Orha Duren from Magna Carta: Crimson Stigmata (Tears of Blood)

Made In. June 2006
Debuted. Anime Expo 2006
Info. Me, G-Mal and several friends had discussed forming a Magna Carta group for Anime Expo 2006. All of the characters of Hyung Tae Kim are awesome, but G-Mal especially liked the look of Orha Duren and settled on doing him. Unfortunately due to too many other costume demands, the Magna Carta group fell through, but G-Mal didn't have any new costume plans for AX and still wanted to do Orha.

However, since G-Mal and I are on the quarter system at UCSD, and since his Computer Engineering major is extremely demanding, we were only able to start on this costume after we got out of school two weeks before AX. Two weeks is not a lot of time to make a costume, especially one as challenging as an HTK design, and this costume gave us a lot of frustrations. Firstly, the tunic and vest are covered in seams, with the vest having a quilted texture to it, and both had to be patterned from scratch. Also, HTK designs have a habit of sprouting petals seamlessly out of nowhere, which gave me a LOT of trouble. I definitely came away a better seamstress after finishing this costume! The costume was simply more time-consuming than the amount of time we had to finish it (it took G-Mal 15 hours alone to sew the feathers on the pants!), and it showed especially as we were finishing it in the hotel room at the convention. It was a little heartbreaking because so much of the costume was AWESOME and well-made, and yet an equal amount of the costume was OMGUGLYRUSHED. We never were able to figure out how to make proper latex ear the shape of Orha's, and have since forgone that aspect of the costume and just said "f*** it." XD

There's a silver lining to this cloud, fortunately. Our friend Solaria had plans to make a Calintz costume from the same game for Anime Expo 2007, which gave us an opportunity to fix up the ugly parts of Orha so he could wear it with her. Anime Expo 2007 proved to be much more awesome for G-Mal to wear Orha, since he had an AWESOME Calintz to take photos with and his costume looked 110% better. Sadly, his shoes broke, but not before doing a sexy photoshoot with Solaria in her Calintz costume!