my unimarucorn cosplay process
One of my friend groups is a journaling club that formed when a handful of us met and became friends at a convention in 2019. Although our "official" hobby is journaling, we also dabble in other activities and hyperfixations like various crafts, Animal Crossing, furbies, dolls, and most recently tamagotchis. A couple of months ago I was the last in our friend group to get a Tamagotchi Uni, which is the version we all own now.
So as I do whenever I get into a new hyperfixation, I looked at all of the different versions and DLCs available and decided which one I liked most (though I didn't end up getting the Angel Festival case because it was sold out), consumed as many Youtube videos as I could possibly stand, and looked over all of the available characters on the Tamagotchi Wiki. I even dropped whatever I was knitting at the time to crochet what I affectionately call a fuzzy prison for my tamagotchi when it arrived:
I even got my partner (who bought it for me) interested and they bought the Monster Festival version so we could play with them together.
But I'm here to talk about a cosplay today, and when I was looking over the available character list on the Tamagotchi Wiki, I was struck with inspiration. If there's one thing to know about me, it's that I really love unicorns, pastels, and rainbows, and the Angel Festival DLC happens to have a pastel rainbow unicorn character, Unimarucorn:
They can also grow from either a boy or girl tama so they are kind of canonically genderqueer??? Clearly the most Megcoded Tamagotchi character. I also really love a fluffy texture and an oversized silhouette, so I thought it might be fun to cosplay this character in some kind of fluffy hoodie but as a dress so I can show off my legs. These were my first initial sketches:
For these early sketches, I wasn't really sure how I wanted to balance the colors in the sweater and I wanted to think about how to do the hood part since I wanted my wig to also be visible. I knew I wanted my main pieces to be knitted because I've been vibing more with knitting than sewing lately, and this would prevent me from having to sew faux fur.
I also wanted to try to use pieces I already own. I already have a multicolored wig that I wanted to use and although I toyed with the idea of gold boots in my first sketch I ended up switching to sneakers with the idea to knit some legwarmers with a goldenrod acrylic yarn my friend Jen had given me to represent the gold in their hooves. I also wanted to use some leftover hoop boning I had for the hoop (halo?) around them and cover it with some fleece my friend Flora let me use. This is what I ended up doing for my final sketches:
In the interest of saving time and money I ended up not buying new socks or making shorts to go under the cosplay (I have some little raver bottoms and pink fishnets that I plan to wear instead), and in the interest of showing more of my wig I decided to freehand knit sort of a headband instead of a hood or hat to hold the ears and horn. The only new materials I bought for this costume were the yarn, which I ordered from AliExpress:
I also had to find knitting patterns for everything. I freehanded the head pieces, but I used a couple of free patterns on Ravelry and a tutorial on Youtube for the remaining pieces:
- Lyall - sweater pattern
- Legwarmers
- Star Bag tutorial
Once I found patterns to use and received the yarn I ordered, I got to work. There was a bit of a learning curve in using the fluffy yarn, but I figured it out after some practice. I did have to start the sweater over a few times because I had some trouble making the increases with this yarn, and then again because I didn't like how the stripes fell on my body. It knit up really fast though, so it wasn't too much of an inconvenience to have to start over. Here are some progress pictures:
And here is the final cosplay! Please excuse my lack of makeup; I just wanted to throw the costume pieces on and make sure they looked good together and I'm very pleased! I'm going to wear it to Zenkaikon with my journaling group this weekend.
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