Chihiro Linden
Pattern: Linden Sweatshirt by Grainline Studio
Fabric: Bamboo and rayon jerseys from Stitch Sew Shop
Sewn Up: Halloween weekend 2019
Halloween 2019!! With my friend Anne / No Face on the metro - inspired by the movie Spirited Away.
I have always loved dressing up on Halloween, and grew up in a family where we made our own costumes. To be Rapunzel, you braided long strands of golden yarn and bobby pinned them to your head; to be Barbie, you painted pink script on a white turtleneck; to be a leopard you borrowed your sister’s flannel pajamas and attached cardstock ears to a headband.
As I’ve gotten older (/attended art school) my craft skills have improved, and on the years I find myself inspired to dress up for Halloween, I tend to go big! My favorite costume formula: Find a character with very distinctive and recognizable features (Edward Scissorhands, Frida Kahlo, Mad-Eye Moody) and execute the details faithfully. Watching people process and then delight in their recognition of you as whatever you are dressed as is one of my favorite parts of Halloween – probably tied with actually figuring out how to execute the costume without buying anything from a party store!
Halloween 2014 (I met another Edward Scissorhands on the metro with MUCH bigger scissors than the ones I had cut from a cereal box and covered in silver paper…)
Halloween 2015, the last time I dressed up before this year. Anne let me borrow her stuffed monkey and my friend Melody creative-directed my makeup!
My friend Anne and I saw the movie Spirited Away two summers ago. Even though many people call this the best animated film of all time, somehow neither of us had seen it. It was so strange and beautiful and, I think, sat with us a little bit differently as adults than it would have had we seen it back in 2001 when it came out. I was inspired by Chihiro’s bravery (I was feeling very nervous about an upcoming public speaking engagement at the time, so watching her be so brave in the face of becoming see-through really resonated with me) – and Anne and I were both taken by the unlikely bond between Chihiro and No Face. We walked out of the theater with a vision of someday joining forces on a couples costume.
I immediately bought Chihiro-style bangs (amazingly in my exact hair color!) for $5.99 on the internet. But Halloween came and went and it wasn’t the right time to actually dress up. Another Halloween passed, and it still wasn’t time. But this year, it was! I didn’t know how to sew when we originally hatched this costume plan, but now I do – and it led to what I think is my most fun costume-making experience yet. Sewing is a real Halloween game-changer!
Chihiro’s costume is easy. She wears pink shorts, a loose off-white and green striped T-shirt, and yellow sneakers. My goal was to only acquire or create things for this costume that I would actually be able to wear in my real life. My sister had serendipitously handed down to me some pinkish-red running shorts earlier this year, and I used Halloween as an opportunity to alter them at the side seams to make them fit me a little better. And I am going through a wear-comfortable-shoes-I-can-walk-long-distances-in phase, so acquiring yellow high tops was something I was excited to do anyway! As for the top, even though the colors and overall look of the T-shirt are not what I would normally wear out and about, I run every day and aspire to do more yoga, and always need something comfortable and not too short in length to do those things in.
I picked up some super-soft jersey at Stitch – a creamy bamboo and a green rayon – thinking that sewing even a slightly funny-looking shirt in highest-quality materials would make me want to wear it outside of Halloween. As I write this, only two days have passed since Halloween observed (i.e. the party we attended on the Saturday night before the real day), and I have already worn it once to run, and once around the house because it is just so soft. I am curious if anyone in yoga class will ever recognize it as Chihiro-inspired. I doubt it will happen but will be thrilled if it does!
And No Face. He is very tall compared to the tinyness of Chihiro – part of what makes their friendship and her kindness toward him so sweet, and them such a cute train-sitting pair. Anne and I are both around 5’6” – How were we going to get that kind of height differential??
Luckily Anne has her MFA in printmaking and sculpture, and, like me, grew up in a make your own costume sort of household. She knew what to do! She asked me to pick up a stack of newspapers from my apartment lobby, and late into the night on the eve of our Halloween party, she worked her masking tape magic on many crumpled sheets of newsprint. A perfectly No-Face-shaped head emerged, and given the materials, weighed almost nothing!
We attached it to a backwards baseball cap using three strips of a shoebox and three hand stitches per strip. I was amazed at the strength of these hand stitches. When we were through, the newsprint head stood straight up out of the baseball cap! Suddenly Anne was seven feet tall.
Anne had meanwhile sketched the most perfectly proportioned No Face face on some scrap cardboard. Later she told me with a laugh that she had held up a ruler to a movie screencap on her phone to make sure the distances were accurate, which was such a funny and Anne-like thing to admit, and is 100% the reason this looks SO much like the real No Face. We painted it together before we closed up shop for the night.
The next day was another classic Project Runway sort of day for me. I woke up with my Chihiro fabric still neatly folded in two rectangles, not yet the Linden Sweatshirt that it needed to become by evening. Thankfully Linden is a tried and true pattern for me – this was my third sew of it (see my other two here and here) so I wasn’t too worried about the construction.
Fun fact, however: Color blocking takes a long time! Instead of sewing four pieces together – front, back, sleeve, sleeve – you are actually sewing 13 pieces together – front x 3 pieces, 2 sleeves x 3 pieces each, back x only 1 piece because I ran out of green. But it came together, and I was very pleased with its resemblance to Chihiro’s top (I borrowed Anne’s phone measuring trick!).
Then I got to work on No Face’s dress. It’s a funny design challenge to make an over-the-head dress with no neckhole, that permits its occupant to both see and breathe. The fabric ticket: performance mesh! I found this at Joann Fabric, and was amazed that when I test-draped it over my head, I could see as well as if I didn’t have anything covering my eyes – yet no one on the other side could see my face through it! (I made sure to try this out in a deserted aisle of the fabric store.)
I sewed up the mesh into a tall dome-like shape, and added some extra length to the bottom from scraps to get the dress as long as possible, leaving side slits for ease of movement. This was the longest garment I have ever sewn, and I had my machine on the fastest (loudest!) setting, as this was a real down-to-the-party-wire sewing situation. Once this was on Anne, I cut some slits for her arms (decked in black evening gloves) to poke out of, then hand-stitched the mask to the dress so that No Face’s chin sat against Anne’s forehead.
And we were off! Alongside our friends from Outlander (Claire and Jamie) and Alice in Wonderland (White Rabbit), we walked toward the party. We couldn’t stop laughing at Anne’s presence – so tall, and such a funny mix of scary and non-scary (if you’ve seen the movie, you know that No Face is ultimately a benevolent character). We even found ourselves in a lantern-draped alley that felt straight out of the film!
Finally we arrived, and here’s what happened: Everyone was OBSESSED with Anne’s No Face costume. People came up to her all night professing their love / fright / delight in her look. And her No Face dance moves were mesmerizing to watch!
I spent most of the evening just staring up at this hilarious creation that I felt so happy and proud to have played a part in bringing to life. Every time someone approached her on the dance floor saying, “I’ve been obsessed with you all night” or yelled something from across the street like, “I love you so much!” or asked to take a photo with her, I felt that creative collaboration glow! I’m pretty sure not one person recognized who I was dressed as, and it didn’t phase me at all – I was 100% heart-warmed by the people’s love of No Face.
We really wanted a picture on the metro to echo the train scene in the movie, so Anne and I made sure to leave the party early enough to catch the last one home. But we missed it! We were about to walk back up the escalator in defeat when we realized a train in the opposite direction was one minute away. We took it one stop, long enough for a kind Spirited Away fan to snap our train picture. We didn’t even have time to study the original to make sure we were posed correctly, but the likeness exceeded our wildest hopes!
And that was the end of our night, and this is the end of this Halloween costume tale. It was just good clean fun to get these costumes together and wear them out into the world. :D
And one last photo: me holding No Face so Anne wouldn’t terrify our taxi driver!
~Movie still included with permission from GKIDS. All other photos by various friends and strangers – thanks Katie, Shosh and Mark!
Drawing process reel: closet floor photo, pencil sketch, digital drawing.
