There are just a few more weeks until this year’s Reactor and my first foray into cosplay, and now I find myself with not just one cosplay project nearly complete, but two! Once I started making things, the JoAnn’s fabric store I get supplies at took its place alongside the Microcenter and Home Depot as places that fire my imagination and inspire me to create new things! My second project is a more modest mini cosplay of Yukino Miyazawa’s dad Hiroyuki in Kare Kano. I like the silly “I Love My Daughters” shirts that he wears, so I decided to make one of my own. Unfortunately, the kanji on the shirt are translated in the English version of the manga and I don’t have the anime episodes or anything online to use as a guide. But I did see the first kanji, musume (daughter) in a manga panel that was not translated. So using that little scrap of info plus a Wikipedia entry that said that the shirt says “Daughter Love”, I used my limited Japanese skills to guess that the front of the shirt probably says musume ai. The back of the shirt is translated as “My Daughters Are My Life”, which I took to be musume no seikatsu. I checked the kanji with my Chinese wife, so even if it isn’t exactly what is on the shirt, the meaning makes sense, so the character should be recognizable to fans of Kare Kano. I made a simple stencil to form the kanji painted with white fabric paint on a black t-shirt. So far it looks pretty good. I hope to finish the back tonight and then I’ll get to work on a Pero Pero plushie as an accessory. Maybe I’ll make him a bag.
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