A tale of two roommates searching for the classified fried chicken recipe. 👀❤️

Our favorite roomies are back with new outfits!! These designs have been in our cosplan since the moment this Genshin x KFC collab dropped in China (US collab when 😭) can't believe it's been a few years since we first handmade Alhaitham and Kaveh's in-game outfits! And now they have new fits hehe <3

Even if these aren't in-game designs, they're still Hoyoverse designs so the most challenging part for us is the same as any of our other handmade Hoyoverse outfits: the manual pattern drafting and trying to make sense of what we're looking at lol. 

We like matching materials for our pairs when we can. Both their white shirts are made with the same white polyester blend. Alhaitham's cape lining is the same red jacquard as Kaveh's main cape fabric. Alhaitham's vest and Kaveh's corset are from the same black fabric, which is stretchy and we were making non-stretch garment pieces, but we already had this fabric in our stash and didn't want to waste more material so we decided to use it and stabilized it with interfacing. Yay less waste!

And as for our most important priority yet: for the pants, we constructed functional side seam pockets and double-welt pockets on the back. <3

Alhaitham
we spent extra time figuring out his little capelets, capes, and the jabot. For the jabot, we started patterning it as a half-circle and sketched out/modified further using mock fabric. For his sleeve ruffles, we did a technique very loosely inspired by the turn of cloth method except much more exaggerated, so that the white fashion fabric primarily showed before the red jacquard lining.

As our original redesign, we added more teal details such as the lining for his coat and on some of his accessories. The details on his vest are iron-transfer vinyl that we distressed by pressing heat onto it so that they would "melt" into the fabric. We added our original details on his cape that are inspired by his in-game design motifs.

His chicken cane is PLA and PVC, and most of the chicken was manually painted. We initially didn't plan on making any props for this project but we caved with the chicken cane. It makes us laugh every time we look at it and it's probably one of the silliest props we've made yet we love it so much lmao. 🐔

For his boots, we had extra lace-up boots that we were able to salvage so we transformed them into unlaced boots by cutting out all the grommets and laces, and sewed the boots together and closed them up by creating seams using their false tongues, then we installed the boot cuffs we made and faux buckles.

Kaveh
We drafted the patterns manually by draping with mock fabric, and it took us a few rounds of modification, after which we transferred the pieces to outline on parchment paper to then use as patterns. Drafting the patterns for his capes was probably one of the trickier parts of his process, considering nothing is ever decidedly symmetrical. For one of his shoulder capes, we installed a couple wires into the seam lines so that the cape "collars" can retain their shape. The corset has internal boning inserted into cased seams.

One of the most challenging parts for our patterning process is trying to translate a design like this onto our proportion, in this case Mei's proportion as they have a shorter torso in ratio to the rest of their body. It's both the blessing and the curse of handmaking your own cosplays- being able to draft and fit each garment to your  exact proportions, but also having to figure that out. 😭

We'd made his earrings when we made his previous outfit, but remade them because we wanted a slightly different size. For his boots, we got plain boots and added grommets and laces, and made the boot cuffs.

We designed and digitized all machine embroidery and iron-on vinyl designs, in addition modeling and printing all our own prints. We also added lots of our own original gold detailing designs and trinkets/accessories.