'But the story between you and me has only just begun.'

OMG we finally completed our MXTX set 😭 Wangxian was one of our first ever couple cosplay projects, then we finished Hualian, and now we have Bingqiu!! The order in which we made the MXTX couples is also the order that we read the books hehe.

As with our Hualian project, these are our original redesigns inspired by the different book illustrations, xianxia aesthetics, and our own personal style.

Shen Qingqiu
Our Shen Qingqiu redesign is inspired by the silhouette of the earlier Shen Qingiu in the donghua along with the later Shen Qingqiu design in the book illustrations, keeping the darker green robe color.  We drafted from scratch his outermost coat pattern, particularly going for a more fantastical Chinese / xianxia themes with his sleeves. For the patterns of his inner layers, we used the hanfu patterns we've made for our past hanfu projects.

The trim in the middle layer was our own design that we made with machine embroidery and rhinestones, primarily so we can match the gold and green threads with the gold and green motifs on his panels, and we matched his silver trims with the silver trims we used for Luo Binghe. 

We received a lot of messages asking where we got our machine embroidery files- for all our handmade cosplays including this one, we create and digitize all our machine embroidery designs ourselves, including all of the bamboos and motifs we used on Shen Qingqiu. Depending on the design, some we would manually sketch out first on paper before scanning and digitizing them, and others we would design directly on Inkscape. 

We incorporated our favorite inside joke from the fandom into a machine embroidery design on the front straps, which is the Chinese characters for "You can you up, no can no BB", IYKYK. 🤣 We also wanted to add tons of bamboo designs as a nod to the bamboo house and to not be mistaken as Shi Qingxuan LOL, and a cat emblem on the front of the belt. For his fan, we bought a plain fan and painted bamboo silhouettes using Chinese calligraphy brushes (although we didn't have authentic ink so we just used watercolor) and painted chibi Meow-qingqiu and Bing-pup on the fan with acrylic. <3 

Lastly, but most importantly: he has pockets!!

Luo Binghe
We love Binghe's white robe look from one of the Thai book cover illustrations so we did our redesign based on that. Most of the patterning we were able to reuse from the patterns we've previously drafted for our other hanfu/danmei projects so that part was pretty easy for this project. We also used similar motifs we've previously designed for when we first made Wei Wuxian, and we used leftover trims from Hua Cheng (having made so many red/black hanfu fits we've accumulated materials lmao). The arm bracers are being reused from when we made them for our Wei Wuxian project, since they fit Binghe so well too, and we didn't want to make two sets of bracers that would look too similar when they wouldn't really show much under Binghe's long hanfu sleeves. Wei Wuxian, Hua Cheng, and Luo Binghe would love to share their closet fr. 😂

We modeled a silly Bing-pup emblem on his belt. Initially we had actually finished making a more serious looking wolf-y dog emblem and then we decided we wanted the silly pup look instead to extra emphasize that this is Bing-mei and not Bing-ge. 🤣 We matched the design on his shoulder piece with his shizun, which is made from pleather carved out with sheer fabric sandwiched inside. As part of our redesign, we also added a decorative small belt sash on his outer coat. We modeled the accessories including the frog clasps and the trinkets and printed with PLA. We also used rhinestones and resin for some of the other details. This disciple also matched his silver trims with the same trims we used on his shizun.

I plan to wear regular pants underneath all the layers, so instead of adding pockets to the cosplays, I decided to instead make a couple slits so that I could access my pants' pockets!