece and new rivets – and a comfortable insole, because convention days is usually many ours on our feet and no reason to not be comfortable if it’s possible!

The next part I worked on was the jacket. Once again, I used a commercial pattern as my base. I can’t remember which one, I think it was just from my stash of old magazines. Once again, first I made the original pattern fit me fairly well, then drew lines on it (not pictured), cut them and used for the new pattern (same as with the bodysuit).

Then I made a second mock-up with the altered pattern and drafted the collar. I’m just using some cotton fabric for my mock-ups, since I found some rolls of it very cheap in a 2nd hand shop.

After weeks of searching, I gave up on finding the perfect fabric. I wanted an off-white denim, but I was only finding cold grey or too beige. So in the end, I bought stark white and coloured it with a mix of black dip dye and strong tea. It was a bit of a mess and it came out slightly uneven, but I think it worked out well, because it gives the fabric a slightly dirty and worn look, which is just what I wanted. Also, I can’t do anything without my cats “helping” me out…
2nd picture is how it turned out (the lump in the sink) and how it didn’t work on my polyester lining (which was to be expected, because it was dye for natural fibres)

There’s not much to say about the sewing process – I added grey satin ribbon before stitching the pieces together. The velcro closure thing at the front is super odd and gave me some headaches before I got it right

The collar was a bit complicated, because it had a quilted lining, but also had a denim edge. But after a few attempts, I managed to get it fairly symmetric. I used a regular batting here. I tried a more poofy one, but it was a bit too much.

Here you can kind of see what I mean about the denim edge on the quilted part. I stitched those pieces together first, then added the other side (which is full denim) and stitched them together with right sides against each other. Then I turned it right side out and stitched onto the jacket. Here you can also see the lower edge that I added.

At this point, the deadline was looming, so I forgot to take progress pictures.
But I took the badge-illustrations from the cosplay guide and printed them out (on a good printed) and then I used these “machine free” badges (I didn’t have time to find someone with a machine to make them, and I think it worked out quite well).
I had a fabric spray paint that I discovered works with airbrush, so I used that to create the gradient. And lastly, I also found the back art design in the cosplay guide, tweaked it a bit in Illustrator and used a Silhouette Cameo to cut it. I would have liked it to be slightly bigger, but I didn’t find wider vinyl and I didn’t want to work with a two-part piece. It’s just regular iron-on vinyl.

Lucky for me, my better half is quite talented at making 3D models, so he made the cyberdeck for me – from model to printing, sanding and painting. First picture is what he handed over, 2nd picture is after I added the stickers (which I printed and manually cut out, RIP) and the belts. I’m hoping Zibartas will post some more info about the Cyberdeck at some point, because it’s actually pretty impressive. It has space for my phone, a small powerbank and business cards inside it!

Final test-fit before packing it for Switzerland!
There are some details missing still, but I think the likeness is pretty ok! I might revisit it in the future, but for now, it is complete!

And here’s a photo of our group from Fantasy Basel! Thanks to Zibartas Cosplay, Yaya Han, Stylouz Cosplay and Fenix Fatalist for letting me be part of this awesome experience!