Complete For: Anime Expo 2003
Worn At: Anime Expo 2003, San Diego Comic Con 2003

Ever since I first read Wish, a manga by the artistic team of CLAMP, I knew I wanted to do one of the designs. It was such a beautiful and human love story, with designs to match. After much debate, we decided to do a group of the master angels.

My character was Ryuki, the angel of Fire, AJ was Touki, the angel of Water, Aimee was Hisui the angel of Air, and Kel was Ranshou, the angel of Earth. However, since their designs change so frequently from page to page, we decided that the dress design would be "inspired" by the acutal manga, rather than a direct recreation. We each spent several months designing our costumes and embellishments, concentrating on simple shapes with extremely detailed embellishment. Unfortunately the pictures do no pick up much of the embellishment, but all of the costumes were covered with hundreds of hours of beading, embrodiery,  applique, and painting.

However, everyone wanted to know how we made the wings!! Even though the wings only took a fraction of time compared to the embellishment, they apparently were very eye catching! In regard to the wings, we have several design challenges to overcome. They needed to be extremely sturdy, so they could take being jostled in the dealer's hall. They needed to be light, so we wouldn't become the Whiny Angels by the end of the day. They needed to not have a bulky and obvious strapping mechanism, that would detract from the overall look of the costumes. They needed to be constructed by girls with little mechanical experience and few tools. And, finally, they needed to be removable quickly, for bathroom trips and rest breaks.

At World Con 2002, we were privledged to see the construction of the Black Swan wings, which had alumnimum pipe welded to a metal plate, which was then laced into a corset. It definately hid the attachment mechnaism, but, we wanted the wings to be able to removed quickly, and, well, didn't know how to weld!

What we ended up doing was mounting a flag bracket (like for mounting a flag pole to the side of a building), to a metal plate, which was then laced into the corset. The basic wing structure was made out of PVC pipe, which we shaped with an industrial heat gun. The pvc would simply be dropped into the flag bracket and secured with a cotter pin.

The shaping of the wing was accomplished with chicken wire, with X-30 expanding foam poured over it. The foam dried hard and incredibly light, and could then be carved into the appropriate shape. All that was left then was to cover the foam with muslin, and then glue the feathers on!

As far as the trailing feathers, in response to frequent questions, you can't actually buy four foot feathers. I don't want to meet the bird capable of growing them!! ^_^ All we did was take regular turkey flight feathers and glue them overlapping the one previous by half, so that the large end was on the outside of the curve. Since we used a flexible glue, the feather held up to fluttering and gave a great, CLAMP look to the wings.